Time to use all those habaneros! Okay, let me warn you, this is a hazardous exercise. I was coughing, my eyes watering, and my nose burning all while using rubber gloves. The combination of the habanero and vinegar fumes is a killer. Thankfully, I have successfully made a few bottles of hot sauce.
This recipe has carrots in it, so the sauce is a little chunkier than I’m used to. We will have to see if I can get it out of the hot sauce bottles without too much trouble.
Tonight I made our first dish using our tomato sauce. It was spaghetti squash and meatballs in the crock pot.
It was very easy to make. Just throw in the sauce, a little oil, balls of Italian sausage, and a spaghetti squash cut in half with the seeds removed. After it cooks for a few hours in the crock pot, you remove the squash and the flesh can be scooped right out. We are pleased with our sauce!
We did it! We used the rest of our tomatoes to make 8 jars of salsa. 4 hot, 4 mild. We’ve had a tiny taste but won’t know for sure until we pick up some chips.
This weekend we thawed out all of the processed tomatoes that we froze over the summer. It ended up being around 20-something jars. Our first project was to make tomato sauce with 7 lbs. of tomatoes. We even had some basil we had frozen from the garden to use as seasoning.
Some of the jars
Cooking down the tomatoes
Final sauce jars
We didn’t use a recipe specifically for canning, so we poured the sauce into old pasta jars and froze them for later. The remaining 10 lbs. of tomatoes will be made into salsa! Good activity for a cold Sunday.
We harvested our first bunch of kale today. Most of the other kale plants aren’t doing very well, especially the ones in pots. I’m making a note to plant more kale and only put them in the raised beds.
I used the kale to make a spicy chicken sausage soup. The kale actually gave it a really nice crunch.
It has been awhile since my last post. This is partly due to the garden being an uneventful place while the fall plants slowly grow (or get eaten), but it is also because I’ve spent the last 3 months making this baby blanket for my fabulous friend Christina!
Now I can turn my attention back to the garden. Some of our beans have dried enough to bring them inside. I can’t wait to try cooking them. The kale is big enough to be used, but I’m waiting on the cabbage and cauliflower to do anything worth while. My biggest worry is the Brussels sprouts that are wilting. Not sure if they will make it.
The past couple weekends were taken up by weddings which left our garden to its own devices. We’ve now taken out most of the summer crops and have added in cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, and kale. It is a good feeling to start fresh.
To our surprise a squash was waiting for us this morning. This is the only squash that made it to maturity. I’ve always heard that gardeners end up with more squash than they know what to do with, so our squash-less predicament was a bit embarrassing…
Our green beans are still at it. We’ve had a few meals with fresh green beans and now we plan to let the rest dry out to save for later use.
Drew is taking the first stab at trying to save some of our seed. The cherry tomato plant has been doing very well and the chickens go nuts for them. I must admit, I stopped counting how many of them we harvested after I started feeding them to the chickens. We’ve gotten a lot! Here are the seeds fermenting a bit before Drew drys them out for us to keep.
On a side note, we did eat that double yolker. Here is how it came out of the shell.
We ate our first handful of green beans the other day. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed them and can truly say that these taste better than green beans from the store.
We cut open our melon once it ripened. There wasn’t much flesh to eat since it never got very big. It reminded me mostly of a cantaloupe. I’ll probably give some of it to the chickens.
We have been peeling, squeezing, and freezing tomatoes little by little over this gardening season. Last night we had the biggest mess of them yet.
The free melon plant we were given seemed to be at the end of its life, so we went ahead and plucked this guy off of it. I hope it is far enough along to ripen and be edible.
This cool, fall air is making me think it is almost time for me to transplant my cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, kale and cabbage. I usually hate the shift into colder weather, but at least now it means new food!
