Onions

As our home fills with the smell of a chicken roasting in the oven with potatoes, onions and carrots from the summer’s harvest and fresh herbs, I’m finally drawn back to writing about food. I’ve taken a long break from blogging to recover from foot surgery. I thought my recovery would provide me with plenty of time to blog but I discovered it’s quite difficult to write, think, or even remember where I just set my sandwich down while I’m taking pain medication.

Today I actually made it into the kitchen where my sweetie helped me put together a lovely dinner in the dutch oven, and after days of losing track of my thoughts, it really brought me back to Earth. By “helped”, I mean he did everything while I sat and watched and gave my two cents worth (maybe more).

I hurriedly spent the days leading up to surgery getting all the garden chores done while I still could. I still have garlic to plant, and hopefully I can talk ‘the Mr.’ into “helping” me with that too, but otherwise the garden is pretty much ready for winter. I filled the yard waste bin with the old dying tomato vines. I didn’t save any of the green tomatoes as I have in the past - green tomatoes will ripen beautifully in a paper bag in the kitchen. I thinned and weeded the fall crops of collards and chard, then pondered whether these tiny onions I’m attempting to over-winter will ever make it through the cold.

What’s left to harvest is the last of the tomatillos and the kale (which will live on into winter)

as well as some fall lettuce, green onions, and as always, herbs.

This is the time of year when I really enjoy the herbs and I’m often sharing them with friends as everybody seems to be cooking fall feasts right now. The herbs I get the most use out of are the ones you only have to plant once and get to enjoy year after year: thyme, sage, rosemary, sweet bay, and chives. Here’s a shot of a podgy little herb bouquet I took as a hostess gift to a dinner party not long ago.

Without much thought, I knew right away that I would schedule my surgery in the fall particularly to avoid letting my recovery time interfere with the garden work. I don’t think I realized until then just how important the garden is to me.

I’m always looking for new and creative ways to cook and enjoy the harvest but when I’ve got too little time and too much produce, this is one of my go to easy dinners that never gets old. The comfort of classic chicken and dumplings with out the chicken. By all means add chicken if you’d like. 

Seafair festivities have kept me away from tending the garden for a few days and now it’s time to catch up with the harvest again. Just a few days was all it took to become overloaded with broccoli, and the never ending green beans so into the dutch oven they went with a few carrots, onions and herbs.

Veggies and Dumplings

• 1 large or 3 small onions chopped
• roughly 1 1/2 quarts of chopped mixed vegetables
• 1 can cream of mushroom soup
• 1 can cream of celery soup
• 3/4 cup milk
• 1/2 cup white wine
• 1/2 cup water
• black pepper
• diced fresh sage, rosemary and thyme
• 1 tablespoon butter
• 1 batch of Heart Smart Bisquick dumplings (follow the recipe of the box)

Preperation

While preheating the oven to 375, caramelize the onions in the butter in a dutch oven on the stove-top. Add all of the remaining ingredients except for the dumplings. Mix well and simmer for 10 minutes while you prepare the dumpling batter by following the directions on the box (mix 2/3 cup Bisquick with 3 tablespoons milk to form a dough). Drop spoonfuls of dough atop your stewed veggies in the dutch oven. The dumplings appear inadequate but will double in size when they cook.  Place the dutch oven in the preheated oven to cook uncovered for 10 minutes and covered for 10 minutes more. Enjoy!

Optional: For added richness, I commonly season the dumplings with garlic powder and/or onion powder before mixing the dough – an old school habit I picked up from my mom.

Today’s bounty has all gone into a hearty salad. Hot food just doesn’t appeal on a hot day but a filling, cold veggie salad is just right. Steamed and chilled broccoli, shredded carrots, diced scallions all from the garden tossed with quinoa, olive oil and Spike seasoning - so simple and so good.

Another favorite way to fnish this salad is by swapping the oil and seasoning for a little vinaigrette and crumbled fetta but I’ve come up short handed today and in the spirit of “living off the land” (by urban standards at least), I make due with what’s on hand.

Speaking of whats on hand – carrots and broccoli might be old news now but the scallions I mentioned are the first of the season.

Typically these can be sown in March and be ready much sooner than this but mine got a later start. I almost always have some scallions, AKA bunching onions, AKA green onions hidden in some corner of my garden.

