We’re still mad for summer vegetables, but these tiny beet seedlings in the greenhouse also have us daydreaming about early fall.

Let’s get right to it, shall we?

It’s a Can-a-Rama! The folks at Canning Across America hope you’ll keep the momentum from National Can-It-Forward Day going all week long with home canning parties.

Simple Bites has a slew of great posts on food preserving. Canning 101: The Basics is a great place to start.

We’ve been on a lacto-fermentation kick here in the Frog Bottom kitchen – lately, with vegetables.  Famous lacto-fermented foods include yogurt, sourdough, sauerkraut, and kimchi.  Lacto-fermented vegetables use a simple brine of water and salt (and sometimes whey) – no vinegar – to encourage good bacteria to preserve the food.  We may write more about this at some point, so for now I’ll just say I love how fast and easy this is! A few minutes chopping, a few minutes stuffing a jar, and then just a few days of waiting for all that good bacteria to do its work.  No giant pots of boiling water, no hours at the stove – the salsa you see below took me about 20 minutes to prepare, and that was mainly because of all the chopping.  Cucumber pickles and okra pickles each took under 10 minutes.  Read a bit more, and find the salsa recipe we used, at Lacto-Fermentation: an Easier, Healthier, and More Sustainable Way to Preserve.

Check out this fun infographic on home gardening!

Tired of pesto and Caprese salads? Wait — not possible.  But, we think you should try these basil cookies anyway.

Here are five awesome tomato soup recipes.  Make ‘em now or freeze some of the incredible tomato bounty and try them when the first fall chill creeps in.

(Did you know freezing tomatoes can be as simple as waiting until they’re dead ripe and then throwing them whole into a Ziploc bag and stashing them in the freezer? A quick blanching/peeling/seeding will make them a bit easier to work with come thawing time, but if you’re feeling overwhelmed, seriously, just throw them into the freezer whole.)

From the pen and kitchen of the ever-reliable Mark Bittman: 101 Simple Salads for the Season.  More fantastic and fast summer fare!

Umm, how fun does Lucky Peach look? It’s a new food journal published by the McSweeney’s folks. Have a look here.

And finally, we loved this essay about processing peaches and the way the long slog through a bushel of seconds can be a kind of meditation.

More to come later in the week! We’ve heard from a number of you that you need some help with okra, and with the mad bounty of eggplant, so that’s where we’ll start.

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Weekend Links is a regular feature here on the farm blog: a weekly(ish) list of articles, recipes, and other resources that have been inspiring and amusing us of late. A tasty smorgasbord for brain and belly!

Heather picks okra while some of the new chickens have a look.

Our fields and fridge are full of vegetables – and eggs! – and we’re feeling mighty inspired these days!  Just a taste of what we’ve been reading and cooking:

Did you know this coming Saturday, August 13, is the first annual National Can-It-Forward Day? The folks at Canning Across America, along with Jarden Home Brands (they’re the ones who make Ball jars and other canning products), are encouraging everyone to gather with family and friends at home canning parties to learn the basics of canning.  One of the coolest resources they’re offering is a day-long live stream of several how-to canning demos (mixed berry jam, kosher dills, tomatoes in their own juice, more!) happening at Seattle’s Pike Place Market.  See the live stream schedule and find the link here.

The August 2011 Bon Appétit had a fun article about an LA canning party. The recipes for dilly beans, pickled beets with star anise, tomato jam, and zucchini dill pickles are all on our list to try this summer!

And this recipe for onion jam has been tempting us for weeks.  Just onions, balsamic vinegar, maple syrup, and butter!  I could do that today!  We think it would be especially delicious on pizza, topped with just about anything else that’s in season right now.

(We should point out the turn-the-jar-upside-down method of sealing is no longer recommended; we’ll probably just make one jar for the fridge and another for the freezer, but here are two good resources for safe canning guidelines.)

We’ve made this heavenly tomato & cheddar pie twice in as many weeks. It does require a little planning: the biscuit dough for the crust needs to chill for an hour, and the tomatoes need to drain for 30 minutes.  But otherwise it comes together quite easily.  And the crust is quite forgiving.  The second time we made it we didn’t use quite enough flour, and the dough seemed a sticky and hopeless mess as we eased it into the pie pan.  But it baked up beautifully, and didn’t get soggy even after a day in the fridge.   And seriously: tomatoes, mayonnaise, cheese, biscuit crust? Do we need to say more?  Make it! Any of the tomatoes you’ve been getting in your shares or at market will work great.

We haven’t tried it yet, but CSA members Yajaira and Domenick independently told us we also had to make this heirloom tomato pie.

