Tomato Glut; More Pesto; Baked Beans

Finally a tomato glut! It’s been a rare sight last year and this but it’s nice to know it can still happen. While I also get tomatoes in my Food Connect box, the tomatoes in this bowl have all grown on my upstairs patio.

I’ve also had the biggest bunch of tomatoes in the five years I’ve been growing them. Including the two I had already harvested this bunch had eleven tomatoes on it. I’ve found the Father Tom tomatoes from Floriana have been particularly productive and this bunch just goes to prove it.

Tonight I’ve had the pleasure of working out how I’m going to use them. Homemade baked beans sprang to mind and I also decided to include some tomatoes in the kale pesto I had been planning to make tonight. The remaining tomatoes will go well on my lunch time salad so I’m sure this glut won’t become a burden.

So I decided on a triple whammy! I made the kale and tomato pesto followed by cooking homemade baked beans and then finished off by making my dinner for tonight – all in the Thermomix and only washing it after my dinner had come out. Now that’s what I call efficiency!

I made the pesto the same way as last night except that I added 120g tomatoes to the mix. Adding the tomato gave a new dimension to the overall taste that was quite okay so I’ll probably continue adding tomatoes to pesto in the future. As much of the pesto as possible was placed into the ice cube tray leaving a small quantity in the Thermomix bowl to supplement the next item on the list.

Navy beans were on my shopping list today but since they weren’t available I picked up some black-eyed beans instead. I prefer navy beans as once I’ve cooked them up into baked beans they look just like the canned variety available in the supermarket but with a superior taste of course.

This afternoon I had covered the black-eyed beans with water in a saucepan and boiled the beans for 5 minutes. Then once the heat had receded I boiled and then topped up the water in the saucepan and covered it. An hour or two later I tested the beans and found they had finished cooking and were perfect. 

The absorption method really works for me when cooking quinoa and these black-eyed beans. However with both brown rice and chick peas I have found that after the absorption time I need to refresh the water and cook them a little longer to achieve a good result.

I followed a modified version of the Molasses Baked Beans recipe in the cookbook “America’s Best Slow Cooker Recipes”, which included blending the tomatoes in the Thermomix instead of using tomato paste or sauce . Then I noticed the downside of keeping the remaining pesto in the bowl as the normally red mix had turned brown. 

Recipe ingredients:
350g tomatoes chopped
Small onion chopped
4 tbsp sugar
1 tsp dry mustard
half tsp salt
1 tbsp molasses
sprinkle of black pepper
cooked black-eyed beans

Instructions:
Process the tomatoes in the Thermomix for 10 seconds on speed 9.
Add onion, sugar, mustard, salt, molasses, pepper and the cooked black-eyed beans.
Process for 15 minutes at 100 degrees C on reverse speed soft.
 
The pesto’d baked beans tasted very nice. After placing most of the mix into pyrex dishes I then added the ingredients for my stir-fry dinner into the Thermomix which along with a fried egg finished off my marathon cooking effort. Now there’s just a few more dishes for me to deal with and then I’m well and truly done for the night.

Confused veges

An article in today’s Courier Mail commented that the fruit trees and vegetables are confused, which comes as no surprise as we enjoy heat wave conditions before winter has officially ended. Two weeks ago I enjoyed a mango with my lunch. I hadn’t really thought much about it but on hearing this, a family member thought it must have come from overseas.

This confusion has been occurring all through winter. My tomato plants have languished this year even though I bought the same seedling varieties that produced prolifically on my patio last year. So far I have had one tomato glut which hasn’t developed into the ongoing flush of tomatoes that I enjoyed last year.

I’m in the process of replanting some trays as the snow peas have finished and are being replaced by dwarf beans. Bean seedlings have been planted into two trays and I’m about to start my last lot of bean seeds to plant out the third tray. I use empty punnets that I’ve previously bought seedlings in to start my snow pea and dwarf bean seeds. So a two by four punnet along with one row of four from cutting through a second punnet gives me 12 spots to plant in. I read an article a while back that suggested planting 2 bean seeds together so they would support each other later on. This seemed like a great idea so I managed to put 24 bean or snow pea seeds into one container, which is shown in the middle photo in the Tomatoes and Beans post.

The bean seeds that I’m about to plant were saved from bean plants early this year. I have tried growing from saved seed in the past but it didn’t work because I hadn’t allowed the beans to dry completely before storing the seed. It will be interesting to see how the third batch of beans works out, which come from fully dried bean pods.

I have saved snow pea seeds as I’ve taken this year's plants out, having let the snow pea pods dry thoroughly. I’ve ended up with enough seeds to grow 3 trays of snow peas next year, which means I don’t need to purchase any new seed. So that’s great news for me.

