A gardener and farm worker has access to lots of summer vegetables, especially “farm seconds.” It is difficult to use them up before they turn to compost.
The recipe for roasted red pepper and tomato soup is simple and the results are sweetly tasty. It was born of an abundance of bell peppers and tomatoes.
I wouldn’t expect anyone to go to the market and buy ingredients for this dish. If one has the peppers and tomatoes, almost everything else is on hand in a well stocked kitchen.
Roasted Red Peppers
Make a batch or two of roasted bell peppers for the soup and to use in other dishes.
Preheat the oven to 450 Degrees Fahrenheit with the shelf in the middle position.
Cull the best red peppers from the lot, halve them and remove the membrane, core, seeds and any bad spots. Using a melon baller makes it super easy and more precise in removing all of the membrane. Peppers needn’t be perfectly halved. Put them skin side up on a piece of parchment paper on a baking sheet with sides. Nestle them close together to get as many as possible on the baking sheet.
Bake at temperature for 25 minutes and remove from the oven.
Using tongs, move the roasted peppers to a bowl and cover it with a plate. This process helps loosen the skin. Let them sit until they can be handled without burning fingers.
One-by-one take the pieces of pepper and remove the skin. Place them in a refrigerator dish and refrigerate until ready to use.
Roasted red peppers are an ice box staple during pepper season. For longer storage there are recipes for oiling and preserving them. They are so sweet and tasty they won’t last long in most households.
Roasted Red Peppers Before Removing Skin
Roasted Red Pepper and Tomato Soup
This recipe makes two quarts, enough to serve four – five people.
Add one cup vegetable broth to a Dutch oven and bring to a boil.
Add:
Equivalent of 5-6 large tomatoes, one-inch dice.
Enough roasted red peppers to approximately equal the weight of the tomatoes, maybe a little less.
Two tablespoons salted butter.
One six ounce can prepared tomato paste.
One teaspoon each dried spices including smoked paprika, granulated garlic and thyme. Fresh is better if you have it. Double the amount if you do. Herbs and spices are always to taste.
One tablespoon dried basil. Fresh basil is better. Double the amount if you have it.
Two tablespoons dried onion flakes.
One tablespoon sweetener. I used sugar because it was in the pantry.
Salt and pepper to taste.
Teaspoon of red pepper flakes, cayenne pepper or your favorite pepper spice (optional).
Stir to incorporate the ingredients, bring to a boil and turn down to a simmer. Cook until the tomatoes begin to soften. Don’t cook the tomatoes to death. You will want some bits of recognizable tomato granules in the final product.
Either transfer the mixture to a blender or use an immersion blender to smooth it to a pleasing texture. As mentioned, I like little bits of recognizable tomato and pepper.
Add one cup half and half and stir constantly until the soup is well-mixed and up to temperature.
Serve hot, garnished with fresh basil, a dollop of sour cream or snipped chives. Whatever looks appetizing and is available.
This recipe was fun to make and better than manufactured roasted red pepper and tomato soup in aseptic containers. Leftovers, if any, will keep for a couple of days.
The text message came while I worked at the home, farm and auto supply store. I saw it on my afternoon break.
“If you want to start tomatoes there is a crate on the packing shed floor you could pick up on way home from work,” Farmer Kate texted. “I’m not home but if you need help finding them let me know.”
We barter my labor canning for her tomatoes. Ready or not, the next aspect of the local food season begins with its quick-paced rush to beat spoilage.
When I picked up the tomatoes there was also a crate of bell pepper seconds unclaimed by CSA members. A farm worker offered them and I put the crate in the back of my Subaru.
On the way hope I spotted the librarian leaving the library for her car and swung by to offer some peppers. My sister in law was at our house when I arrived home. I offered her some too. They are so sweet — unlike what’s available at the grocery store. A gift to be shared.
The garden is coming in with more apples than can be picked before they drop. Pears are almost ready, there are tomatoes, celery, hot peppers, basil and more waiting to be harvested and processed. There will be more cucumbers for pickling. Sweet corn will run another week or two at the roadside stand and we want to put some up. Every night after work and most mornings before, I’m in the garden harvesting or in the kitchen making dishes and preserving the harvest. Right now tomatoes, peppers, sweet corn and apples are in the house waiting to be processed. It’s a mad rush.
It’s also a good life. Staying busy with useful work blocks out negativity from other sectors of society. It’s cultured and produces the tangible benefits of relationships, knowledge and good food for our table and those with whom we share.
For the rest of August and September, it’s work, kitchen, garden for me.
The origin of my adult interest in cooking and gardening is time spent in a motel room in Thomasville, Georgia while implementing a logistics project at a large, nearby mining and manufacturing company.