And while we’re on the subject of tomatoes: how delicious does Tyler Florence’s Roasted Tomato Soup look?  Thanks to CSA member Tracy for this one.

We’re longtime fans of Mark Bittman.  We pull his How to Cook Everything down from the kitchen bookshelf at least weekly, often more.  The How to Cook Everything app is pretty great too!  For close to fifteen years he wrote a cooking column for the New York Times called The Minimalist.  We’ll admit to feeling a twinge of disappointment this winter when he decided to write less about cooking and more about food politics.  Certainly the systems of food production and distribution in this country are damaged, and we appreciate compelling writing from folks who can help us think about how we might begin to fix things.  But there are many people writing eloquently about these issues; fewer writers have Bittman’s skill for making home cooking seem simple, fun, and approachable.  So we were really delighted by one recent op-ed: “Make Food Choices Simple: Cook.”  In it, he argues we should cook more and eat out less – because it’s cheaper, because we have more control where the food comes from, and because it tastes better.  He writes:

When I cook, though, everything seems to go right. I shop an average of every two weeks in a supermarket, and make a couple of trips a week to smaller stores. I’m aware that my choices are mostly imperfect, but I rarely conclude that I should make a burger and fries for dinner or provide a pound per person of prison-raised pork served with fruit from 10,000 miles away, followed by a cake full of sugar and artificial ingredients. Yet, for the most part, that describes restaurant food.

Also fantastic?  ”101 Simple Meals Ready in 10 Minutes or Less,” a Minimalist column from 2007.  Loaded with awesome ideas for no-fuss summer cooking.

Oh! We’ve posted our favorite ratatouille recipe before, but it bears reminding — early August is definitely ratatouille time in Central Virginia!

That does it for this week!  We’ll be back this weekend with more tasty links.  And we hope to post later this week about two delicious vegetables that we know can be intimidating: okra and eggplant.

We’ll wrap things up with some more recent images from the farm. (Click on any to see ‘em big!)

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Weekend Links is a (soon-to-be!) regular feature here on the farm blog: a weekly(ish) list of articles, recipes, and other resources that have been inspiring and amusing us of late. A tasty smorgasbord for brain and belly!

Just photos today. Back soon with some recipes and links!

Ain’t that the truth?  Here at Frog Bottom as I’m writing this it’s 96°F, with a heat index of 108°F. While Ali, Joseph, Eric, Heather, and Claire tend to the irrigation, keep all the animals well watered, staff the CSA pickups, and daydream about swimming in the James River, Arlo and I are doing what we can to stay cool: lots of iced coffee (for mama), peach and basil smoothies (for both of us), picture books read while parked between two fans, splashing in a cool bathtub.

Perhaps the heat has addled our brains, because we’re also slow-roasting tomatoes.

I suppose it’s a stretch but I argue we can still call this a great activity for a sticky summer day, since, after all, slow-roasting doesn’t involve very much participation or even movement on your part.

Slow-roasted tomatoes are simple as can be: put your tomatoes on a cookie sheet or in a casserole dish.  Drizzle with olive oil.  Sprinkle generously with salt.  Toss.  Roast in a low oven (about 225°F) for three or more hours, until nice and wrinkly.

We decided to slow-roast today because the tomatoes are in in a big way – more than we can eat even when we eat them three meals a day.  So we’re roasting them, and, if we don’t eat all four pans in one sitting, we’ll freeze as many as we can.  There’s little that lifts the spirits so well, in the deep dark icy depths of winter, than these little bursts of summer flavor.  (Well, maybe pesto as well – make some; it freezes great too!)

Slow-roasting is more method than recipe.  Play around!

For example:

Cook them in a hotter oven for less time, if you need to.  I prefer to roast them low and slow, because it really concentrates their sweetness without drying them out  — sometimes I even set the oven as low as it will go and slow-roast them overnight — but they’re quite delicious any way you do them.

These don’t need anything more than olive oil and salt, but those two ingredients can also anchor more complex flavors from additional herbs and spices.  Try chili pepper or cayenne.  Try them with fresh or dried thyme or rosemary or oregano.  Cumin is also very good!

Or try adding some balsamic vinegar too.  That gives them a lovely pungent sweetness.

Use bigger tomatoes, coarsely shopped, and seeded if you have the patience – or not.

Later in the summer, when our Roma or paste tomatoes are in, we’re mad for pomodori al forno – a dish of lightly herbed slow-roasted tomatoes that marinate in olive oil with parsley and garlic for a couple hours before you eat them with goat cheese and bread. It’s out of this world.

But for now, plain old slow-roasted cherry tomatoes will do.  They will most certainly do.

