Once in a while somebody says something to you that continues to pop up in your mind now and then. “Thank goodness,” said my friend Janet Halsey, back in her Lincolnville days, “we had a frost last night.” Not what you’d expect from an avid gardener, unless that is, you are one. Because the first killing frost means you’re finally free from worry. The worst has happened. All your carefully tended tender things — the tomatoes and peppers, cucumbers and squash, the melons if you’re lucky enough to have any — they’re all toast. Wilted, drooping, dead.  Maybe you’ve been going out every evening with sheets and covering them up, trying to eke out the last they’ve got to give. But that killing frost ends it all. Stay inside, pour a glass of wine, turn on the news, put your feet up. That evening chore is over.

The potatoes, carrots, beets, turnips will be safe in the ground for a few more weeks; you can dig them at your leisure. The kale and parsley and a few other hardy greens will continue on through November maybe. Of course you’ve already harvested the onions and garlic; the corn’s gone by early September, and the beans; well, you grew tired of beans sometime in mid-August. You’ve already got dozens of bags of green beans in the freezer and couldn’t care if you never saw another.

All you’ve got to worry about now is what to do with all this bounty you’ve harvested. In mid-September that usually means baskets of tomatoes covering every surface, giant zucchinis still lurking around, cabbages, peppers, bunches of basil and sage hanging here and there. Maybe dry beans waiting to be shucked. If it’s a challenge to learn how to grow all this stuff, it’s even more of a challenge to figure out what to do with it. And here’s where it helps to listen to your elders. They knew how to do this stuff. If you’re new to it, I suggest to you go next door and talk to a preferably elderly neighbor who can tell you how. It’s how I did it.

Tomatoes are the most obvious. For one thing they’re so perishable; they go from pale greenish pink to deep red and ready to burst in days. And you’d better not put it off or you’ll have a squishy mess on your hands. Here are my three favorite ways to use them up:

V-8 Juice

I got this “recipe” off a V-8 label: tomatoes, onions, parsley, carrots, spinach, garlic, beets, celery. Except for the spinach, which I never have in September, I’ve got all those things in my garden. I use beet greens or chard or whatever other greens are still vital in place of spinach. Everything goes into the big stainless steel soup pot Wally bought for $5 at Reny’s a few years back. Because I’m not going to pressure-can this, the mix has to be overwhelmingly tomato, the acid fruit that keeps bad bacteria at bay. So to a potful of tomatoes I add a couple of cut up onions and celery stalks, two or three carrots and beets (the latterly coarsely shredded for quicker cooking), a handful of greens and parsley. A round rack on the bottom helps keep the stuff from burning on. Simmer it until everything is tender enough to go through a food mill. Mine’s a Mouli, strongly recommended by Cyrene and Frank Slegona, the Youngtown Road couple who knew how to do almost everything. I found mine online.

Now you’ve got a potful of very hot tomato-vegetable juice bordering on a puree. To each quart jar add a teaspoon of salt, a tablespoon of Worcestershire, and as much Tabasco as you can stand. Process in a hot water bath for ten minutes. We generally drink ours all up with vodka; it makes a terrific Bloody Mary, almost thick enough to eat with a spoon.

Tomato Soup Base

Saute a lot of chopped onions and garlic in some butter. Peel a bunch of tomatoes (drop into boiling water for a few seconds, then into a bowl of cold water. The peels come right off), then chop them up pretty small, and add to the pot. Cook for awhile, until everything seems tender. I ladle it into a measuring cup, and then pour it into quart size freezer bags. If, like me, you tend to re-use old bags, don’t do that here. You need new ones with good “zippers” so they don’t leak. I put 1 1/2 cups in each, then pile them up flat on a tray and freeze them that way. They don’t take up much room. This base could be used in all sorts of tomato soup recipes, but I like cream of tomato best. Make a roux: 1T butter, 1 T flour with 1 t dry mustard, 1 t Old Bay seasoning, and a pinch of cayenne, then add 3/4 cup milk or cream. Stir into the tomato base and add a dash of cooking sherry if have it on hand.