I’d go into the plant early and stay late, returning home to Iowa only every other weekend. When I got back to my room, I turned on the television and fell asleep watching the TV Food Network.
That’s not to say experiences with my mother and grandmother played no role. They did, especially in our kitchen on Marquette Street where Mother prepared meals using familiar ingredients both fresh and prepared, and at Grandmother’s kitchen — first at the Lend-A-Hand and then at the Mississippi Hotel.
Rather than sustenance, food became an escape in my adult years.
In the 1990s I escaped into the T.V. During thirty minute segments I could forget extreme poverty and plain family restaurants that served a meat and three sides in rural Georgia, and engage in personality chefs who enjoyed what they were doing as locals did not. I had no kitchen so the interest was intellectual. I did learn techniques, some of which I would use later in our home kitchen. We don’t get Food Network any longer but it set me on a course for being the kind of home cook I am today.
Yesterday I made breakfast of steamed broccoli, fresh tomatoes and quesadilla — a gardener’s breakfast. In a social climate of political turmoil, disease, famine and extreme weather events food continues to represent escape as well as nourishment. Producing local food and dishes is a way of navigating diverse interests in a society that seems to have gone mad. Not only escape, but protection of who we are from those who would change us.
In western culture we begin each day with choices about food. The lesson I learned in Georgia, on the T.V. and in family kitchens is to choose fresh and local in order to sustain our lives, and there’s more. Make something of our choices. For a brief moment yesterday it was a gardener’s breakfast. Now to turn to today.
Between planning, planting and weeding a garden, and fall’s frosty end, lies a time to harvest, cook and preserve the results. So it is with our lives.
As humans we possess a unique ability to envision a future: one where we need supper and know we will need food later. We produce in abundance, fearing we won’t have enough. With modern food supply chains producing readily available foodstuffs in the United States this isn’t rational. In this sense, a gardener is an archetypal human living a life on urges, needs and wants we don’t fully understand.
Saturday Harvest in High Summer
The culture that produces a kitchen garden is complex, involving not just the gardener and soil, but seed producers, greenhouse operators, equipment manufacturers, chicken manure composters, potential future diners and others. A gardener is deeply engaged in human society. Much of our garden time seems solitary but isn’t. Animals wander nearby and we view the results when they eat garden plants and produce we’d hoped to harvest later. There is a daily drama of birds which are abundant in Big Grove. There is also a vast and little understood society of insects, some of which are annoying, a few deadly, and without others, the garden could not exist. A gardener embraces the complexity of life’s culture.
A gardener is not only a gardener nor does he or she seek to be. Each is just one iteration of humanity engaged in a broad society and we Americans are a peculiar bunch. We work hard, long hours whether it is at home or in a workplace and leave little time for enjoyment of the fruits of labor. Sometimes, like this weekend when I am between work at farms, we get time to ourselves to enjoy life lived how best we know. My story of Saturday is in four parts.
Predawn
My day begins around 4 a.m. and if I’m lucky, I got six or seven hours of sleep. I slept well Friday into Saturday waking only briefly to put in a load of laundry around 2 a.m. The routine was basic. Do stretching exercises, make coffee, say hello to spouse, go downstairs, and turn on the desktop computer to see what’s going on in the world. That’s not to say I didn’t already know. I use my mobile device in bed before turning on the light. Usually something new has happened since retiring the night before.
I wrote a series of tweets to better understand my memory of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act as it pertains to the false accusation it is a job killer. I recall local businessmen who said after the law went into effect they were in a position to add jobs but didn’t want to do so because they would have to provide health insurance per the ACA mandate. The assertion is the mandate killed these jobs and that idea got blown up into hyperbole of unprecedented proportions. Re-circulation of this idea is ongoing and rarely fact checked any more.
Businesses of a certain size should provide a health insurance benefit to employees or risk the possibility of being unable to recruit qualified staff. By defining the size at which to mandate health insurance, the law changed the business structure. In highly competitive local markets for landscapers, concrete workers, framers, heavy equipment operators and the like, employers faced a changed landscape. Operating on tight budgets, rather than embrace quality of life for employees they resisted change. The core problem lies in that the K-12 education system does a really poor job of preparing students to enter business. People carve out a niche, generate revenues and go out of business if they don’t properly manage risks or aren’t adequately capitalized. Small-scale operators I know are not educated in things we took for granted when I managed the profit and loss of a $12 million annual revenue transportation and logistics operation as part of a billion dollar corporation. The problem is not the ACA, or teachers. It is our education system doesn’t provide an adequate path for people to be successful owning and operating a business.
