Garden 2010! (Part 2)

I'm back-posting this entry because...well, I'm lazy :(

Here are some photos from about 2 weeks after the last entry.

Here you can see that the tomatillos and tomatoes have grown up a bit (though not a lot); they've about doubled in size. The peppers haven't done much at all in these two weeks except get eaten by slugs. Along the left you can see some weeds sticking out where beans might be (again, slugs devoured the starter leaves).

My rose bush (from last year) has come up quite a lot; eventually it will have a nice trellis to climb, but for now it's just hanging out with some bamboo.

Here's a close shot of the tomatillos; you can see them slowly climb up the stakes; tomatoes are in the row immediately behind.

My orange-bucket tomatoes are slowly getting bigger too. Not bad for left-over seedlings :)

Garden 2010! (Part 1)

There's hardly anything left from last year's garden except for strawberries. Unlike last year, these guys have grown TALL actively reaching for the sun. It's a very neat look, I think.

This year I decided to completely change my garden orientation. Instead of 4 long rows, I have 4 short rows. Sounds worse, right? Well, technically I do have fewer plants in the garden, but last year it was too tight.

Last year, we used these flimsy cheap tomato cages. Given that I couldn't find any more robust cages, and building some stronger cages would be prohibitively expensive (even cattle wire is too expensive), we decided to try something different...very different. For starters, each of the tomato plants is staked so that the center mass of the plant will be supported. In a couple of weeks, we'll put down some other stakes and wind twine around them to fashion a three-dimensional Florida weave (of sorts) around them so that their limbs are also well supported. Why not just do this latter thing? Well, it will be a few weeks (or more) before they're large enough (wide enough) to require this other support, and I think this will be better. We'll see :)

From closest to farthest in the photo above, we have serrano and jalapeno peppers, then a row of poblano peppers, then a variety of cherry tomatoes (yellow plum on the right, then from a mixed packet for the other three), then four bloody butcher heritage tomatoes, then four tomatillos.

The peppers won't have this special weave, but we will do a standard Florida weave; you can see the stakes on either end of the row in anticipation of this.

Along the fence on the left are bush beans that haven't quite sprouted up through the fabric yet. We planted two plastic stakes on either end and ran some twine in anticipation of them; they probably won't get as tall as the stakes are, but..oh well :)

Along the fence at the bottom of the picture (where you can't see) are carrots that haven't quite poked out yet). Along the fence on the right are weeds :P

As far as the garden's architecture is concerned, each row has soaker hose running its length (as well as some along the fence-line), then garden fabric was put down and cypress mulch on top of that. Hopefully this will keep the ground warm and moist and prevent requiring a lot of watering. The watering is all on a timer; right now it's daily for a half-hour at 6am and it seems to be working pretty well. The butchers have grown about 3 or 4 inches since I put them in the ground last week. The peppers are doing well too, but some bug has been eating their leaves; I got some insecticide soap spray today and some slugbait. Hopefully between the two, I won't have any more holey leaves. One of my serranos was still a wee seedling when I put it in the ground; whatever bug it was ate all of its leaves (I don't think it will survive).

I started almost all these plants (except the tomatillos) back in March in our basement closet with some 4 foot grow lights in shop-light fixtures. Naturally, we started more plants than we'd have room for in the garden "just in case"...but because we can't throw away anything, we decided to throw the remaining EIGHT tomato plants into irrigated buckets and threw them in the landscaping where they won't kill the lawn. These are predominantly mortgage lifters; for some reason, they weren't doing so great when it came time to plant so I didn't put any of them in the garden. We'll see how they turn out! You'll notice that there are only 6 orange buckets...there's also a black bucket that I doubled-up because I ran low on soil. We'll see how that works out (I imagine not so great!)

Last but not least, we wanted a place to put some herbs and other small plants. The house came with a small planter box (the smaller older-looking one in the picture below) and we decided to make two more and tier them. We opted to make them match the length of the deck rather than the length of the prior box. Each of the new boxes is approximately 8'x1'x1'. From top to bottom, we have two kinds of basil, then turnips and green onions, then radishes and cilantro.

We'll probably end up replacing the smaller box with another cedar box eventually (and maybe the deck too), but that's a project for another day/year.

I'll post updated pictures in about two weeks so you can see how they've grown!

Pumpkins!

I've been waiting all year for Hemmeter Farms to have their pumpkins and today was the day :) (They may have had them last week or something, but I wasn't aware of it, so...)

We swung by Hemmeter's and while they don't have ALL of their pumpkins out yet (like they do closer to Halloween), they had plenty of massive massive pumpkins.

We picked up this beauty for $4.50 (the one on the right!).
We weighed it when we got home - 51 pounds. So...yes, this pumpkin cost us about 8.8 cents per pound.

I wasn't sure how to cut into it - last year, I tried a variety of knives but was having a lot of trouble. The pumpkin flesh is something like 3-4 inches thick which is fine but the skin (in the past) was very very tough. This year, Stacey offered to help me butcher the pumpkin for roasting.