We love them straight out of the pan … tossed in a green salad or potato salad or pasta salad … stirred into a frittata before it bakes … alongside roasted eggplant and caramelized onions and tangy goat cheese as crostini toppings … on pizza.

There are lots of tomatoes in the CSA shares this week, and more are available at market.  Here are some more recipe ideas.  Tomato season comes but once a year.  It lasts awhile here in Virginia – tomato plants adore this heat! – but before you know it, it’ll be time for kabocha squash soup and kale chips.

How have you been eating your tomatoes this year?

Things have been busy over at the farm Facebook page though!  We encourage you to check in there regularly to share your recipe ideas, get ideas from other CSA members and market customers, and enjoy some more snapshots of our farm season.  You don’t even have to have a Facebook account!

We hope to be back later in the week with some tasty ideas for using cucumbers.  (In the meantime, our “How to be cool as a cucumber” post should help.)  And until then: some photos from the last month.

It all begins in a land far, far away…

In 2005, I planted exactly three pots on my terrace in New York City.  I grew four kinds of lettuce, two kinds of thyme, oregano, lemon verbena, and one variety of cherry tomato.  In 2008, I married a farmer, and we bought 25 acres in Central Virginia, managed a flock of 800 pastured laying hens, and planted approximately 7000 tomato plants.

In a similar tale of living at full tilt, I made my very first batch of jam ever last month: apricots from our neighbors’ tree, simmered slowly with a vanilla bean, and tucked right into the fridge, in part because there were only two pints and in part because I’m still a little scared of canning.*  And then last week we** went to the Prince Edward County Cannery and put up 58 quarts of tomatoes.

We had a fantastic time, and the Huddlestons were such generous, patient, congenial teachers.  Mrs. Lena Huddleston has been working at the cannery since it opened in 1975, and she knows a thing or two (hundred) about canning.  She showed us how to use all the big equipment to steam the tomatoes before peeling and chopping them and to cook the tomatoes gently before putting them in cans.  After that Mr. Huddleston took over and sealed everything up.

Meanwhile we cleaned up our mess (and now I want a hose in my kitchen).

When all the cans were sealed, we placed them in an enormous metal barrel, and Mr. Huddleston used an elaborate system of pulleys and chains to lift them all at once into a giant kettle of a pressure canner, where they were processed for the better part of an hour.  (During that time we walked next door to Granny B’s Market, where we had some fine fine reubens for lunch.)  And at last they were plunged into a cool water bath, to stop the cooking and to cool them enough to load everything up into the truck and head home.

Guess what everyone’s getting for Christmas?

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* I know!  A farmer’s wife, scared of canning!  I just have to begin.  My excuse is that the times when we have the most abundant vegetables here on the farm are also our busiest times.  Freezing has always been more manageable — and, I maintain, an excellent choice for many kinds of vegetables. But I do dream of being a food preservationist extraordinaire, and I really want to make jams and pickles.  So I really will learn to can.  Maybe soon.  I’ll keep y’all posted.

** Let me say right now that by “we” I mean, “Miles, Katie, Shannon, Ali, and the Huddlestons.”  I arrived late with Arlo after his morning nap, and we cheered everyone on in the final stretch.

Down below the photos, we’ve listed a few recipes we’ve been loving lately.  Some CSA members have also been sharing recipes via email, the comments sections here on the blog, and over at our Facebook page.  We’ll try to highlight some of those soon as well.  And plans are still afoot for adding forums to this website, so you can share your recipes and cooking adventures directly; we’ll keep you posted!

Here are some tasty ideas for working through these early summer CSA shares and farmers market finds.  Most of them would be fantastic fare for your Fourth of July BBQ!  Lots of these posts link to other great recipes too.

Ginger Scallion Sauce at Chocolate & Zucchini

Red, White & Blue Roast Potatoes and Firecracker Potato Salad (two recipes) at Babble

Fondant Fennel from Edward Schneider at Mark Bittman

Raw Beet Salad at Just Braise

Quick Sauté of Zucchini with Toasted Almonds at Smitten Kitchen

Chard, Onion, and Gruyère Panade at Orangette

101 Fast Recipes for Grilling at The Minimalist

Soon, it should be easier to search recipes we’ve posted or linked to here on the farm blog.  In the meantime, you might enjoy just browsing the posts with recipes.

Enjoy your holiday weekend!  What will you be eating?

Was it yesterday’s record high of 102° and the accompanying sweat in our eyes, grime behind our knees, and grumpy baby in our arms?

Is it the wild blackberries turning deep purple and plump along the edges of our fields?

Is it the hum of the fans, the buzz of the flies, the pleasant cracking and clinking of the ice in our sweet tea?

It is all these things — but mainly, we know it is summer because of this:

and especially

especially

especially

especially because of this: