Category — Jan’s Thoughts

This meal is a standby at our house because it’s simply delicious. The necessary ingredients are almost always on hand in our pantry and freezer. Monterey Beans and Cheese is also extremely flexible so we can easily use up leftover meat or vegetables. This time of year we use ripe tomatoes from our garden. Here’s our take on the recipe from the More-With-Less Cookbook (World Community Cookbook)
by Doris Janzen Longacre.

Monterey Beans and Cheese

Fry, drain, and break into pieces:
• 2 slices bacon
Set aside. Sauté in bacon fat until tender:
• 1 medium-sized onion, sliced
• 1 jalapeno pepper, diced
Add:
• bacon bits
• 2 cups cooked black beans
• 1/4-1/2 lb. shredded cheddar cheese
• 2 ripe tomatoes, diced or 3/4 c. tomato sauce
• 1/4 c. beef bouillon or tomato juice
• 1 Tablespoon chili powder
• 1/2 t. salt
• dash of pepper
Cook slowly, stirring constantly, until ingredients are blended and cheese smooth — about 5 minutes. Serve with rice.

Variations:
•This dish can be made vegetarian-style leaving out the bacon altogether– we don’t make it that way, however. Even for an omnivore, this dish contains just a little meat and you get a whole lot of flavor from that.
•You can use whatever type of beans you like best. Kidney beans or white beans work well, but black beans are our favorite kind.
•The cheese used can also be varied.
•Different peppers can also replace the jalapeno. Chipotele add a smokey flavor. Green or red pepper make a less spicy dish.

We like the spicy element, however, so we tend to make Monterey Beans and Cheese on the spicy side, sometimes adding a chili pepper as well. Summer or winter, this meal is easily prepared in the 20 minutes it takes to make the accompanying rice.

The third week of July is when the Ann Arbor Art Fairs take over our town. Our family deals with the traffic and the crowds on a daily basis because of our proximity to downtown and the substantial crowd the Art Fair draws. Although we might whine as much as the average townies, we also enjoy four days of festive atmosphere and visit the readily available “fair food court” a couple blocks away from our front door.

We also usually have some company this week, either to visit us or the Art Fairs or park for free in our conveniently located driveway. Friends came to see us and the Fair, and we served a grand meal with lots of garden produce.

The menu included:
• marinated grilled chicken legs & thighs
• black bean patties
• tabbouleh
• steamed broccoli
• yellow squash sauteed with garlic
• grilled eggplant with special miso sauce
• mesclun salad

Other than the chicken and black beans, most ingredients came from our backyard. The bean patties were flavored with fresh herbs from the garden. I’m including some of the basic recipes below.

Marinated grilled chicken legs & thighs
also works well with breasts or whole cut up chicken

3-4 pounds of chicken
1/2 cup soy sauce
3 cloves of garlic, mashed
juice of one lime
3 quarter-sized pieces of ginger

Mix soy sauce, garlic, lime juice and ginger together. Place chicken in a bowl or a ziploc bag and pour liquid over the chicken. Seal or cover, and place in the refrigerator for 4 to 6 hours, or overnight, if you wish. Drain chicken and grill.

Black Bean Patties
We’ve just discovered that we love making and eating these! Our vegetarian guests warmed them up over the grill and they seemed to like them too.

1 can of black beans, drained
1 cup of oatmeal
1 egg or 2 egg whites
1/2 medium onion
1 clove garlic
1 jalapeno
fresh oregano, basil and thyme

Put onion, garlic and jalapeno in the food processor, and pulse until finely chopped. Add beans and pulse. Add eggs and mix. Add herbs. Add oatmeal and mix to combine. The mixture should be fairly thick and chunky– not smooth. Form at least 4 patties on a non-stick cookie sheet. Bake patties at 350F for 10 minutes. Turn and bake 10 minutes more. Enjoy right away or store in refrigerator for quick meal later.

Grilled Eggplant with Special Miso Sauce

Slice Japanese eggplant (the long slender kind) lengthwise and brush with oil or spray with cooking spray. Grill until the eggplant is tender. Serve with special sauce on the side.

Special Miso Sauce
Excellent with grilled eggplant or other vegetables. Or bean patties. Or chicken. Just about anything on your plate really.

Combine 1/3 cup each of miso, mirin and sugar in glass bowl. Stir to dissolve sugar. Cook over low heat on stove for 20 minutes or microwave for 3 to 5 minutes, stopping and stirring after each minute. Serve warm or at room temperature.

This recipe can easily be increased or decreased to suit your needs.

We’ll be enjoying more garden-filled meals and I’ll be posting more recipes here.

It’s almost here… The happiest time of the gardening season…

Tomato time!

If I could give two words of advice to a beginning kitchen gardener, it would be “Stake everything!” It’s the very same advice that my September-self always wishes that my June-self would have remembered and acted upon.

Many kitchen garden plants need to be supported in some way to do their best. I’m thinking of tomatoes especially, but we have also found staking our basil, eggplant, and peppers to be very helpful. If we manage to scrounge enough cages, we also support the cabbage or broccoli. Sometimes we use cages early in the season to mark the vulnerable seedlings so they don’t get stepped on, and sometimes we forget to move the cages until too late. By then, the plant has filled out enough that the cage can’t be removed easily.

