Seasonal spoils!

It's been a pretty busy week. Between dealing with preserving the tomatoes from my garden and taking advantage of cheap produce at the farmer's market, I've been donning my invisible apron more often than usual. The nights have been getting more and more chilly over the past few weeks, so after harvesting some straggler-veggies early one evening, a good old frost warning led me to pick all of the rest of my tomatoes. (The photo of the tomatoes is after my having indulged in tabouli and / or tomato salad over 2-3 days.)
My first project with the tomatoes was to try oven-drying some for the first time earlier this week. I never did get around to building a solar dryer (a project for this winter, maybe?) and the days are cool and my vacation days have run out, so regular old sun drying (something else I've yet to try) seemed as if it would be a bit tricky to attempt. After Googling a few times, I realized that the simplest thing to do would be to slice the plum tomatoes lengthwise and set them on a tray with the cut side facing up, then heat them at the lowest oven setting (140 F) until they seemed about right -- sort of leathery. Various websites stated they'd take 8-9 hours. Some of the tomatoes were a bit large (next time I'll use more common sense and choose tomatoes of the same size), so the whole thing actually took 9-10 hours. They supposedly keep really well if you cover them in a high quality olive oil in clean jars. I just stuck mine in a baggy and tossed them in the fridge. I figured they wouldn't last very long and was right -- I'm now around halfway through them! They're delicious, but I figure that considering the energy used to dry them in the oven that I won't repeat this experiment. If I dry any next season, it'll be without gobbling up that much electricity. All sustainability issues aside, there's also the more practical point that it would probably cost me less to buy the sun-dried organic tomatoes one of my local health food sells than run my oven at 140 F for 9-10 hours. I've also been doing a bit of canning. I pickled (and froze) around 10 lbs of beets, made around 3-1/2 quarts of Lady Ashburn Pickles and pickled a small bunch of zucchini using my mom's friend's recipe. This week, I plan to pickle and freeze another 5 lbs of beets and deal with the rest of my tomatoes -- maybe make salsa.

Chill

I had hoped to hop on the bike today to enjoy some rays. With the shorter days and daylight savings changes kicking in again later this month, I've been sneaking in my bike riding jaunts whenever and wherever I can. It's hard to believe that I've had KevinSpacey, my mint-ish coloured Hampton Cruiser, for an entire five months or so already. I'm still discovering new trails, even as the seasonal changes make themselves obvious in the bold reds and muted yellows of the tree-lined tunnels of sorts that make up the trail system. It's chilly outside, though, and I have beets to jar and a 12-lb. zucchini to shred.

I should kick start the whole process with a nice hot bath and some leafing through my copy of Putting Food By to track down some different ideas for the beets and zucchini. Maybe a couple of jars of zucchini relish wouldn't be such a bad idea. Of course, that nice hot bath could be the kiss of death for each and every good intention I may have today. Mango-scented bubbles, cocoa, some sweet bossa nova in the background...