Valentine's Day!

Garden Fresh Chow Mein

The best Valentine's Day gift is not chocolate. This may be depressing news to a friend who confided in a whisper to me last weekend that it was her favorite gift. I didn't want to burst her bubble. My favorite Valentine's Day gift is pictured to the immediate right. Can you spot it?

If that looks like a dish of homemade chow mein, points to you. That's exactly what it is. But that particular dish isn't the favored gift. It's what's in that dish. Look closely. Can you spot it? That dish contains two-three elements from my spring and summer gardening exploits. It's the garden that keeps on giving. Even in the dead of winter as I plan out the next spring and summer garden efforts, the 2022 garden is still paying off.

Dixondale Farms Onions

That garden gift is one of three vegetable packs that I prepared at the close of last summer's gardening efforts. Those packs include two chopped onions, courtsey of Dixondale Farms, the largest grower of onion plants in the USA. The packs also include anywhere from two-to-four chopped bell peppers and one or two chopped jalapeño peppers (seeds included), to give the finished creation a little kick. The packs also include the leaves produced by a prolific summer basil plant.

The creation of these winter packs is a fairly simple operation, but it does require a bit of time in the kitchen. This is where the process starts. The largest onions, which were hung to dry on a fence after a July harvest, are selected. So are the largest peppers. By late August and September, these bell peppers have taken on a pleasing red, orange or yellow hue. The jalapeño peppers are a bright red at this point in the summer garden season and are as spicy (hot) as they are going to get.

Summer Garden Peppers

Jalapeños are not the hottest peppers you can grow in the garden. But they are the best tasting in my humble opinion. The hotter peppers, which all grow well in this California climate, tend to be a tad bitter. This is all personal opinion, of course. There are hot pepper afficiandos who love the taste and jolt that comes from biting into a freshly harvested Ghost, Scorpion or Habanero flamethrower. That's just never been my style. To each his own.

Jalapeño peppers also tend to be the most prolific and easy to grow, which means I can hand out scads of them to neighbors and friends who love the jolt of summer garden heat. There were a lot to give away this past summer, thanks to the garden patrol efforts of a legendary kitten known as "The Mango." I've come to discover that the kitten I adopted from the Bradshaw Animal Shelter in Sacramento County last May not only chased a voracious army of rats out of my garden this past summer, he apparently did a lot more. Neighbors have confided in me that "The Mango" took this hunt into other yards with vegetable gardens, fruit trees, or both.

The Chop!

I did not receive any complaints about these visits. The neighbors loved these well-timed events. The army of rats that once feasted on these summer gardens did not. The end result was a string of successful garden efforts in every yard "The Mango" patrolled.

A food processor aided with the end-of-season chopping effort. The end result went into one-quart bags that went straight into the freezer. I have used two of these bags so far. I will most likely use the third at some point later this month or in March. The bagged peppers, hot peppers, onions and basil are perfect for stir fry dishes, soups, chili or any other dish complimented by summer gardening efforts. The only drawback will come when I finish off the last bag and wish I'd created a fourth or fifth chopped summer garden effort.

Finished Freezer Pack

Three is never enough.

There is a down side to preparing fresh summer vegetables that are chopped and frozen for future use. You do lose that fabulous crunch. But that signature smell of a summer vegetable garden is never too far away. Which is a nice thing to have in the kitchen on a cold and wet winter day.

The HAUL

Heirloom Tomato Haul

I haven't been blessed like this for a very long time. Not since my gardens were located in North Natomas and I was using a different blog from a past lifetime. The haul of tomatoes, peppers, onions and basil currently coming out of the Citrus Heights garden is one for the ages.

The photo you see pictured to your right is just one part of it. I picked this for a canning project last weekend. This sink full of ripe heirloom tomatoes came from approximately half of the plants in the garden. I'm still harvesting from the other half that didn't get touched, hoping that my neighbors don't get tired of my never-ending gifts of vine ripened tomatoes.

I've stopped waiting for the 101st Airborne Rat Army to show up. It's nearly September now. In the past two or three years, this garden would have been decimated from top to bottom by now. Every tomato still on the vine would be damaged with large and disgusting chunks in the shape of large, sharp rat teeth. It was impossible to walk down the garden rows, unless you enjoy rats suddenly zipping across your shoes as this walk interruped their non-stop feeding regimen and garden destruction habits. It was really something to experience. Depressing too.

Single Plant Harvest

But the introduction of "The Mango" as my neighbors now call him (they did name him, after all), has meant all the difference in the world. I kept waiting for weeks on end for the 101st Airborne Rat Army to parachute in on any given night and lay claim to the ripening heirloom tomato crop. They never did. Not with The Mango, my tiny orange rescue kitten from the Bradshaw Animal Shelter, now patrolling the garden area.

His presence has resulted in what is pictured above left. That isn't a harvest from my heirloom plants. That's from ONE plant. Plus, that is just the harvest from that ONE plant on the day this picture was taken. I've been pulling tomatoes off this ONE plant for weeks. It's still loaded with tomatoes that are still green at the moment. Which means another monster harvest from this ONE plant is coming soon.

Processing Tomatoes

So, with heirloom tomatoes literally coming out of my ears, it was time to put some old gardening tools to work again. This would result in a project I had not undertaken for nearly a decade. I would turn a sink full of vine-ripened heirloom tomatoes, garden bell peppers and jalapeño peppers, garden grown onions and basil, and turn it into as many jars of spicy tomato sauce as I could get.

This was an all-day job for two people a decade ago. I'm alone now. I wouldn't be all that surprised if this job took me more than a full day. That did happen, but only because I ran out of canning jars and the all important canning jar lids. The lids are the one thing you cannot recycle. Once they've been used, you cannot use them again.

Simmering Sauce

I'm not sure why I chose to hang onto all of the old garden canning equipment when I found myself living alone again. Anyone who has been through this experience, and a lot of us have, will find themselves throwing away a lot of old and unpleasant memories. This I did through the years, but I kept the old water-bath and pressure-canning equipment sitting on a shelf in the garage. It had gathered a fine layer of dirt and dust through all those years of inactivity. But you know what? You can wash the dirt off. You can enjoy life again.

Turning a sink full of heirloom tomatoes and peppers into jars of spicy tomato sauce is a fairly simple task once you've done this a few times. The first step is to wash and core the fruit. It's then cut into chunks and liquified in a food processor. The amounts are then measured and added to a large pot. Once everything is added, you bring the mixture to a boil and let it simmer.

The Payoff

I wanted a thicker sauce this time. So, rather than just one hour of a hard simmer, I kept it going for two. It's useless to keep an air conditioning unit working during a project like this because the heat coming out of the kitchen is fairly intense. Of course I would choose the hottest day of 2022 to take on such a project. That only makes sense. I had forgotten about the kind of heat that comes out of a kitchen when a pressure canning unit is hard at work.

The end result is 13-pints and three quarts of the thickest sauce I've ever created. Do you really think I'm going to consume this much heirloom tomato sauce during the winter? Are you insane? That's what neighbors are for. The same neighborhood children who gifted my orange rescue kitten with the name of "The Mango" will get to enjoy the results of his non-stop garden patrol efforts.

The Mango

If "The Mango" enjoyed tomato sauce he would most certainly get his fair share. After all, he earned it. But, he's more than content with his kitten kibble. The only snack he seems to enjoy is the ocassional bug he hauls in from the backyard. This is one garden assassin who works cheap.