Cherry Tomato Tart

I found this recipe at Kitchen Vignettes https://vimeo.com/100256941, the work of another sometime Lincolnvillian, Aube Giroux. You can make it with any pie crust, or make Aube’s delicious version. Either way, it uses up a lot of cherry tomatoes, and if you have even one plant you know there are always too many. Mix 1/2 cup ricotta with 1/2 cup shredded parmesan and spread it over the unbaked crust. Cover the whole thing with halved cherry tomatoes, cut side up. Drizzle with olive oil and brush the edges of the crust with egg wash (egg yolk and 1 t water). Bake at 375º for 45 minutes. Sprinkle with shredded basil leaves. Good for breakfast, lunch, or dinner.

Ben’s Pickles

This is from our long-time next door neighbor, Ben Mikutajcis, his mother’s Polish pickles. Fill a gallon glass jar with whole cucumbers, several garlic cloves, & lots of dill. Fill the jar with water, then pour it off into a saucepan. Add to the water 1/2 cup pickling salt, 2/3 cup sugar, 1/2 cup vinegar, 1 t dry mustard, and a handful of pickling spice. Bring to a boil. Meanwhile, have the jar of cucumbers standing in a deep pan of very hot water so the jar doesn’t break; pour the boiling liquid over the cucumbers. Cover and, when it’s cool, refrigerate. The pickles will be ready to eat in a week to ten days. They keep for a long time in the fridge. We slice off spears and return the remaining pickle to the jar.

Ross Overcash’s Horseradish Jelly

Now here’s a unique way to use horseradish, and next to cherry tomatoes could be the most prolific plant in your garden, actually, the most invasive as it isn’t killed off by the frost like the cherry tomatoes and spreads roots underground. I only knew one way to use it for a long time — grate it (you practically need a hazmat suit to do this indoors), mix with some white vinegar and a bit of salt and store it in the fridge in jars, keeps all winter. Add it to mayo and a dash of Worcestershire to make a good horseradish sauce. Then at dinner one night at Ross and Marylou Overcash’s a little dish of jelly was passed around the table –“It goes good with meat,” Ross said. Mmmmmm — Horseradish Jelly! And here’s his recipe:

Mix together 1 cup finely grated horseradish
1 cup white vinegar
3 1/2 cups sugar
1/4 t tumeric
1/2  t salt

Let it sit for 15 minutes. Then bring it to a rolling boil, stirring constantly. Add 1 package Certo pectin and boil 1 more minute. Makes two cups.

Many of my early attempts at food preservation (and every thing else related to this new-to-me-at-the-time country life) ended in failure. Luckily I had a friendly comrade floundering in the same boat, in a manner of speaking — Margaret Page. She was my neighbor first, and that’s a story in itself, and then a dear friend after that. One day she appeared with a giant pressure canner, a real dinosaur with 1/2-inch thick walls, and proposed we go halves on it. She’d found it at a yard sale; I willingly handed over my $5 share, and we were co-owners of the thing. Every summer, it traveled back and forth between our houses, lugged out to our vehicles, hauled into our kitchens. You can see it at the Schoolhouse Museum where we finally retired it by mutual agreement.

Mildred’s Flagg Sauerkraut

Yet Another Loss

The Bulletin Board was fairly quiet this past week, but still there was this:

From New Resident: “Greetings, Lincolnvillers! Anyone have a chicken coop, tractor, or run they are looking or are willing to sell? We recently moved from PA and our chickens are coming to join us shortly. Let me know! Thanks …”

 Response: “I have a neighbor that has sworn off chickens. He built a nice villa for a dozen or so birds two years ago.  You can call him at ….., his name is ….”

We encountered a flock of some 15 adolescent turkeys on Youngtown Road the other day. They seemed to be milling around in an agitated way on the shoulder. Closer to them we realized there was a dead turkey lying among them, seemingly hit by a car. The flock scurried off the road as they usually do as we approached, but then, looking in the mirror, I saw them all gather up again on the shoulder around their fallen brother/sister.