Roasted Corn and Tomato Chowder

Ingredients

7 ears of corn

7 zucchinis, split lengthwise,

4 carrots, split lengthwise

2 onions, coarsely chopped

3 - 4 cloves of garlic, diced

3 stalks of celery

5 - 6 tomatoes coarsely chopped

1 14oz can of coconut milk

1 box broth (veggie or chicken)

Bayleaf, paprika, thyme, marjoram
Salt, pepper to taste

1 tbsp each olive oil, coconut oil


Directions

Prep zucchini, carrots and corn by rubbing with olive oil. Place on cooking sheet, salt and pepper to taste.

Roast veggies until the corn is golden brown. It took about 45 minutes on 350 in my oven.

While that's cooking, chop onions and dice garlic, melt coconut oil in a skillet. Drop in onion and garlic in the skillet, stir around a bit, cover and leave at low heat to sweat while the veggies are cooking. They'll be translucent when they're ready. Add paprika and thyme to the onions, then cover until it's time to add to the mix.

When veggies are ready, take them out and let cool. When they're cool, slice kernels off the corn, then use the back of your knife to scrape the juices off of the corn cob. Coarsely chop carrots and zucchini.  Put all in a saucepan or pot with onion/garlic and chopped celery and tomatoes. Drop in bayleaf. 

Add broth and cover. 

Let simmer about 30 minutes. At this point, your chowder is at the "chunky" end of the soup continuum. I like it a bit smoother (in the potage category), so I drop the immersion blender in and blend about half the pot, leaving the other half chunky. You can do this just as easily in a blender or with a mixer. 

Just before serving add coconut cream and stir well. As always, you can sub 1 to 1 coconut cream to the dairy of your preference and 1 to 1 coconut oil for butter.

This is great topped with chives, chopped red pepper, or those yummy dried tomato flakes!

The Soup Continuum

Soups are either clear or thick. A clear soup is a bouillon or a consommé. Anything with a clear both, unthickened. Thick soups are soups that have something added to thicken the broth. There's a million different types, but commonly:

Purées are vegetable soups thickened with starch.

Bisques are thickened with cream. Alternatives are "cream soup" (thickened with béchamel sauce and veloutés (thickened with eggs, butter, and cream).

Stew - a combination of solid food ingredients that have been cooked in liquid and served in the resultant gravy. Depending on how you treat the gravy, stew can be thick or clear.

Pottage a thick soup or stew made by boiling vegetables, grains, and, if available, meat or fish.

which should not be confused with ...

Potage, a category of thick soups, in some of which meat and vegetables are boiled together with water until they form into a thick mush.

or

Chowder, which is a seafood or vegetable soup, often thickened with milk, cream, potatoes, or corn.

So, you have stews/pottage on the chunky end and bouillon/consommé on the smooth end, with the purees, chowders and potages somewhere in the middle.

Week Eleven - Farmshare

Lookie lookie! What a great box! 

Carrots
Lettuce
Garlic  
Corn  
Zucchini  
Cucumbers  
Cherry 

Tomatoes  

Napa Cabbage

Laura mentions corn soup... I may give that a go this time around.  There's a good roasted corn soup somewhere, I think it'd be super with some roasted zucchini, diced carrots, and tomato flakes... among other things.

Week Ten Interlude - Homemade Tomato Sauce

Remember all those tomatoes?

Week Ten Interlude - Garden Fun with Tomatoes (Dried)

Dried in the oven at 150 (the dehydrator works too!) Then crumble and store in jars or a baggie. Carolee says they're terrific added to homemade soup. They'll last even longer in the freezer.

Week Ten Interlude - Garden Fun with Cucumbers

The cucumbers and zucchini are racing to put out... we're headed to an end-of-season barbeque tomorrow, so two end-of-season salads!


Pam's Cucumber Salad (almost)

Cucumbers, sliced super thin.
1/3 cup yogurt
2 tablespoons lemon juice
1 tablespoon honey
Bunch of dill, chopped
3 tablespoons vinegar
Salt and Pepper to taste.

