Harvest Monday - September 24, 2012

I've been watching all summer long while other garden bloggers in the northern hemisphere have hauled in harvests of summer vegetables. My patience started to wear thin as I saw a bounty of tomatoes and peppers and eggplant coming out of their gardens. There were ripe tomatoes everywhere, except my garden. Now, as many of them talk of clearing out their plots at the end of the season, guess what, summer looks like it has finally come full blast to my garden, right on schedule.

Here are the harvests last Monday:

Fiaschetto tomatoes

Diamond, Kamo, and Salanga eggplants

Da Fiore zucchini, Rolande filet beans, Gigante beans

The last of the Apollo broccoli

Tuesday I cleaned and weighed the green coriander seeds that I had harvested and dried in the previous few weeks.

Dried green coriander seeds

And I harvested all the ripe Yellow Manzano and Aji Angelo chile peppers (not done yet).

Yellow Manzano and Aji Angelo chile peppers

Wednesday I needed to harvest a bunch of Padron peppers before they got too big and there were a few cucumbers.

Pimento de Padron peppers, Green Fingers cucumbers,
and Tasty Green cucumbers

And the basil plants had gotten out of hand so I harvested a big bunch to make pesto. It is still very good in spite of being in absolute full bloom.

Profumo di Genova basil

Thursday I harvested a small handful of filet beans and a few peppers to use in Tomato Gazpacho. The zucchini plants are still producing a steady crop in spite of the powdery mildew.

Lady Bell, Shephards Ramshorn, and Jimmy Nardello's peppers
Rolande filet beans
Da Fiore zucchini

Sunday was the day to tackle the tomatoes. I started with my least favorite part of the job, the cherry tomatoes. I like to harvest them with the caps on which prevents them from cracking and then spoiling but it makes for tedious work.

Sunshine Cherry and Wheatly's Frost Resistant Cherry tomatoes

Next least favorite tomato harvest, the plum tomatoes which also get harvested caps on because many of them will sit a few days before I can get around to processing them.

Fiaschetto tomatoes

When I filled that box shown above it maxed out my kitchen scale so I had to move some of them to another box.

More Fiaschetto tomatoes

And then I got to move on to the rest of the tomatoes.

Amish Paste, Nyagous, Jaune Flamme, Wheatly's Frost Resistant
and the first Martian Giant

And finally the very productive Rosabecs, just a bit of BER affected tomatoes remaining.

Rosabec tomatoes

More Padrons needed to be harvested, and there were more zucchini, a few cucumbers and a nice handful of filet beans.

Pimento de Padron peppers, Da Fiore zucchini, Tasty Green cucumbers,
Green Fingers cucumbers, and Rolande filet beans

And there was a lot of eggplant that needed to be brought in and I found two ripe Odessa Market sweet peppers. The sweet peppers are the last of the summer vegetables that have yet to produce in quantity.

Diamond, Kamo, and Salangana eggplants
Odessa Market peppers

Here's one dish that I made last week with some of the bounty, Eggplant Stuffed with Pork from Claudia Roden's book The Food of Spain. These were tasty but the filling was a bit moist for my taste, it includes bread crumbs that are soaked in milk. Next time I think I'll include the bread crumbs without the milk. These were even tastier a couple of days later.

Pork Stuffed Eggplant

Some of the bounty of zucchini went into a dish that I made up to use the rest of the ground pork that I had on hand. I grilled the zucchini and some sweet onions on my stove top ridged griddle and then a made a saute with the ground pork and a bit of chopped onion, garlic and fresh Aji Angelos, some ground fennel seed and chopped capers, and some quartered Fiaschetto tomatoes that were added at the end to soften but not cook down. I arranged the zucchini and grilled rings of onion on a platter and piled the pork mixture on top. I wish I had taken the time to take a photo, but it was late, we were hungry, the camera was not at hand...

I have been making a different variation of the tomato, cucumber and sweet pepper salad almost every day. Last night I seasoned it with Merlot wine vinegar and pomegranate molasses and added bacon and blue cheese - oh yum. I'm really liking the addition of a bit of pomegranate molasses to the dressing, it's better than balsamic, well, at least different.

The final harvest of Apollo broccoli went into another frittata for my husband's lunches last week. I finally tore out those plants to make way for some celery plants that I had growing in pots. It may be a bit late to plant the celery, but we'll see.

Last night I used about 2 1/2 pounds of the eggplant to make a big batch of Caponata. That's a nice dish to have on hand for my weekday lunches.

Here's the harvest totals for the past week:

Rolande filet beans - 11.1 oz.
Apollo Broccoli - 9.4 oz.
Dried green coriander seeds - 4.3 oz.
Green Fingers Persian cucumbers - 10.1 oz.
Tasty Green Japanese cucumbers - 2 lb., 3.6 oz.
Diamond eggplant - 2 lb., 7.3 oz.
Kamo eggplant - 3 lb., 10.5 oz.
Salangana eggplant - 3 lb., 2.5 oz.
Tango lettuce - 3.5 oz.
Aji Angelo chile peppers - 9.9 oz.
Jimmy Nardello's peppers - 3.7 oz.
Lady Bell peppers - 4.6 oz.
Odessa Market peppers - 6.4 oz.
Pimento de Padron peppers - 2 lb., 5.3 oz.
Shephards Ramshorn pepper - 4.8 oz.
Yellow Manzano chile peppers - 4 lb., 6.7 oz.
Amish Paste tomatoes - 3 lb., 13.7 oz.
Fiaschetto tomatoes - 26 lb., 8.9 oz.
Jaune Flamme tomatoes - 2 lb., 9.6 oz.
Martian Giant tomato - 1 lb. (one beautiful tomato)
Nyagous tomatoes - 5 lb., 7.2 oz.
Rosabec tomatoes - 6 lb., 11.4 oz.
Sunshine Cherry tomatoes - 5 lb., 2.4 oz.
Wheatly's Frost Resistant cherry tomatoes - 15.9 oz.
Da Fiore Zucchini - 4 lb., 8.9 oz.

The total harvests for the week came to - 79 lb., 5.7 oz.
Which brings the totals for the year up to - 310 lb., .7 oz.

Harvest Monday is hosted by Daphne on her blog Daphne's Dandelions, head on over there to see what other garden bloggers have been harvesting lately.