On Sunday (well, two Sundays ago, before our Oregon trip), Rob and I made another batch of our Super Baked Ziti. Rob stayed up ’til 3 a.m. the night before, making the sauce. It was an epic sauce. He started working on it about 8:00, when I was hanging up our new shower curtain and the house …
Summer is my favorite season at Spruce Pine Cottage. It’s the green time, the lush, sultry time, the time when the rosinweed blooms and the garden is full of tomatoes. Box turtles come out in the rain. Nighttime is even better than daytime because there …
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| Granny Smith tomatoes |
This summer Rob and I are growing a fun tomato called Granny Smith. It gets its name because it looks so much like a Granny Smith apple; it’s big and solid and stays green (well, chartreuse) even when ripe.
Granny Smith tomatoes even taste kind of like apples. They’re firm and crisp and quite sweet. Their firmness, we’d read, makes them great for frying, so on Sunday we decided to make a batch of fried green tomatoes, our first attempt at this old classic.
They turned out really good. On Sunday afternoon we sat on the breezeway eating them (with a spunky pepper-jelly dipping sauce) and chatting about the Granny Smith’s many fine qualities.
“It’s so productive!” Rob enthused. He motioned to the raindrop-studded garden behind him. “I mean, look at all those tomatoes! There’s no way we can finish them all this week. We’ll have to take them on vacation with us so we don’t waste any.” (We’re flying to Oregon on Saturday.) “We can fill up a Tupperware and make salsa at the rental house.”
I nodded. “Granny Smiths have such an apple-like consistency, you could probably bake them in a pie. There’s a lot of different ways you could use them.”
“Maybe we should try them in a crumble first,” Rob suggested. “Because, you know, a pie is so hard to make, with the crust and everything, that it would be sad if it didn’t turn out. But if the crumble tasted bad, you’d think, oh, well, it’s just a crumble, it’s not that big a loss.”
“Well,” I said, “I bet we’d still be sad because we’d wasted our tomatoes. I mean, you know how we are. They’re obviously pretty important to us since we’re planning on vacationing with them.”
“A good point,” Rob said.
Fried Green Tomatoes
Ingredients:
4 large green tomatoes
Salt and pepper to taste
2 cups almond milk
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup cornmeal
3 cups vegetable oil
Directions:
Cut tomatoes into 1/4-inch slices and place them in a shallow baking dish. Sprinkle the tomatoes with salt and pepper, then pour the almond milk over them. Combine the flour and cornmeal in a pie pan and dredge the tomatoes in this mixture. Fry tomatoes in batches in hot oil in a large skillet over medium heat. Cook for 3 minutes on each side or until golden. Drain on paper towels. Sprinkle with salt to taste. Serve with Red Pepper Jelly Dipping Sauce.
Red Pepper Jelly Dipping Sauce
Ingredients:
2/3 cup red pepper jelly
1 tsp horseradish (check label to make sure it’s vegan)
2 Tbls spicy brown mustard
A drop or 2 of orange extract
Salt to taste
Directions:
Mix all the ingredients together in a small bowl. Stir until well blended.
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| A nice stack of fried green tomatoes. The dipping sauce was the best part. |
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| Carl watching us eat fried green tomatoes. It’s hard to impress a cat. |
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| I won’t even try to pretend this picture has anything to do with anything. The caladiums got off to a slow start this year, but now they’re really going strong. |
Each May a great transformation takes place in our borders and meadow garden when the purple coneflowers (Echinacea purpurea) start to bloom. The beds turn rosy pink and buzz and flutter with bees and butterflies. And I wear myself out taking pictures and picking bouquets …
On Saturday Rob and I touched up the paint on the breezeway and repainted the door that leads from the breezeway to the Little House. The breezeway gets lots of wear and tear because it’s open to the elements–and because it’s our cats’ very favorite …
On Sunday Rob and I made a batch of vegan zucchini bread with our first zucchini of 2013. It’s interesting the sense of duty we feel toward our homegrown vegetables. We never want to waste them, so the bulk of the weekend is often spent cooking up our harvests.
