Author: Paul

I almost forgot I had a blog. I haven’t been here in a few days. Too much work. Don’t call us. We’re too busy.

We celebrated the Autumnal Equinox in style last night. I think it was a full moon, it looked it. We fired up our Home Depot chiminea and burnt some scrap wood from the garage. It was mostly pine but there was some redwood and cedar scraps from various home improvement projects. It got too hot out there for a while. There is a whole ‘nother world in that chiminea. We were transfixed.

I suspect Martin eats out more than he eats in but I know he is a great cook. We’ve had his homemade pizzas and olive salad and things I can’t remember right now. He emailed us that he and Boo had bought thirty pounds of tomatoes at the public market and made sauce by baking the tomatoes. We have always par-boiled the tomatoes and then simmered the sauce for most of the day so we were intrigued by the baking approach. We grow tomatoes in the gardens of the neighbors on either side of us. We don’t have enough sun on our property to grow them. In fact I only have to mow our lawn twice a year because it just doesn’t get enough light to grow.

We picked both gardens clean and split the tomatoes in half as Martin suggested. Here’s his recipe:
Cut in half and put in roasting pans with chopped onion, garlic, some with red peppers and olive oil, baked for 3 hours, pull the skins off and blend. We started at 400 for an hour then lowered to 350. They get real juicy at first then the juice starts to evaporate. When most of it is gone take them out and let them cool. We dug in and slipped the skins off before blending them and putting them in freezer bags with a funnel. We put sliced carrots in some batches- they sweeten it a bit. Don’t bother with Basil, the flavor disappears almost as soon as you put it in so it should never be added until you’re ready to eat.

I was working out in the tomatoes cooked down and the whole neighborhood smelled like an Italian restaurant. We started to pull the skins off and then bagged that idea. And we didn’t blend them either. It almost like stewed tomatoes but chunky and rich. The next night I baked a big eggplant at 400 for about an hour and then peeled and sliced it. I mixed it in with the sauce and we served it over whole wheat pasta.

We started some seeds from scratch this year, lettuce, peppers and basil, and they did well. We bought our plants, tomatoes and more jalepeños, at Case’s on Norton just like other years. But we picked up some zucchini plants at Aman’s on East Ridge Road. The plants were labeled “zucchini ” but they got huge in a hurry and ran all over the garden. I pulled a twenty foot section out of our tomatoes and threw it back where it started. The leaves are as big as elephant ears and the vegetable that emerged from the blossoms looked a lot like pumpkins now. Some are already orange. We will probably have enough for the whole street. The one see above escaped the garden and is now hanging off the fence that is supposed to keep the deer out. Do deer like pumpkin? We will find out.