Pickle Fermentation
Outside
If there was no rain I water the garden shortly after sunrise. Without thinking it turned into weeding, then harvest and before I knew it the time was 11 a.m. The garden looks more like a weedy mess but inside there is abundance.
Before going outside I started soup to take for lunch at the home, farm and auto supply store, and mixed the brine for a batch of dill pickles.
I picked a box of kale for the library then went plot-to plot to collect what was ready. There were broccoli florets, leeks, onions and fairy tale eggplant in one. Jalapeno peppers, a bell pepper and cucumbers in the next. More broccoli and celery near the locust tree. Four kinds of tomatoes in the tomato patch. Basil is ready but I left it in the garden until I’m ready to make pesto.
Apples are sweet enough to eat out of hand, but not sweet enough to juice and ferment into apple cider vinegar. I picked the ripest for a batch of apple sauce. There are a lot of apples this year because of almost perfect pollination during spring. It should be a long apple season starting now.
I collected the harvest in a crate and placed it on the kitchen floor. There was another two hours of work cleaning the produce but that could wait.
Soup for Next Week’s Work Lunches
Short Trip
I try not to leave our property on weekends unless for work. Ours remains a car culture and we don’t have disposable income for shopping if we thought we had it before. Saturday I went to HyVee to pick up canned goods, pantry staples, organic bananas and Morningstar Farms frozen products we use. Organic celery is permanently on the shopping list although we have a lot of celery ripening in the garden. I picked three heads that morning so bought none at HyVee.
On the eight mile trip to town I noticed two sweet corn stands on Highway One.
One is the farm where we get most of our sweet corn, Rebal’s Sweetcorn. Supply was uncertain from their Saturday post:
It was tough picking this morning; we had to really search for the corn in this patch… we’ve got corn today, but it’s not a full load, so if you want it, try to get out here early. And, because of having to search to find the better ears, we might just let this one go and wait for the next. We’ve got 4 blocks (patches) coming up that look beautiful!!! The question is when they’ll be on… we’re checking them every day, so I’ll keep posting
They had plenty as I passed Southbound.
Lindsey Boerjan runs a seasonal road-side stand further south and was featuring sweetcorn and melons. I wrote an article about women farmers in the Sept. 22, 2015 Iowa City Press Citizen:
Lindsey Boerjan is a fifth-generation farmer living on the family-owned century farm where she grew up. She moved back in 2011 and farms alongside her aunt, uncle, husband and daughter, who run a beef cow and calf operation. To supplement income from beef sales, Boerjan raises chickens and operates a small community-supported agriculture project.
The CSA didn’t make it, although the road-side stand likely does better. I decided to stick with Rebal’s on my return trip.
A musician played for free will donations outside the entrance to HyVee. He seemed too young and inexperienced to be playing Folsom Prison Blues, although he was very musical.
Dinner Salad
Cooking
On arrival home I put away the groceries and started cleaning the morning harvest.
Leek stalks make a great vegetable broth base so I got out the large stainless steel pot. I added the leek leaves, broccoli stalks, a turnip — greens and root, kale and onion tops. I don’t usually salt vegetable broth and this time I didn’t add bay leaves. It cam out dark and flavorful — two and a half gallons.
Part of summer cooking is going through the ice box and making sure old stuff is used first. We have a broccoli abundance and need to do something soon with the gallon bags of florets. The freezer is almost full, so freezing more is not a good option.
I found some lettuce and decided to make a small salad and pizza for dinner. The salad is a work of art with two kinds of lettuce, kohlrabi, two kinds of tomatoes, cucumber, grated daikon radish, bell pepper, pickled jalapeno pepper, sugar snap peas and other items either from the farm or grown in our garden. Ironically I forgot to put some small broccoli florets on the salad.
I also made applesauce, salsa with tomato, garlic, jalapeno peppers and onion, and a cucumber salad of diced cucumbers dressed with home fermented apple cider vinegar, salt and pepper.
Our pizza process is to buy pizza blanks from the warehouse club and add toppings at home. Making our own pizza dough is no real work, but the convenience of a pre-made cheese pizza for $2.50 presents value. I added Kalamata olives and a diced red onion from the farm, then topped with Parmesan cheese. 15 minutes in a 425 degree oven plus a minute under the broiler and done.
This Morning
Everything on my list didn’t get done Saturday. I’m processing the vegetable broth in a water bath this morning and figuring out how to pack a summer’s worth of yard projects into today’s glorious summer weather. That is, I wrote stuff on my white board. Once I move outside into humanity and culture, I will likely forget about the plans and do what comes naturally.
