This vegetable plate represents summer in our yard and greenhouse. The red tomato slices are Czech’s Bush, the oddly colored ones are a Siberian variety called Black Prince, the cucumber is called Space Saver and the garish beets are Detroit Dark Red, pickled in a bonehead-simple recipe of vinegar, sugar, water, cinnamon and cloves.
In making that plate I flashed back to the covered-dish suppers of my youth. Each table in the church basement had a cut-glass dish of pickles, olives and pickled beets (or something quite like it). The suppers tended to happen in fall and winter, so freshly sliced tomatoes and cukes weren’t on the menu.
After an unusually sunny June and July, we’ve been treated to near-constant clouds and rain. “State fair weather,” we call it. Great for the rhubarb and raspberries and other outdoor crops. Not so much for the greenhouse tomatoes, which are bursting with fruit but ripening more slowly than we’d like.
For a South Jersey girl, the importance of tomatoes is hard to overstate. Back home all you had to do was drop a seed and jump out of the way. Here you need to cosset and coddle the plants with greenhouses or, if outdoors, with floating row covers and maybe a little wave-selective plastic.
On the bright side, this cooler clime means lettuce, spinach and other greens that don’t bolt by mid-June; the “cut and come again” force is strong here. We’ve been eating marvelous salads lately, with cold lettuce that’s so crunchy you’d swear it had bones.
Although we put home-grown cucumbers into the salads we serve the tomatoes separately. Something as sweet and soft as a Black Prince or Cherokee Purple deserves to be savored on its own, without the distraction of salad dressing. All they need is a little salt to intensify the sweetness.
Alaska’s summer flavors
The lack of real heat also means no chance for other fondly remembered produce of my youth: Silver Queen white corn, peaches, watermelons, lima beans (which we ate as a main course, in bowls of hot milk with swirls of melted margarine on top).
But here’s what we have enjoyed this season:
Strawberries so lusciously soft that they dissolve when you press them against your palate (DF’s photo makes me hungry)
Green beans, fresh and crisp, courtesy of a 25-cent seed packet from The Dollar Tree in Phoenix
Raspberries – our freezer is bursting with the things and we’ve only just finished using last year’s fruit in a wonderful mixed-berry pie and, in DF’s case, smushed onto vanilla ice cream
Salads of leaf and head lettuce, mixed with spinach and Asian greens
Intensely sweet carrots; although most went into pint jars, we nibbled a few odd bits here and there as we chopped
The startlingly good tomatoes, savored all the more because most were from seeds saved from last year’s crop
Those pickled beets, which are delicious on their own but even better when made into a sandwich with hard-boiled eggs sliced onto lavishly buttered multigrain toast
Still no word on the potatoes, but the plants look healthy. At some point in September we’ll uncover the spuds; I say “uncover” because they aren’t mounded with soil but rather with last winter’s leaves.
And did I mention the popcorn? Yep: Three plants in the greenhouse, all of which are setting ears. We won’t do this again, as the large tubs take up too much room. It was a pure entertainment.
Summer, saved
In keeping with our zero food waste effort, we dehydrated the beet greens for use in the coming year’s soups and stroganoffs. The carrot greens were divided among several boiling bags in the freezer, to be turned into stock for those future soups.
As we still have beets and carrots in the garden, I expect this will be a canning weekend. I’ll look forward to roasting and peeling those beets, then slicing them into wide-mouthed pint jars and pouring in sweet-sour brine. While they are processed in the water-bath kettle, DF and I will scrub and top the remaining carrots and ready them for the pressure canner.
As we preserved the previous batch of carrots we marveled that it’s actually fun to do this with a like-minded partner. Unlike gluing stamps in an album or catching Pokemon, gardening and food preservation are pastimes that nourish us figuratively as well as literally.
Watching the seeds sprout in late winter and nurturing the young plants brings us tremendous pleasure. Eating the heirloom tomatoes and other delicious results makes us feel rich.
And on below-zero winter mornings when the sun’s not due up for hours? The zing of rhubarb in yogurt or the sweet-tart crunch of raspberry in a muffin reminds us that June and July will some day return. Summer in every bite.
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Wow Donna! Love this post. Sounds like you definitely enjoy the “fruits of your labor” all year round! Delicious!
Those tomatoes look delicious! And the pickled beets too!
The thing about beets is that no matter how you prepare them, there is still a faint under-flavor that I can describe only as “dirt.” But in a good way.
Never would have thought of making beet-and-egg sandwiches until I read Tamar Adler’s wonderful book, “An Everlasting Meal: Cooking With Economy And Grace.” She changed the way I cook.
I LOVED this book. She writes beautifully and like you, it changed the way I cook.
Thank you for another great article. You can make the simplest things so fun to read. We can’t grow a garden where I live, but we do belong to a CSA, so I do get the great summer vegetables. And I cracked up at the description of the taste of beets: “dirt”. I cannot get either of my sons or my husband to eat them because they all say they taste like “dirt”. Hilarious.
Love it! You cannot beat a great tomato and I am a huge fan of vegetable plates!!
Try dilly beans sometime. I only got one batch so far this year and seems like the season is coming to a close. And pickle relish-makes good tartar sauce. Have apples to can tonight. Freezer won’t hold everything we want, so canning saves space.