You'll want to make a thin dressing out of the vinegar and yogurt, amounts will vary on the amount of your sliced cucumber. I had two medium and one large cucumber, so I used about 1/3 cup yogurt and a couple tablespoons of vinegar.  I've seen this recipe with mayo, so we tried it that way last time we made it.  I didn't thing the mayo added much to the taste, so we don't use it. I think the mayo is intended to blunt the sharp edges of the yogurt, a bit of honey and lemon juice will do the same thing.

The yogurt mixture will draw a bit of water out of the cucumbers, so make this ahead of time and let it sit a few hours in the fridge.  If it's still a bit "dry" add some more yogurt&vinegar and stir it in.  If it's a bit wet, drain the liquid and add some more yogurt.  But honestly it's going to taste great even if it's super drippy, so don't stress!

Week Nine - Tomato Sauce

Earlier I had big talk about tomato sauce, so this is me following through...

Oregon Early, Amish Sauce,and Yellow Taxi

I spend the evenings looking at various tomato sauces and pastes. There's some similarities, as I'm sure you can imagine.  First is the method by which you deal with the acidity. Tomatoes are hella acid. When I was picking tomato varieties for the garden, I tried to work the balance.  Taxi Yellows are very sweet, the Amish Pastes aren't very seedy or watery and reduce well, Oregon Earlies are sweetish, and very meaty.There's still going to be some playing with the chemistry, but when your making your sauce, think about tomato meat, seed-to-meat ration, and water... then taste, how do they taste? There's a really terrific article by Daniel Gritzer that describes his quest for the perfect sauce.  This year, or this batch anyway, I'm just going for the simple sauce... trying to get the taste and consistency right. 

So here's the recipe I worked with...

Tomato Sauce

1/3 cup olive oil
1 large onion (I used a purple one, because I had it. I think any would do well) 
3 large shallots
5 cloves of garlic
1 carrot
5 lbs of tomatoes
Salt & pepper
1/3 cup fresh basil
4 bay leaves
2 tbsp thyme
2 tbsp oregano
1 tbsp honey

Prepping the tomatoes.  This is a bit fiddly, but doable.  You're going to blanch them to convince them to take their jackets off for you. In a large sauce pan, heat salted water to a boil.  Prep another big bowl with ice water.  I put this one in the sink.  You're going to work your way through your tomatoes, 

1. Cutting a smallish x at the base of the tomato,
2. Removing the stem,
3. Plopping it in the boiling water for a few minutes. When you see the skin start peeling back, 
4. Scooping out the tomato and dropping it in the ice water bath. 
5. The ice water cools the tomato and encourages the jacket to peel back a little more.
6. Finally you'll fish the tomato out and remove the jacket. My friend Carolee saved these and dries 'em to use in soups.
7. Put the peeled tomato in the sauce pot. 
8. Repeat until your pile of tomatoes has moved from the countertop to the cooking pot.

So, yes, you can skip this step.  And you might want to, but you will be fishing out tomato skins as your sauce cooks down.  If you have a food mill this will be easy!

Start your tomatoes on a simmer.

Oil in a heavy pan or pot. Let it heat up while you remove the onions and garlic from their tunics.  I don't know if the garlic has a tunic officially, but since they're in the onion gang in my veggie basket, I'm saying yes. Chop the onions and garlic finely and put in heated pan. Stir around a bit and then reduce heat and cover. We want these to sweat a bit. 

Chop your carrot and toss in tomato mixture

Chop basil, add this and other spices to the tomatoes mixture. Then add onions and garlic. 

Let simmer til cooked to the consistency you want. the internet says 20 minutes...

Add noodles and yum!

Kat

 

While you're letting the sauce simmer down, listen to Malcom Gladwell talk about spaghetti sauce. 

The next batch of tomatoes will become ketchup! 

Week Nine - Homemade Hummus

The dill is definitely going into jars with my crazy bumper crop of cucumbers... we added the melon into our weekend fruits salad, so good! 

I was thinking about cucumbers and we just had that great chickpea-chicken curry, so I had some chickpeas left over.  A fortuitous meander down another aisle at the grocery store brought me face-to-face with a jar of sesame tahini.  And it all came together, hummus!

Mom had this great homemade hummus recipe, not sure where she picked it up...