When people think of local food, most have seasonal sweet corn and tomatoes in mind. That hasn’t changed much in years.
The quest for good-tasting food that does no harm has also been around for a long time. Organic food production came up in the early 20th Century as an alternative to the rise in mechanized, industrial farming.
An organic food production system developed, although there is less clarity about it today than there was a few years ago. Organic certification has contributed to confusion.
The Organic Foods Production Act of 1990 and the National Organic Program were game changers that created a new certification process and, importantly, a greater market for organic food. Sales of organic food more than doubled during the period 2006-2015, according to the Organic Trade Association, reaching $43.3 billion in 2015. In its quest to bring standards and a market, the well intentioned government program suffered abuse in the form of government lobbyists from moneyed interests who diluted the meaning of “USDA Organic” many of us found inspiring in the 1990s. Under Sonny Perdue, the 31st U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, further erosion of the law’s original intent and the organic standard is expected.
“It seems that uncertainty and dysfunction have overtaken the National Organic Standards Board and the regulations associated with the National Organic Program,” Senator Pat Roberts (R-Kansas), chairman of the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry, said recently according to the Washington Post. “These problems create an unreliable regulatory environment and prevent farmers that choose organic from utilizing advancements in technology and operating their business in an efficient and effective manner. Simply put, this hurts our producers and economies in rural America.”
Roberts statement is code for getting government regulations out of the way of large scale producers in the organic market. As the 2018 farm bill is crafted by the Congress, any meaningful regulation pertaining to organic standards is expected to be gutted by Trump Republicans.
What you see is not always what you get as organic food producers scale up to meet demand and work the system. Here are two recent examples:
Herbruck’s Poultry Ranch in Saranac, Michigan produces one in 10 organic eggs in the U.S. according to the Chicago Tribune. The linked article describes production processes indistinguishable from those of almost any Iowa confinement egg producer. Those eggs don’t seem organic despite assertions by the ranch. What does “organic” mean in this context. At a minimum, not what we expected.
In May, Peter Whoriskey of the Washington Post reported fraud in imported corn and soybeans. A large shipment of soybeans began as “regular” soybeans in Ukraine and changed to “USDA Organic” by the time it reached a California port, garnering an additional $4 million for the shipment because it was “organic.” Some doctored documents is all it took for a huge, fraudulent payday.
My perspective of organic food is from a backyard garden. Gardening is about changing one’s relationship with food as much as providing food for the table — process more than produce. Using organic practices comes naturally as gardeners are mindful of crop inputs that will land on the dinner plate. A common mistake is neglecting the social context of gardening. In most cases gardening includes family, fellow consumers, merchants, farmers and gardeners. A gardener has only slight intersection with government.
Once government got involved in organic food production a market became viable. That was a good thing for farmers who sought to make a living growing organic food. Organic food systems then merged toward commodification as they scaled to meet demand and that’s the sticky wicket.
An ability to increase organic food production without compromising organic standards has been difficult all along. When news stories raise doubt about the meaning of “organic food,” it’s one more burden for farmers to bear in a business where the challenges of producing organic food at a profit are substantial.
I work on farms that use organic practices and plan to resist compromise on organic standards in the next farm bill. If you care about what’s on your dinner plate, should too.
Yesterday I made the last 62 trays of soil blocks at Sundog Farm (Local Harvest CSA) and Wild Woods Farm.
Totaling 946 trays or roughly 110,000 individual seedling soil blocks, I made more than in any previous season. Adding Wild Woods Farm this year is the reason for an increase in this specialized work.
Not only did I produce practical farm products, I learned to be a better vegetable grower by observing farm practices and talking to people about grower issues. Sunday was the last day of the season. God willing and the creek don’t rise I’ll do it again next year.
Next is some summer respite before beginning work at Wilson’s Orchard in August. The garden harvest has begun so there will be plenty of work to keep me busy on weekends.
This year was the nicest crop of turnips I’ve grown. Here’s a bowl I prepped for storage in the ice box.
A few years back I started planting turnips for the greens to make canned vegetable broth. With this year’s abundance I’ve already put up about ten gallons of broth using earlier green vegetables.
I use turnips as an ingredient in soups and stir fry, and will occasionally mash one with other root vegetables as a side dish. I’m not yet to the Julia Child level of turnipery but can see it from here.
Saturday was harvest day and this year’s abundance is beginning to cut the grocery bill ($23 this week). I grow other stuff besides turnips. As a friend recently described it we have something of a kalepocalypse going on here. 42 plants was way too many.
There are other lessons from the garden, but no time for them now. I have to water and weed the garden before heading to the farms for the last day of soil blocking. They are starting crops for the fall share today.