Why stake up plants? Seedlings are much like children in that, when they are small, trying to imagine them all grown up is nearly impossible. Just like children, however, seedlings do grow– beyond your imagination. Those tiny tomato plants will not stay tiny. Same for those cucumbers, basil, eggplants, and, with luck, everything else you plant. You turn your back, occupied with other daily distractions, and then blammo– you’ve got tomato plants tripping over each other, falling on the ground.

The weather can also take its toll on the heartiest seeming plant. Given the torrential downpours that often mark Michigan summers, staking up as many plants as possible in the kitchen garden helps plants make it through the summer without getting beat up, knocked down or damaged.

Keeping plants standing up off the ground also yields more produce. Contact with soil weakens the skin of vegetables like tomatoes or eggplants, which can encourage decay. Soil contact also makes it easier for certain insects to have easy access to your crop. Some loss is unavoidable but it’s disappointing to share too much of your hard work.

There are different materials and methods available for staking up garden plants. We use a “what-have-ya-got” approach to staking, so our main methods are garden spirals, tomato cages, some home-made wire fencing cages, and wooden stakes. I’ve seen neighbors employing other shapes, like tripods or trellises, but the four types below are what we have on hand this season.

1. Tomato cages. Not just for tomatoes, these cages also support basil, peppers, and eggplant in our garden. Tomato cages are our old stand-by. Over the years we’ve acquired quite a few, and they are good to reuse for many seasons. They are fairly inexpensive to start, and occasionally I’ll see some out by the curb or listed on the ecycle list. Another thing I like about tomato cages is that they ‘stack’ together nicely for storage in our barn attic.

2. Tomato spirals. Oh my goodness, we love tomato spirals, and so do the tomato plants. We have about a dozen tomato spirals that we’ve collected over the years, and we wish we had more. The twisty part works with the tomato plant’s natural growing tendency, so with just a little nudge every now and then, the tomato grows up the spiral and stands tall in the garden. Spirals are particularly useful if you prune your tomato plants. They are not inexpensive, however, so we don’t have a one-to-one ratio of spirals to plants. We acquired some of ours from our local Downtown Home and Garden, but they are also available elsewhere, including Amazon.

3. Wire fencing cages. We purchased a roll of wire fencing and cut it to make our own. Our cages have about a 12-inch diameter. Jim says if he were doing it over again, he’d make the cages bigger. You’d want to have 4 inch to 6 inch squares in the wire pattern for easy access to your plants, i.e., harvesting, pruning. You don’t want something too small to put your hand through. The cages are a little wobbly so we usually use a metal fence post to support several cages.

4. Wooden stakes. Usually my last choice for staking up plants, but good in a pinch. We have some old ones around that we made tripods with in the past, but we didn’t do that this year. You have to be careful pushing wooden stakes into the ground because it can result in splinters or occasional self-stabbing when the stake breaks– and I had a bruise to show for that.

Staking up garden plants is an entirely worthwhile effort that will always pay off more than you think. Other methods abound. What’s are your favorite?

The other day in the garden, I stood admiring the new Caribbean hot peppers that 20 Minute Jim had planted earlier this year. As a hot pepper aficionado, he had been very excited to a new pepper to the varieties growing in the garden. I observed the green peppers hanging under the leaves, and then an odd shaped pepper poking up among the foliage caught my eye. That’s weird, thought I. And I reached out and touched this weird pepper… and it moved!

AAAA-gggghhhhh!

My shriek certainly startled the neighborhood or at least the chickens next door.

I was too hot and shook up to trudge all the way upstairs to find my favorite gardening pest book (The Organic Gardener’s Handbook of Natural Insect and Disease Control: A Complete Problem-Solving Guide to Keeping Your Garden and Yard Healthy Without Chemicals), so I instead consulted the internet. Googling “big green worm” immediately brought some of the desired information. The big green worm was a tomato hornworm, the larval stage of the Manduca quinquemaculata. As I suspected, it was a foe, rather than a friend, to the garden and one possessing a voracious appetite.

Author Relic. Used under Creative Commons License.

The advice I read was to pick off and kill tomato worms, with one exception that I’ll detail in the next paragraph. Large wormy pests are not things I can pick off using my fingers. I returned to the garden with a plastic container and its lid, thinking I could knock said tomato worm into the container. But no. Tomato worms have several sets of rather powerful legs. They cling. I donned my handy gardening gloves and returned to plucking. The worm was not cooperative; I had to tug firmly as each set of legs reluctantly let go of the pepper plant stem. I put him in the container for disposal, after showing him off to anyone who’d listen to my tale of woe. And I shivered for a few minutes. Ugh.

When shouldn’t a gardener pluck up the offending tomato hornworm and mush it out of existence? When the worm looks like this:

Author Stsmith. Used with permission under the Creative Commons License.

A tomato hornworm who looks like rice is stuck on its back has already met its end: it has been parasitized by the Braconidae wasp larvae, a beneficial insect, a gardener’s friend. This tomato hornworm has become a nursery for Braconidea wasps, which will attack tomato hornworms and other harmful insects in your garden. A parasitized tomato hornworm should be left as is.

Tomato hornworms like to eat various plants from the family Solanaceae, including tomato, eggplant, pepper, and potato; they also attack tobacco but we don’t grow that. I’m keeping a daily patrol on the rest, however, watching for areas of defoliation. So far, I haven’t found another big green worm, but I know the old gardening adage of “one insect seen usually means more than one in the garden” so I’m remaining vigilant.