They’re always reliable and so easy to grow as they don’t seem to mind if its freezing cold or smoldering hot outside, the bugs couldn’t be less interested, a little shade isn’t a problem, they don’t mind crowding and by taking up no room at all, they can be squeezed into any little corner of free space in your garden patch. As you can see from the photo above, even the dry, rocky soil in this new expansion of the garden, that we haven’t amended yet, is good enough for the low maintenance, lovable scallion.

I fear I may be condemned by my community for what I’m about to say but…I need it to rain. Just for a few days so I can sow a row of carrots for a fall harvest. This summer weather has been fantastic – I was even out shopping for inflatable beach toys yesterday and they were sold out everywhere! My only complaint is that the soil needs to maintain a certain level of moisture in order for seeds to germinate and I could water morning and night but by noon, in this heat, even in the most compost rich soils,  the top 1/2 inch where the seeds lie will be bone dry and dusty. I do have a day job so I have to depend on mother nature like day care to watch over my little seedlings and I don’t use a drip system because…well…our natural weather pattern is a drip system. I’ll keep watching the forecast and keep the seeds on hand for a patch of wet weather which we all know is coming right? (Now I’ve done it -  I’ve crossed a line and I’ll probably be pelted with rotten fruit the next time I show my face)

In the mean time I’ve been happily occupied with experiments in pickling. My mom has now effectively instilled a healthy fear of botulism contamination in me which will keep me from stepping outside the safe lines of pickles and jam – oh and mustard. Canning, without a pressure canner, is not on my to do list but pickles are so much fun. 

So far my favorite tip in pickling is to boil a pot of onions before you make a batch of pickles – how ever many onions will fill one of your pickle jars. Then, use  the onion broth instead of water to dilute the vinegar by the ratio in your pickle recipe. At the same time, pickle the onions too!

I picked just enough small beats to fill one pickle jar.

And my onions are plumping but some are still small enough to pickle whole.

There aren’t enough green beens yet to fill a jar so I stuffed just a few in with the onions and I ran out of white venegar so the cider vinegar will have to do.

The recipes I used are from Carol Hupping’s third edition of America’s classic preserving guide – Stocking up (see bookshelf).

My modest harvest today consists of a single head of broccoli that was ready ahead of the others, a white onion that I pulled up to check on the progress of the developing crop and a small beet that accidentally came up with the weeds.

I peered into the depths of the fridge pondering how on earth I would use these in a dish. I could just eat the broccoli and the beet fresh and save the onion for later use but that’s not much for blog material or for dinner and then it all came together; I happened to have a package of store bought pizza dough, an open jar of tomato sauce and some garlic and shaved parmesan. Perfect! A garden pizza!

I carmelized the onion, microwaved and peeled the beet, and left the broccoli as is. I loaded everything onto the pizza dough with enough garlic to chase off the Twilight vampires and into the oven it went at 450 for 14 minutes. It’s as good as it looks!

The remnants of a crop gone by. This is what’s left of our hugely successful scallion bed. Just one small sowing last spring supplied us with seemingly endless green onions into the fall. It was so nice to have deliciously fresh scallions right outside anytime I needed some for an omelet, miso soup, or pasta salad. They’ve kept their beauty but began to taste a bit tough and bitter especially when they began to flower which made their only purpose to suppress the weeds until I had another use for that space. Now it’s time for them to go so I can amend the soil and make a home for some new spearmint! This weekend I plan to sow a new crop of the same scallions in another corner of the garden as they did not disappoint. I’ll make it even smaller because I obviously don’t need this many.

The beginging of spring, with hours to pass untill the rain lets up, feels like a fitting time to begin a blog.

As winter draws to a close, my overwintered vegetables are ready for the warmth of the sun to return so they can complete their growing cycle that began months ago in the fall. Last week my family enjoyed the last of the winter spinach and although nothing beats harvesting salad greens fresh from your garden in February, I will say that they were beginning to taste a bit old and woody, so they’re out. The spinach won’t make it to a blog debut but there are plenty of other exciting things happening in the garden right now waiting for their turn to star in a blog post.

May I begin today with onions. Proof that overwintering works. My Cippolini Onions survived the winter and will be ready to harvest months sooner than the onion sets I just put in the ground days ago. On an impulse, I bought these as starts from a local nursery at the end of summer. I simply stuck them in the ground, watered them once or twice before the rainy season began and then left them there. The slugs didn’t bother them nor did the cold. They haven’t been growing as much as just surviving but they are much farther ahead of any onions just starting. Can’t wait for garden fresh onions in the spring!