What could break the back of the local food system? Lack of affordable individual health insurance policies.
Finding and funding health insurance is a key pivot point for local food farmers when considering remaining in business. If they can’t afford health insurance, they may reconsider operations, take a job off the farm to get coverage, or even give up farming altogether. It’s that important.
Politicizing health care raised the level of uncertainty in a profession where uncertainty — about crops, weather, pests and customers — is de rigueur. Failure of our government to adequately address health care for everyone may be one too many burdens for small farm operators to bear.
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act has done a lot of good. Created in a political environment hostile to change, Democrats held hundreds of hours of public hearings and adopted more than 160 amendments proposed by Republicans, according to Minnesota Senator Al Franken. They held meetings with stake holders from every aspect of the country’s health care system to gain perspectives and buy in. Despite the law’s flaws, millions more people gained health insurance coverage, including farmers. The farmers I know have either been covered by the ACA or considered it as an option.
The contrast between Democratic creation of the law and the Republican efforts to repeal and replace it couldn’t be more stark. Crafted in secrecy, Senate Republicans eschewed public discussion that was the hallmark of the Democratic process while writing their new law. From whom are they taking counsel? We suspect but simply don’t know.
What we do know is small farm operators require health care and if they can’t afford an individual health insurance policy it may break their will. The uncertainty created in Washington, D.C. about health care has not been good for them. It hasn’t been good for any of us who believe sustaining a strong local food system is important.
Ambient temperature hit 91 degrees Sunday, about 20 degrees above historical average. The heat continues, drying the topsoil, creating want of rain.
An idea once held — the garden should be planted by Memorial Day — is outdated. As early crops come in, others will be planted. What’s more significant to yield than planting time is weeding, mulching — and with the heat, irrigation.
This year’s garden is four varieties of kale, sugar snap peas, radishes, beets, eight varieties of tomatoes, broccoli, three varieties of bell peppers, three varieties of hot peppers, winter and summer squash, basil, cabbage, collards, turnips, two varieties of celery, two varieties of carrots, six of lettuce, spinach, bok choy, daikon radishes, potatoes, onions, leeks, three cucumbers and of a pear and two three apple trees laden with fruit.
Our garden, combined with bartered shares in two CSA farms, will provide plenty of vegetables this summer. We should be set for a productive season.
Last night was what I had hoped for our kitchen garden.
I spot-watered plants that needed relief from the baking sun. Picking a turnip, I ate the small root and saved the greens. I picked a leaf of collards and headed inside to make this dish for supper.
Greens Hot Plate
Add high smoke point oil to a frying pan on high heat. Once the oil is hot add two cups thinly sliced Vidalia onions and season with salt, stirring constantly. (A pinch of red pepper flake would be a nice addition, allowing it to cook for a minute in the oil, but our cooking is capsaicin free until the finished dish reaches the table).
Prep greens — collards, kale, bok choy and turnip — by removing the thick stem and veins and tearing the leaves into bite-sized bits. Thinly slice the stems and add them to the onion mixture. Once the onions become translucent, add fresh garlic if you have it, although granulated works.
De-glaze the pan with vegetable broth. Stir and add the greens.
Add a quarter cup of vegetable broth and cover the pan to create steam. Once volume reduces in size to one third, remove the lid and mix the ingredients together. Re-season. Add a tablespoon of lemon juice. Continue gentle stirring until the leaves are tender.
In a large dinner bowl place a cup of warm rice. Using tongs, cover the rice with the greens mixture. Finish with thinly sliced spring onion, a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil and feta cheese. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Serve hot.
Sunrise is in half an hour and the high ambient temperature is expected upper 80s to low 90s this afternoon.
I want to get as much garden work as possible finished before noon.
That means only a few minutes in front of the computer screen then outdoors.
I got a copy of the voting records from the May 30 special election in Solon. It can be a time suck and while very interested I set it aside to focus on the garden and other work at hand.
Yesterday at the home, farm and auto supply store I wrangled a squeeze chute. It is a large machine designed to hold cattle and horses stable, without injuring them, while they are examined, branded or given vaccines or other veterinary treatments. We sell only a couple of these expensive, specialized pieces of equipment each year. My objective was to take it out of the semi-trailer, reload it on a couple of pallets and traverse the bumpy parking lot from one corner of the store to the opposing one. I drove the forklift very slowly. Once in the outdoors display area, I lined it up with two others and locked it down. This is part of the “farm” aspect of our retail outlet. I managed the process without damaging the squeeze chute.
It was a work week looking toward the weekend. Now that Saturday morning is here it’s time to get outside. Here’s hoping for a good day in my kitchen garden.
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