It was time to take the pumpkin out of the pot and eat it. In the final analysis, that was what solved these big problems of life. You could think and think and get nowhere, but you still had to eat your pumpkin. That brought you down to earth. That gave you a reason for going on. Pumpkin.
–Mma Ramotswe, The #1 Ladies’ Detective Agency

Pumpkins are one of my absolute favorite things to grow.  When people visit my garden and see the long vines with their ripening green and orange orbs, they often say, “I would grow pumpkins, but I don’t have enough room.”  A common misconception!  Unlike a summer squash, say a zucchini, that takes up a whole world of garden, sugar pie pumpkin vines can be planted at the corner of a bed, then their vines trained around the edges.  When the summer garden begins its descent into depressing barren brown-ness, the pumpkin vines will be graced with gorgeous orange fruits that turn our minds to cozy things–tea during a rainstorm, books by the fire, and of course pumpkin pie.  Preferably with hazelnut-rum whipped cream.

For best color, nutrition, and storage, pick your pumpkins when they are fully mature.  The stems should start to feel corky rather than moist and fleshy, the fruits should be full sized, and the skins should be rather tough–it will be hard to poke your thumbnail into it.  Cut them leaving several inches of stem, and keep them in the garden for a few days to “cure” before preserving.

Even if you didn’t grow pumpkins this year, you might find it satisfying to choose some pretty ones from your local farm and preserve them for winter cooking.  When you see the gorgeous yellow-orange puree you produce, you will never want to open a can of that brown Libby’s stuff ever again.

Pumpkins are not very acidic, so they cannot be safely canned in a water bath.  If you want beautiful canned pumpkin puree, you will have to pressure can it, and since I have a subrational fear of pressure canners, I freeze my pumpkin, which works perfectly well, even if it isn’t as pretty.  (For directions on pressure canning pumpkin, check the indispensable Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving.)

There are two ways to prepare the pumpkin for pureeing:  roasting or boiling.  To boil, use a sharp serrated knife to cut the pumpkin into halves or quarters, scoop out the innards, save a little handful of seeds for next year’s planting, and the rest for roasting (the innards and a few skins can go to the chickens), then cut into large chunks and pop into a big pot of boiling water until soft enough to poke easily with a fork. Let cool, then skin.  The combination of a tough-skinned squash and me wielding a giant sharp knife strikes fear into the heart of my long-suffering husband (with good reason, I admit), so I personally use the roasting method:  use a fork to poke holes into the skins, then pop the pumpkins into a 350 degree oven for up to an hour, until soft.  Protected by their skins, the pumpkins are actually steamed, rather than roasted.  Let cool until easily handled.  Slice the fruits and remove the innards.  The skins will slip right off, and the pumpkins will slice like butter.  Many hands make light work, and it was fun to prepare pumpkins alongside my daughter.  Claire de-gunked the pumpkins and saved the seeds, while I sliced, both of us singing along with Abigail Washburn and her banjo.

One way or another, you now have soft, skinned pumpkin, ready to puree.  The intrepid may use a potato masher, but the rest of us will prefer a blender or food processor.  Having tried all three ways, I go with the food processor.  The processing should be easy, and the fruit should quickly puree into a soft, smooth, orange puddingy mixture.  If it seems to take forever, the pumpkin may still be too hard.  Even if you roasted it to begin with, hard pumpkin chucks can be popped back into boiling water if need be.

The prettiest color of orange...

Freeze in containers or freezer bags.  Our freezer space is limited, so I use bags because they take up less room.  Be sure to label the containers with the contents, date, and amount stored, and fill them in the amounts you most often use.  I pack most of mine with one cup of puree for pumpkin bread, and a few with two cups for my favorite pie recipe.  For easy storage in a crowded freezer, smash the bags flat, pile them on a cookie sheet, and freeze into a nice, stackable shape.

Be sure to save a cup of two for a batch of fresh bread!  Here’s my favorite recipe–all spices are “to taste,” and Claire, like many children,  prefers it with fewer spices in general.  I have grown to enjoy a nice gingery flavor alongside squash, but the cinnamon and ginger measurements could be reversed if you prefer.  This recipe works  well with any kind of winter squash, yams, or sweet potatoes, but I like it best with nice orange pumpkin.  If you use white whole wheat flour, the bread is even better the day after baking; the germ will have melded with the moisture of the pumpkin, the milk, and the spices.  So lovely.

Tangled Nest Pumpkin Bread

Whisk together:
1 1/2 cups flour (white whole wheat, all-purpose, or a mixture)
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1-1/1/2 teaspoons ground ginger
3/4 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon cloves

In a liquid measuring cup stir together:
1/3 cup milk (or substitute water, soy, or rice milk)
1/2 teaspoon vanilla

In a large bowl, or the bowl of your mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, beat until creamy:
6 tablespoons butter, preferably unsalted

Add, and then beat until smooth (about 3 minutes):
1 cup sugar, and 1/3 cup brown sugar (light or dark)

Beat in 2 eggs, one at a time

Add, and beat until just blended:
1 cup of your beautiful pumpkin puree

Add the flour mixture in 3 parts, alternating with the milk/vanilla mixture.  Beat only as much as necessary, but scrape the bowl sides and bottom as needed to blend all the butter/sugar.

Fold in 3/4 cup chopped walnuts

You can also add a handful of raisins if you don’t mind squishy things hiding in your food.  (If I liked such things, I think I would try golden raisins.)

Spread evenly into a 9×5 greased bread pan, and sprinkle more chopped walnuts or pepitos on top.  Bake in a 350 degree oven, until a tester comes out clean, about an hour.  You may need to put foil over the top to keep it from over-browning in the last 15 minutes of baking.  Let cool in the pan for five minutes before turning out to cool completely.  Meanwhile, luxuriate in the incredible pumpkin-spicy fragrance of your kitchen.

And here’s how we roast seeds:  wash the seeds, remove most of the pumpkin gunk, pat off excess water, and let them air dry on a dish towel for an hour or so.  Saute in a little butter, soy sauce, and splash of worcestershire sauce until the liquids start to cling to the seeds.  Transfer to a baking sheet and roast at 350 until beginning to plump and brown–somewhere between 7 and 15 minutes.

They are best eaten warm from the oven.  So delicious!  And, as Mma Ramotswe says, they’re a reminder of the simple, most peaceful, most essential things in life.

Favorite pumpkin recipe?  Please share!

There are so many reasons to save seeds.  One is simply the placing of our lives within the cycle of nature, the completion of a circle from planting, to eating, and seeding again–to relish this lively, easy, sustenance from the land on which we live, even in urban places.  But there are other compelling reasons to save our own seed:  the control of our food supply apart from corporate interests; the preservation of biodiversity and heritage/heirloom varieties in our crops;  and the taking of a stand in support of farmers’ right to save seed.  Farmers have been improving their crops and preserving favored varieties by saving seed for millennia.  Today, five large, multinational corporations control 75% of global vegetable seed production, and the industry contrives at every turn to limit both the ability and the right of global farmers and gardeners to save their own seed through variety patenting, licensing agreements, and the development of “Terminator Technology” to render seeds sterile.  It’s completely–what’s the word?  Evil.

Seed-saving can seem daunting, what with jars and drying racks and silica packs, and  all manner of esoteric instructions.  Still, there are many simple ways to participate in the beautiful, global, grassroots movement to save seeds.  Our favorite is to save mainly the seeds that readily dry themselves.

We leave a batch of beans on the end-of-season vines until the husks brown and wrinkle, then collect the already-dried bean seeds within.  This is one of Claire’s autumn jobs, and she particularly loves to find the shining pink and black seeds in the pods that have collected on her Scarlet Runner Bean teepee.  Many flowers pods also dry themselves.  Claire collected the seeds from the marigolds in her edible-flower garden.  When the blooms are ready for dead-heading, the seeds are almost dry, and only need to be spread out for a day or two before storing in jars for spring planting.

One of the very best ways to save seed is to let the plants do it themselves.  Make sure to leave a green onion or two to flower and go to seed.  Unlike some invasive spreaders (like fennel) onions seeds don’t travel far, and will naturalize in the area you originally planted them.  Young sunflowers grow easily beneath their parents, and if you live in a temperate environment like we do in the Pacific Northwest, you can mulch these volunteers with straw for overwintering, and a healthy headstart on spring growth.  We’ve enjoyed watching a squirrel harvest the seeds from our mutant mammoth sunflower (by hanging upside down from the plant, of course), then earnestly plant them all over the garden, patting them down with his bad little squirrel feet.  If they grow, we’ll have a sunflower forest!

Tomatoes and squash can be left to compost in the winter soil.  Cover them with straw, and watch for the plants to emerge soon after the last frost.  Be sure and label the fruits you leave out so you know what’s growing.  Also be on the lookout for squash and gourds vining out of the compost heap!

For instructions on saving just about any kind of seed, check out the International Seed Saving Institute’s tutorial.

And when we don’t manage to save seeds, or when we want to try new varieties, there are so many lovely small companies that are working to preserve heirloom varieties, and farmers’ rights.  The Sustainable Seed Company is just one of the many seed sources that deserve out support, and they have a great, informative website.

Meanwhile, Happy Harvest.

]]> http://thetanglednest.com/2009/10/seed-saving-for-the-faint-of-heart/feed/ 2 http://thetanglednest.com/2009/10/a-new-way-to-freeze-cherry-tomatoes-tasty-herb-roasted-bites/ http://thetanglednest.com/2009/10/a-new-way-to-freeze-cherry-tomatoes-tasty-herb-roasted-bites/#comments Sat, 03 Oct 2009 17:45:56 +0000 lyanda http://thetanglednest.com/?p=1353 We’ve had a great  tomato year–about as good as it gets in Seattle.  A hot summer, and warmth into the beginning of October (last year the green tomatoes practically withered on the vine in early August).  But autumn is truly with us now, and as I pick tomatoes this Harvest Moon morning, it is with the bittersweet realization that this is the end of the harvest.  Still, there are more cherry tomatoes left today than we can possibly eat.

This year I tried a new freezing technique, inspired by June (my rural soul-sister) and her beautiful blog, Four Green Acres.  The tomatoes are halved, doused with a lovely herbed olive oil mixture, and roasted.  I’ve fixed cherry tomatoes this way before–SO delicious on salads, or on sandwiches with crusty bread (try then on ciabatta, with romaine doused in fresh caesar dressing–heaven).  But I’d never thought to freeze them.  Here’s what you do:

Rinse the cherry tomatoes, and halve them, then scoop out the really juicy-seedy stuff (save it in a bowl for the chickens–they’ll love you forever).  We find that the small end of a melon baller works great for this part.  Spread them, cut-side-up, on a baking sheet.  Claire prepares the tomatoes while I start on the olive oil potion.  Her comment:  “I feel like Laura Ingalls.  I come home from school, do my homework, and now I’m Putting Up Food for the Winter.”

For one baking sheet of tomatoes I mix:  about 1/3 cup olive oil; 1 large clove of garlic, minced; a couple teaspoons of chopped thyme (oregano and basil, or a mixture, would also be good–use whatever’s growing in your garden).

Use a pastry brush to spread the olive oil over the tomatoes, then sprinkle with your best sea salt, a small handful of finely grated reggiano parmesan, and a dusting of fresh ground pepper.

Roast in a 300 degree oven for–well, it depends.  You want that tasty roasted flavor, and the tomatoes should start to color and dry just a bit.  But you still want them somewhat moist and certainly not dehydrated.  Start checking them after half an hour, and use your best judgement.  They shouldn’t roast more than an hour.

Let them cool before gently packing them into freezer jars.  They can be plucked out a few at a time for tossing on salads, or nibbled whenever you need a sunny taste of summer in the dark of winter.  The only problem I have is eating too many of them before they make it to the freezer…

For a slightly different method, see June’s beautifully-photographed instructions.  She is not as lazy as I am, so she stirs the salt, pepper, and parmesan into the olive oil mixture, and spoons it into every individual little tomato.  So yummy.

Happy Harvest Moon.

But when I got home, I realized I would need to dry many of the riper figs pretty quickly or they’d ripen beyond edibility. So I began searching the internet for simple drying methods. I found designs for all kinds of cool-looking solar dryers that seemed simple enough to build-and I may build one yet. But meanwhile, what about these ripe figs? With a little more searching I found a simple idea that made immediate, intuitive sense: why not use the fine German-engineered solar collector we already had sitting in our driveway?

