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!

It’s still technically the holiday weekend, right? We meant to post this yesterday, but we lingered at our friends’ potluck into the evening last night, popping cherry tomatoes into our mouths, watching toddlers chase cats and tackle dogs, and cutting just one more slice of peach pie.

But we do aim to make Weekend Links a regular feature here — a list of articles, recipes, and other fun stuff that’s been inspiring or amusing us lately.

Read on!

Mitch and Heather picking your basil!

First things first: it’s a Pie Party tomorrow! If you can, join the almost 1,400 (!!) people who are baking pies and posting their photos and experiences on Facebook, Twitter, or their blogs. This event evolved quite spontaneously during discussions on Facebook and Twitter but it took off like hotcakes.  Read more about it here – and make pie!

Are you intimidated by making pie dough? I feel more at ease in the kitchen than just about anywhere else, and yet until fairly recently I was scared of pie dough. I definitely allowed all the talk about cold butter and not overworking the dough to get in the way of delicious, homey pie.  But you know what?  It’s not so hard!  We’ve been using the pie dough recipe in this Orangette post – easy peasy!  And if you need to avoid gluten, try the recipe in the Pie Party post on Gluten-Free Girl and the Chef.  (Did you learn how to make pie from your grandmother, your dad, your next door neighbor?  We’d love it if you could share the recipe in the comments!)

I don’t have a great segue here – I do love pie – but I’m considering signing us up for the 30 Day Vegan summer session beginning August 15. This is a whole foods online workshop led by Heather of Beauty That Moves.  It’s for anyone interested in eating more vegetables and seeking a more balanced, centered approach to nourishment: vegans who feel they’ve been eating too many processed foods, people considering becoming vegan, or folks (like us) who aren’t vegan but who are looking for some inspiration and love the idea of getting some fresh perspective with a community of other eager eaters. The session costs $45 and includes access to a private blog, video cooking classes, loads of recipes, and one-on-one guidance from Heather if you need it.

Hey! Our farm was featured in an NPR story about cooking from a CSA share! Nicole Spiridakis’s “Oh the Things You Can Do With a Farm-Share Box” is one of the best things we’ve ever read on the challenges of learning to cook from what’s really in season.  She brings a spirit of adventure, ingenuity, and fortitude to her cooking – go get inspired!  I’m especially eager to try her Farm Egg Soufflé With Vegetables as soon as our new chickens start laying.

Here’s another great piece on making the most of a CSA share.  Author Kate McDonough shares several tips, including this shift in thinking: do your meal planning for the week after you pick up your share.

And here’s one more on cooking from a CSA share, from Meagan at The Happiest Mom. This one is really about coming up with a focused and mindful approach to summer eating.  Her Six-Meal Shuffle approach to menu planning is especially encouraging and I think we’re going to give it a try!

And a few fun links to round things out: How close to a train track can you set up a vegetable market? Have you tried an Eastside Fizz yet this summer?  And are you as excited as Guy Clark is about homegrown tomatoes?  I know we are!!

Happy Fourth of July, everyone! May there be lots of good food, fireworks, and lightning bugs in your (near) future.