If there is one good thing this hot and humid weather is good for, its the garden. My wee vegetable patch looks like a jungle bursting with greenery. But when I took a closer look this evening I found some sweet surprises camouflaged by all that foliage. There dangling before me were the most unassuming pea pods patiently waiting to be picked. Not a huge harvest, but a good start to the season, those little green suckers were so sweet that I actually wrestled them out of my six year old’s hands to get a taste.

I’ve also been watching the progress my grape tomatoes have been making in the planter on my deck. They have to reach the right shade of red in order to be picked, but I’m reticent to wait too long lest the skins split, which was the case many times last summer. So I’ve been monitoring their progress daily and I just harvested the first half dozen or so, which will no doubt be devoured once again by my two pint-sized munchkins who are almost as keenly interested in the garden as I am when there is food involved.

And finally the last but certainly not the least, my grandfather’s raspberries. This year has produced a bumper crop of the sweetest most delicate jewels. We’ve been picking most of the berries from my parents’ raspberry “forest,” but when I checked my little patch by the air conditioner shoved in the most unattractive corner of our garden, I was pleasantly surprised by the berries I found. While I love picking berries (straw, rasp or blue), I prefer turning them into pies and jams rather than eating them raw. So the bowlful of berries now sitting in my fridge will join their cousins from my parents’ backyard in the jars of jam I’ll be making tomorrow night.

Progress report on the rest of the garden: the red cabbages and savoy cabbages are exploding, as are the tomato plants. The cucumber plants and pumpkin plants are now flowering and I expect to see fruit begin to form soon. There is a mammoth red pepper dangling from one of three pepper plants–a couple smaller ones on the other plants but nothing to blog about right now. And I’ve got dozens of golden beet seedlings but I’m not sure when or how to transplant them into the garden–suggestions anyone???

I just finished reading Molly Wizenberg’s A Homemade Life. Not surprisingly I devoured the book and the recipes in it. I have yet to make the chocolate cake that appears at the end of the book, or any other recipe for that matter, although I’d like to, but I did manage to make one. It’s the recipe (if you can even call it that) for slow roasted tomatoes. My mother, my sister and I bought a half bushel of roma tomatoes a few weeks back thinking we’d all take our thirds away and turn them into tomato sauce or something like that. Mine sat in the fridge pining for attention, but I just didn’t have the time or the energy to put into them. Finally one Saturday rolled around and I decided it was now or never for those tomatoes and based on my interpretation of Molly’s recipe, slow roasting them would be the simplest thing to do to them. So, I set the oven to 200 degrees, bisected the tomatoes, threw them on a cookie sheet, drizzled the appropriate amount of olive oil, sprinkled kosher salt and popped them in the oven for a full 5 hours. Out they came, slightly shriveled and sweet as can be. I brought them to my parents’ house for dinner that night and my dad oohed and awed as he ate them, along with everyone else. I single out my father because I consider him a tough customer to please when it comes to culinary achievements. He likes things simple and full of flavour and this fit the bill. Take a look at the pre-operative and post-operative tomatoes!

Roma tomatoes

Ready for the oven

Slow roasted tomatoes

All that rain and cool weather we were complaining about just days ago seems to have disappeared and been replaced with….how do you say it? Oh yeah, summer. And now everyone is complaining about the oppressive heat and humidity. But not my vegetable garden. No sirree! In fact all this heat is finally making my tomatoes blush. And all that rain? Well it made my herbs go haywire. As such the garden resembles more of a jungle than a cute backyard veggie patch. The sunflowers are towering over the tomatoes almost ready to burst with yellow blooms the size of dinner plates. The tomatoes look like something out of the Little Shop of Horrors–scratch that, the pumpkin plant has taken over and wended it’s way across the patch, over the deck stairs and back down into the grass (can you say, “Feed Me Seymour?”), and if it’s possible, my parsley, sage, thyme, basil and chives are producing too much! One should only be so lucky, right? So I had the pleasure of going out to the garden first thing this morning and while the kids munched on their breakfast outside on the deck. To my delight there were tomatoes aplenty to pick! I actually made a tomato and cucumber salad tonight, simply tossed in olive oil and balsamic vinegar. When the tomatoes are this fresh, there’s no need to dress them up. The freshness speaks for itself. Ialso took cuttings of the herbs into the office the other morning to share with my co-workers. I’m not sure everyone likes cooking with fresh herbs, but they are there for the taking. Might as well share the wealth.

Yellow & Red tomatoes from my garden

Herbs from the garden