It’s kind of a triple play for the kitchen — pickling, canning and baking.

I made a French-style beef stew (daube), a vast amount of salsa, assorted rounds of goat cheese, an argula salad with cherry tomatoes and lemon cucumbers and pasta with a fresh sauce made from San Marzano tomatoes. In short, the goal was to use as many of the remaining tomatoes as possible. I tapped a keg of American Ale that I had brewed in the spring. Nancy made zucchini bread, congo bars and corn bread — however, we forgot to put the cornbread out.

John stopped by with his house-truck and gave us tours of his nice wooden house built on the bed of an Isuzu truck. He just left Oregon and he’s off for six months traveling around America with his four-wheel residence.

Sunday was a beautiful sunny day. We had lots of young kids around, enjoying themselves, the dogs and the pool. Lots of friends dropped by to share some food and conversation.

I was too busy to take photos. However, the last thing to be made was a pear tart by Chris and Kim Collett. They poached the pears in red-wine then covered it with a pastry crust and baked it. The tart wasn’t finished baking until everyone had left so Nancy and I enjoyed it after cleaning up. Incredible. I had to take a picture of it, although the photo doesn’t suggest how good it was.

Maybe the best taste of this summer and a memory I will hang on to as I head East to stay for the rest of September.

An Impossibly Perfect Garden Tomato

(I’m not sure the iPhone photo does it justice. Here a link to the original on Flickr.)

I was gathering tomatoes to do my first batch of canning. I made six quarts of tomato sauce, the first of the season. Canning is great for the far greater majority of imperfect tomatoes.

First batch of tomato sauce canned this year

The first tomatoes are ready in the garden.   I have great expectations for this tomato crop.  It appears that the wait that began when the plants were started in the greenhouse in March, and then put in the ground in early May, is now over.  Picking the first tomatoes is wonderful, but soon there’s a flow like through a firehose of tomatoes and tomato sauce now through September.  Summer is here in full.

This Roma tomato was sauteed with other vegetables and then put over polenta.    

I took it with the new iPhone 4 camera, which has twice the resolution.  

Posted via email from dalepd | Dale Dougherty

Each season begins with seed starter and seeds, and the idea that warmer weather is not too far off. First, I planted turnips from seed out in the garden. The soil may be too cool for them to start but I thought I’d try sowing two rows.

I also started five kinds of tomato seeds in the greenhouse, along with several other vegetables that can be planted weeks ahead of the last frost date. (I’ve been away for the week after planting them and I came back today to find that many had sprouted.)

There’s a lot to know about seeds — how long they last in storage, for instance, and the different ways to coax seeds to germinate. I followed one recommendation to start seeds on a moist paper towel, which is wrapped up and placed in a plastic bag.

As I was working with a range of seeds, I noticed just how different various seeds actually are from one another — even from plants that you might think would be more similar. So here’s an exercise — identify the seeds in the photo below. I’m practically giving you the turnip to start and there’s two root vegetables in the mix.

Click through to the annotated version of this photo on Flickr to see if you know your veggies and their seeds.