We took it out to our porch, washed it and then....

After about...2 minutes, it was basically done (cut into 3 main pieces).

You can see just how HUGE this pumpkin is!

Stacey butchered the rest of it into manageable pieces, then we took them inside for seed scooping.

Just for kicks, here are the photo taken timestamps:
3:36pm - Stacey begins cutting the pumpkin
3:39pm - Stacey finishes
3:46pm - Stacey and Matt start scooping the seeds
3:52pm - Stacey and Matt finish

So...about 9 minutes work to turn

into

The next step for this pumpkin is roasting. Unfortunately, I can only fit about 4 of these pieces in the oven at a time and it's taking something like 100-120 minutes to roast it. When they're soft, I'll puree them and freeze the puree.

Not too much work for a TON of fresh (well, frozen) pumpkin puree!

Chicken stuffed with bacon and sausage

I saw on the internet some time ago an idea of a bacon lattice that's wrapped around italian sausage. It sounded good (and unhealthy) and while I still want to make that someday, I thought I'd try something completely new for me. A real kitchen experiment....

So, when we were at the grocery store I thought: I want to make a roast chicken. And I want to stuff it with yummy things...like bacon and italian sausage.

I rinsed the chicken off and removed the giblets and then pulled the skin away from the meat and crammed bacon underneath - I ended up using close to 1.5 pounds of bacon on the chicken and filled it out completely. Then I took a little less than a pound of italian sausage and stuffed the inside of the chicken with it. I have this little device that lets you rest a chicken on a soda can (to humidify it from within) and I used it here, though without a can. I like it because the chicken sits upright instead of on its side.

After that, I finely diced some garlic and added it to some olive oil and freshly cracked black pepper in a bowl and rubbed that into the skin.


Last but not least, I poured a few cups of apple juice into the roasting pan to humidify the chicken as it cooked. Why apple juice? I figured it would go well with the bacon :)

I put it in at 350 for about 90 minutes. After about 60 minutes, I put some potatoes in the oven too (which as it turns out would remove some of the heating from the chicken...a mistake) We pulled it out and it looked like this:

Yum! Well, it wasn't entirely cooked (it was still a little pink) so we put it back in the oven for another 25 minutes or so (without the potatoes) at 400. We also removed the sausage at this time because only the outside of the sausage was cooked at all. We cut up the sausage and finished cooking it in a pan.

When the chicken came out of the oven, it was mostly done. Only some of the higher parts of the chicken were still slightly underdone so we just cut that away and ate the more well-done parts.

Here's a shot of the chicken being cut - you can see the bacon sticking out from under the skin!

Finally, the plated chicken (and bacon) with some sausage under steamed green beans and with some potatoes.

So, you're probably wondering: what did it taste like?

I was hoping for something that had flavors of chicken, bacon and sausage. Unfortunately, there was just too much bacon and the sausage didn't really cook to release its oils so instead all of the chicken tasted solely like bacon...which is good, if you like the taste of bacon in a somewhat less fatty way (i.e. in chicken form). I liked it but this recipe definitely needs some work! I think next time I'll omit the bacon and try a SMALL amount of sausage under the skin (basically rubbed under the skin) over a large portion of the chicken's body. That should give it some of the taste but not completely overwhelm the chicken.

If you're interested in the ingredients for this concoction:
1 whole chicken (about 4 pounds I think? or was it 4 dollars...I dunno, not too big)
1.5 pounds of thick-cut bacon (I selected a package that was predominantly MEAT instead of fat - there were many packages which were more like 90% fat, 10% meat)
1 pound of italian sausage (I only used about 3/5 to 4/6 of a pound - I can't remember exactly how many cased sausages there were in the package!)

For the skin-rub:
1 (large) clove of garlic
about 1/4 cup of extra virgin olive oil
about 1/2 teaspoon of cracked black pepper (as if I measured!)

For the potatoes:
5 red potatoes
about 1/4 cup of e.v. olive oil
1 lipton onion soup packet
(chop the potatoes, put in a bowl, add the oil and mix until all potatoes are covered in oil, then add the soup packet and mix until they're covered in the mix) - bake on a cookie sheet (I use parchment paper too to reduce stickage/mess) until done - I think at 350 it took about 45 minutes

For the green beans:
steam green beans. :)

If you end up changing this recipe into something that doesn't taste entirely like bacon, let me know! I'll have to come back to this and change it up but I don't buy chickens very often so it may be a while.

New blog

Alrighty, I've been using facebook a lot lately to post pictures, things on my mind, recipes, etc. but have found that it really doesn't get the same job done as a simple blog. So here's mine. It's simple, but I'll be going back through facebook and transferring some of my recipes and photos in an easier-to-read format. Hopefully, at least!

Also, I've enabled Google Ads on the right pane. Maybe I'll get a (undoubtedly SMALL) bit of money from it...it can't hurt! (I hope.)