Looking covetously at those tomatoes. Mine are just now starting to turn red. Our summer has been odd. Have no idea what the potatoes have done. Not ready for a peek yet.
Just read an article from Washington State University about how long it’s taking tomatoes in that part of the country, too. It was written by a former co-worker from Alaska:
https://news.wsu.edu/2016/08/09/trouble-tomato-land-green-tomatoes/
Hope the sun comes back soon.
You are making my mouth water! We only have tomatoes and peppers this year, as between the deer, and groundhogs, everything else is gone. I used to look forward to buying the silver queen corn, but the last 3 years it seems no one is growing it anymore. I don’t understand it, but they say everyone seems to want the bi-colored, so that is what they are planting. It is way too shady here from my cousins trees, or I would plant. Tried it several years ago, and it just never grew much. Wish we would get a little rain and the humidity would go down.
Your tomatoes look luscious. My Jersey ones are still green but coming along nicely. I have a couple of peppers in the works too.
As a child I used to eat the tomatoes raw with a shake of salt. My Grandma used to make a salad of sliced tomatoes, chopped raw onions and oil. I remember it so clearly and remake it myself in the summer.
Enjoy:)
They are luscious: soft and sweet and almost dissolving in the mouth without the need to do much chewing. Those heirlooms are the best! But who can afford to pay farmers-market prices? Up here some heirlooms were going for $9 a pound. That’s why I feel so rich when we eat them.
Your tomato salad recipe is making me hungry.
Our garden has been more interesting than productive this year – such strange weather. Very hot in May, and I know better than to plant then, but… so, 4 nights of killing frost in June, back to 90 degree weather for July, and we’re anticipating our August freeze any day. This year for the first time we watched sparrows nibbling the pea blossoms and leaves. The lettuce, even with a woven wire row cover simply wouldn’t grow – finally we were sort of delighted to find a tiny baby rabbit there enjoying breakfast. We don’t think he got there all alone. We can keep the deer out and protect some things from birds, but this is our first year with cottontails. However, we are eating beets, zucchini, and green beans. I couldn’t stand not knowing any longer, so pulled a red potato plant and we are having creamed new potatoes tonight. I do love gardens!
Mmmmm….new potatoes. Sorry about the weird weather; seems like it happened all over the country this year. Thanks, El Nino!
Everything looks and sounds so delicious! Except for the Black Prince tomatoes, they just look rotten to me. Not saying they taste that way, Donna, just saying that I’m turned off by the way the look. Of course, I’d taste a slice if given the opportunity. ;o)
We are having the weirdest weather here. It’s traditionally very dry in July and August in Arkansas. Sometimes we have drought conditions for several weeks. Not this year, it rains 4 or 5 days a week. Not light summer showers but monsoons! I’m getting kinda nervous about winter. We don’t need a lot of snow/ice because we don’t have the equipment to deal with it in the south.
I know what you mean about the Black Prince. Usually I’m suspicious of tomatoes that aren’t a deep red, but these are delicious. So are the Cherokee Purples, which also don’t turn bright red. I’m hooked.
The Czech’s Bush red ones are lovely, too. So are the Stupice, Patio and Tumbling Toms. DF says that some folks are crazy cat people but that we are crazy tomato people.
Beautifully written, Donna, bravo! I enjoyed reading this. Your words just flowed.
Why, thank you.
What’s your recipe for pickled beets, or where can I find it? I love pickled beets, but the hubby and kids don’t. We have too many squirrels and deer to make a garden worthwhile. And it’s far too hot to can right now (heat index was well over 100 yesterday)!
I borrowed it from Food.com:
http://www.food.com/recipe/easy-pickled-beets-13606
Enjoy!
I would take a little of your chill if I could just grow rhubarb! Beets do taste like dirt. I can vividly remembering turning them down when I was three and watching my two-year-old brother gobble them down.
It’s 11:05 a.m. here in Boston and still one hour till lunch! Hope i last that long! Donna, what a beautiful tribute to Nature and the Natural way of life.
Thanks for your kind words.
Last night DF and I canned six pints of pickled beets Would have been seven pints except a jar broke. Waaahhhh….
You and me both. I also was canning and did seven of beets. One broke in the canner. Thank-goodness it didn’t happen with the baby cukes?
Ok, that made me hungry!! We love our garden. It is too hot for me to do anything at the moment here in Virginia, but I managed to freeze quite a bit last month.
Thank you for the great story about your garden. To think this was all grown in Alaska….well…is just crazy. The tomatoes look really interesting….
“Interesting” is probably your polite way of saying, “Um, eeewwww.” But I promise that the Black Prince are some of the best tomatoes I’ve ever eaten — and I’m from New Jersey.
I once interviewed a guy who grew corn and cantaloupes outdoors in Anchorage. He used both the floating row covers and wave-selective plastic, but he did it.
Every month, I make a Word file with things I’ve found and want to remember –inspirational or humorous quotes; recipes; and ideas-to-ponder.
TWO of your sentences from this essay made my list (exceedingly rare):
cold lettuce that’s so crunchy you’d swear it had bones.😁
Back home all you had to do was drop a seed and jump out of the way. 😆
Awww, thanks! I love making it onto lists.