Our zucchini bread recipe comes from The Joy of Vegan Baking, by Colleen Patrick-Goudreau, and it never fails. It’s always good. Yes, making it did take up an entire afternoon, but that’s just because we’re not too good at baking. (I’m famous for my inaccurate measuring.) Our bread turned out a little funny-looking, a little lopsided (since the oven is slanted), but it tasted delicious. It also made the whole house smell wonderful, like nutmeg and cinnamon.
I had a piece for breakfast this morning out by the vegetable garden. It was quite tasty, and the garden made for a pleasant view. There are green, peaceful rows of bean tepees these days, and squash plants studded with huge orange flowers. Ripe cucumbers dangle from their vines, while the mint and oregano lean out of their beds and sprawl across the pebble path.
Vegan Zucchini Bread
Ingredients:
3 Tbls ground flaxseed
1/2 cup water
1 cup canola oil
1 Tbls white vinegar
2 cups sugar
2 cups grated zucchini
2 tsps vanilla
3 cups flour
2 tsps cinnamon
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1/2 cup chopped walnuts
1/2 cup golden raisins
Directions:
Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F. Grease two 8 x 4 x 2-inch loaf pans.
Use an immersion blender to whip together the flaxseed and water until thick and creamy. Combine the flaxseed mixture, oil, vinegar, and sugar in a large mixing bowl. Stir in the zucchini and vanilla.
In a separate bowl, sift together the flour, cinnamon, nutmeg, baking soda, baking powder, and salt. Add the walnuts and raisins. Stir the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients, being careful not to overmix. Divide the batter into the loaf pans and bake for 60 to 70 minutes.
Rob was out of town on Sunday, so I got to have one of my little “Leslie days.” It was extremely pleasant. I started it with a delicious breakfast of popcorn popped on the stove. There’s nothing better than eating popcorn at dawn. As I ate, I read a cookbook …
On Saturday Rob and I went to Dothan to visit Landmark Park, a 135-acre park with nature trails, a living history farm, a one-room schoolhouse, and many other historic buildings. The moment we turned into the entrance …
I have this dream that someday I’ll be able to take a week off of work and do nothing but drive around in the country, on the back roads, and explore. I’ll go to all the little towns near my house, like Whigham and Bainbridge, and see what there is to see. I’ll poke around in dusty antique stores, buy peaches and watermelon at roadside stands. I’ll take pictures of ancient live oak trees and tin-roofed houses and stop at homey, decrepit convenience stores for Cokes and boiled peanuts.
I dream this dream all the time, when I’m driving to work, and when I’m waiting to fall asleep. And then yesterday I guess I just got tired of dreaming. At 11:00 I asked for the rest of the day off and I drove up to Thomasville, a town about 45 minutes from Quincy, for a mini vacation. I puttered around in the antique stores and had little conversations with the owners, conversations that usually started like this: “Oh, this is so pretty!” Then I strolled around in an old cemetery and read the gravestones in a leisurely fashion. It was brilliantly sunny, and warm yellow light flooded the streets and yards and parks. I got myself a nice cold Coke and walked down bumpy sidewalks while taking pictures of mildewed mansions.
There’s lots to see in Thomasville. The city is famous for its rose gardens (and annual rose festival), as well as its 330-year-old live oak, the Big Oak, which has a limb span of over 165 feet. Another attraction is the Lapham-Patterson House, built in 1885. It’s a wonderfully eccentric, asymmetrical Victorian house with fish-scale shingles, gingerbread trim, loads of stained glass, and 45 doors.
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| Thomasville has a thriving downtown, with brick streets and lots of cute, fancy shops. |
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| There are so many historic houses. |
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| The First United Methodist Church was built in the 1880s. |
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| The oldest grave in the Old Cemetery dates back to 1842. |
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| I bought a couple things on my little trip. I got this plaster urn at Relic’s. |
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| Another treasure I found was this clay candelabra from Mexico. It’s now part of my beloved “bird collection.” |