I’ve taken a break from growing lettuce over the past few months as there are plenty of winter greens to grow such as loose-leaf cabbage, celery and beetroot. I also planted 8 herbs into two trays, and only have parsley and sage remaining – well, three herbs if I count the oregano that is barely hanging on. So today I’ve planted a punnet each of green and red mignonette lettuce into a tray, and a perpetual lettuce into the available space in the parsley and sage tray.

I can’t remember seeing perpetual lettuce before. What a great idea – particularly since parsley is a perpetual herb. With any luck, they will both last about the same time.

Little yellow things which are probably aphids have pestered my cabbages and some of my herbs over winter. I brush them off and they fly away, but unfortunately return. There were so many of them on my pineapple sage plant that I removed it, and I did the same when new leaves on two cabbage plants were infested. However I’ve since been able to brush them off the cabbage leaves. Actually, I see them rarely on my plants now. Perhaps they don’t like the warmer weather.

I have little cages to deter moths and butterflies from laying on my veges. I got the idea from someone at Brisbane Organic Growers and promptly bought some 1 inch mesh and assembled them. While I still get the occasional caterpillar on my greens or just the tell-tale signs of nocturnal munching, it is not as bad as my first two years of growing veggies.

Mini Green Bags

 In late 2007, Tim Robson, a Gardener of the Year finalist on the Gardening Australia show, discussed using organza bags to protect plants from pests rather than spraying with chemicals or using calico bags which look ugly and also exclude the sunlight. 

Capsicums growing on my patio were being attacked pretty badly so I decided to try his suggestion. I bought some dark green organza, selecting a green shade mostly because I believed I could see the fruit more easily than with the other colours available but also because “green” has become synonymous with the environment.

I remembered an Earth Garden article (Issue 137, Sep-Nov 2006) that I had read about making your own bags to hold fruit and vegetables, and followed the steps given. The little bags did a great job of keeping insects away and reduced the damage done to the capsicums.

Then I decided to make a bigger bag for fruit and veges. I tried using tulle as suggested in the article, but found it difficult to work with, so I’ve used organza for these bigger bags.

I get a lot of positive comments about my fruit bags when I'm out shopping, in the same way the author of the article did. People have even suggested that I could sell them. I’m not interested in making enough bags to sell, but might consider making them as presents in the future.

As with everything, there is a downside to this. Since I acquired a worm farm a few years ago, I have been using plastic bags to hold the fruit and veg scraps that I can’t feed to the worms. Now I’m running low on suitable plastic bags. So as much as it goes against my grain, I will need to conveniently forget to use my home-made bags for a little while in order to boost my stash of plastic bags.

Kitchen Greens

I bought a packet of buckwheat lettuce seeds a while back thinking that I’d try sprouting them, but then started experimenting to see how I could grow them as kitchen greens. I discounted the traditional kitchen green growing kit with its tray of 30cm square because it would take up too much bench space, and my preference was to avoid soil by growing hydroponically as I have done with some vegetables on my patios.

For my first attempts, I used an inch of perlite in a clear plastic container that greengrocers sell lettuce in. While the greens grew well, my dilemma was that all I could really do with the perlite and matted roots afterwards was dispose of them in the general garbage bin.

Then I found a Décor 900 ml microwave container with lid and tray inside that became the perfect growing environment. After some more experimentation, here are the steps I use to grow kitchen greens hydroponically.

Place a moderately heaped tablespoon of buckwheat lettuce seeds into a jar sprouter and soak in water for 12 hours.

Drain the water off and rinse and then drain again. Place the jar at an angle so that any remaining water will drain off.

Rinse and drain morning and night for the next couple of days.

Place a small amount of water into the Décor container – enough just to cover the bottom of the container. Place the tray inside the container and then spread the sprouted seeds over the tray separating them as much as possible. Cover with lid.

Over the next 2 days, ensure there is always a small amount of water in the bottom of the container. Leave the lid on the container until the seedlings are getting close to the height of the container which should be around about the 2 day mark.

Then check the water level night and morning and add water with some powdered kelp mixed in up to the level of the tray. I use ½ heaped teaspoon of kelp to 1/2 cup of water when watering 3 trays.

After 7 to 8 days in the container, the buckwheat lettuce will be ready to harvest. Once all of the greens in the tray have been harvested, then the remaining stems and matted roots can be pulled off the tray and placed into the compost heap or worm farm. I use an old toothbrush to clean the tray.

So far, buckwheat lettuce has worked out the best for me. When I’m not able to grow salad greens on my patios over summer through lack of sunlight, I have one sprouting jar and 4 Décor containers perpetually in operation so that I have a regular greens supply. My next experiment is to grow barley or wheat grass which can then be included in a daily juice.