Hummus in a Jar

2 cups drained well-cooked or canned chickpeas, without liquid
1/2 cup tahini (sesame paste), optional, with some of its oil
1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil, plus oil for drizzling
1/4 cup orange juice
1/4 cup water
1/2 teaspoon ground cumin 
1/2 teaspoon paprika
Juice of 1 lemon, plus more as needed
Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste

...so, "in a jar" ... I know you're wondering, whazzup with that?

Mix everything together, reserve the water to add if things get super sticky.  And go get your immersion blender!

Blend til smooth, adding water as necessary. 

You can add garlic to this, super yummy!  If you're going garlicky, avoid the orange juice, they don't mix well. 

You can also use the chickpea "juice". just dump the whole can in, liquid and all. 

Dip away!

Week Nine Farmshare - Chicken Chickpea Curry

 Our little apple trees are on target this year, dropping almost ripe apples on the lawn.  I usually gather them all up and make a batch of crockpot apple butter, but I haven't gotten around to it yet.  In the mean time. we're going for no dairy/no gluten for a month to see what happens. Our new Uncle Jimmy's been eating chickpeas and tuna salads,which ALMOST sounds good.  Neither one of us is a real tuna fan, so I played around with some ingredients and came up with ...

Ch-ch-chickpea Chicken Curry 
 
1 large can of chicken (I used Costco Canned Chicken for this one, roasted chicken would be great!)
1 can of chickpeas
2 - 3 stalks of celery
1 cup of golden raisins
1-2 green apples

Olive Oil
Curry (about 2 tablespoons)

Salt and Pepper to taste. 

Make a paste of olive oil and curry and your salt and pepper. 
Drain chicken and add to bowl with curry paste.
Chop celery and apple and add to bowl with raisins.

Stir all really well to mix.

This goes really well with a coleslaw style salad or a spinach salad

Week Nine - Farmshare

Here's what Kelly and Laura have for us!

Carrots
Lettuce
Purple Potatoes
Cherry Tomatoes
Slicing Tomatoes
Bell Pepper - green or purple or a mix of both
Korean Melon
Herb Choice - basil, parsley or dill

Have you looked at Laura's webpage lately?  There's some might tasty recipes over there... Away, then my dearies O!  hie thee away!

Week Eight Interlude - Breakfast with Tomatoes

Eggs Benedict

Small baguette
Baby spinach (chiffonade)
Basil flowers (or basil leaf chiffonade)
Fresh ripe tomatoes (Oregon Earlys are pictured)
Balsamic reduction

In a stout sauce pan, balsamic vinegar and honey (1 cup vinegar to 1/4 cup honey). Bring to a boil, then reduce to a simmer, while...

You slice the baguette into thin slices, four per plate. Bunch your spinach and chiffonade, and thinly slice your tomatoes. 

Check up on the balsamic vinegar, reduce heat if it's still foamy.  Stir a little. Dip a slice of bread in it to taste it.

Set up your plates with four slices of baguette, each with a slice of tomato. Then sprinkle out your spinach and basil. 

Poach the eggs, if you can.  I always try one and then move on to a steam baste, when I blob up my poaching. Gently drop egg into center of the four bread pieces and drizzle on the balsamic reduction. 

Glorious!

Week Eight Interlude - Things with Tomatoes

Confession time... 

I love tomatoes.  

I love them warm off the vine

On a buttermilk biscuit for breakfast.  

I love them sliced thin in a BLT.  

I love them under a perfect poached egg, 

drizzed with balsamic vinegar. 

I love them as garden grazing, with a leaf of basil,  

as I water and prune.  

And I especially love tomatoes that have never been inside a refrigerator. 

 

I have failed every year I have tried to grow tomatoes.  

For those doing the math, that's 15 years of carefully cosseted tomato plants reluctantly handing over a few ripe tomatoes and baskets of green ones. 

 Which in in turn means the annual end-of-season Fried Green Tomatoes Party.

To my friends who look forward to that, so sorry to disappoint!  

Look at this DAY'S WORTH of edible berries of the  nightshade Solanum lycopersicum. 

In the words of Chef Spicoli... duuuuuuuude!
 

 

This year's garden is a triumph of tomatoes... and perhaps a sign of the greater trend of global climate change.  So, there's that. 

Or maybe the garden goddesses were smiling on my yard this year?

Here's the line up...

 

I will make tomato sauce this year!