By then I had already sliced the figs thin enough to dry fairly rapidly (I hoped). They were sitting in the sun in an old box with its side cut off, with a screen on top to keep out bugs. They seemed to be making very slow progress towards dehydrating. I moved them to the dashboard of our car.

Along with them, I moved our kitchen thermometer. For dehydrating, you want the food to dry fast enough that mold does not grow, but you don’t want to cook it, and you want some enzymes to survive. So for vegetables and fruit you aim for temperatures in the 100-150 degree range. (There are schools of thought on the perfect temperature, of course. You can spend a whole evening reading the internet arcana about dehydrating – perfect dehydrating temperatures, enzyme survival, et cetera, if that interests you).

On a warm Seattle afternoon (high 70s), the temperature in the car was just about perfect. (The surface temperature of the drying fruit will theoretically be slightly lower due to the cooling effect of evaporation). On hotter days or in hotter places I suppose the temperature could be managed through careful window-opening.

I confess this experiment was not entirely carbon-neutral: when our driveway shaded over at about 3 PM, I backed the car onto the street to get four more hours of direct sun!

The figs spent a couple of sunny days in the car (intermittently – we took them out when we ran errands, and during the night), and we ended up with a nice dehydrated snack.  We will be consuming these in the next few weeks so I did not let them get overly dry, but to prevent mold you want to be sure foods are very well dried before storing them away in a bag in the cupboard.

(If you have a tree exploding with fruit, there are some wonderful Seattle programs like City Fruit and Community Harvest that will harvest your excess fruit and donate it to food banks – call them, or volunteer with them to go help pick this year’s bounty!)

We made them from Speedy Carve–an eraser-like art medium for creating your own rubber stamps. Our friend Audrey showed us how, and this was one of our first efforts.  We think they’re pretty darn cute. If you don’t have a crafty friend to teach you, check out this nifty tutorial at Geninne’s Art Blog.  It’s easy as pie.  (Strawberry pie.)

I have a kid who eats  “Deep PB and J” about 300 days out of the year, and I am happy to bypass the jam section of the grocery store in favor of my own basement pantry, lined with pretty fruit-filled jars. But there’s more to it than economics, isn’t there?  Children raised with a sense of delight in creating part of their home’s sustenance.  Ruby-red colors.  Art, heart, the “fruit of the vine and the work of human hands…”

I just finished the season’s second batch of strawberry jam from the berries we picked the other day.  The kitchen looks like a war-zone. I handed the pot of berries and the potato masher to my ten year old, so I also have red-polka-splatter-dotted walls behind the counter. Totally worth it–maybe even a plus.

Shocked that your recipe calls for more sugar than berries?  Check out these yummy alternatives with less sugar from Mother Earth News a few years back.

And we’d love to hear your own canning/preserving motives and stories…

The favored variety here is Benton, a sweet, flavorful berry well-suited to the Northwest climate and soil.  There is something about picking them yourself that makes them even yummier than they already are.

It hasn’t been a good year for local berry farmers.  The first half of June was atypically hot and dry, and strawberries favor a temperate spring–one of the reasons they normally thrive here on the west side of the state.  The picking season for these small farms is usually four or five weeks long—this year it’s winding down after only two weeks.

The Kent valley holds some of the most fertile farmland on the entire earth, and is often compared to the Nile valley.  The rich soil is now mostly covered in enormous concrete industrial  structures, though some family farms persist.  I grew up in this area, and my mom took my sister Kelly and me strawberry-picking every summer. I remember being in awe of my mother’s super-picking powers–her bucket was always full while mine had only an inch or so of berries in the bottom, just like Blueberries for Sal.  I’m happy to carry on the tradition with my own daughter (though she is a much more industrious picker than I was).

We’d gathered ten pounds of strawberries when my co-pickers began complaining of heat and hunched postures!  But that’s plenty for jam and nibbling.

The hot weather has been good, at least, for the raspberries, which will be ripening at the local u-pick farms in a week or so.  Be sure and buy or pick plenty!  Let’s show the love for our local farmers–our business completes the circle…

Lazy River Farm in Kent doesn’t have a website, but they are open in season on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays from 9-5.  Their address is 27010 78th Avenue S.  Always call ahead for berry status:  206.963.5079.