My best Brandywine tomato of the year - just harvested!
Now that it's fall, I feel like my garden should be winding down; but, in fact, I have quite a bit still coming in. In part, this is due to the fact that my tomatoes did not begin to ripen until very late in the season. I've finally gotten some of my brandywines, which are very delicious, though few in number. The yellow pear tomatoes have not slowed down their production at all over the past month. I finally decided that I needed to do something with them, because I had so many piling up. I decided to try making a "Yellow Salsa" today, although with the addition of cilantro and some chile peppers, it ended up more green. Here's the rough recipe:
I had chicken salad at a friend's house a while back. I normally don't eat chicken salad, because it's typically slathered in mayonnaise, which I despise. The recipe my friend made didn't have a strong mayo taste, and it was actually really good! I decided that I should try making it sometime, but I would have to find a mayonnaise-free recipe or there is just no way I would make it (mayonnaise is probably second only to mustard on my list of things I refuse to buy). Lo and behold, I discovered that I could use Greek yogurt instead of mayo, and I just happened to have some leftover Greek yogurt in my fridge from another recipe. I looked up several recipes before deciding how I wanted to make mine. I also had several ingredients on hand that I wanted to incorporate -- including radishes that I had just gotten from the farmer's market. I was really pleased with the way it turned out. I served it on a rye swirl bread and had for lunch several days. Yum!
I learned something interesting about carrots the other day. Apparently, they are biennial plants, which are only supposed to flower every other year. So, carrot seeds that you buy for your garden should not grow into flowering plants. I found this fact particularly interesting since I planted carrots for the first time last year, and they flowered -- flowered and reseeded themselves to the point that I have carrots growing everywhere. AND, this year's crop of carrots are also flowering. My guess is that due to the crazy weather and drought last year, the carrots went a little crazy and flowered when they shouldn't have. What I didn't think about is that because the plants are spending so much energy producing flowers, the roots do not grow as well. This may be part of the reason I had stunted carrots last year. This year's plants are flowering even more (so that my garden was starting to look like a wildflower field). I decided to pull a few up and see what was beneath the ground. To my horror, most of the plants had hardly any carrot root on them. Most of these things that have taken over my garden that I expected to harvest as carrots this fall, are basically just weeds.