Autumn is here

It's noticeably cooler, leaves are cascading, spreading color across the grass. Geese practicing their precision formation, crying in the wind. Winter is coming.

This time of year is also canning time. For the next 10 days, it's tomato heaven around here. Am doing 12 quarts at a time in the water bath. It takes a while for them to cook down so it's possible to stage the process and be able to accomplish other things while they cook.

Here are some photos:



The tomatoes seem to be an heirloom variety called Oxheart. They are almost solid meat and cook up beautifully.



These are almost ready to go. The foam is changing color, turning darker, and they have thickened considerably.


The finished product. The fruit kept its color with no added ingredients, salt or anything else.

I have the last 30 pounds of maters on the stove, cooking. The first two batches were around 25 pounds and the extra 5 was just enough that I had to get a second stock pot for the excess. I am "guesstimating" that I might get as many as 16 quarts from this batch. Have another 2 bushel coming this week so will continue with this. She offered another 4 bushel in the weeks to come and I may take her up on it. (We need around 124 quarts of tomatoes to get us through winter as we use a LOT of them.) 100 pounds of tomatoes for $40 is one hell of a deal and well worth the money.

Have spoken to a number of people over the last week who can't imagine doing anything like canning tomatoes. "Why don't you just buy them? It's a lot easier." Well, yeah, I suppose it is but I get something from doing this. Not just wonderful, fresh-tasting produce in the depths of winter but some kind of personal satisfaction. Like many home canners, I take pride in the fact that I can do this, do it well, and do it quickly. (I also take just pride in the fact that over the 30+ years I have been doing this I have had only about 5 jars that didn't seal and only one that broke in the pressure canner.)

I started quite young, learning the process, in my mother's kitchen. Back then, if you didn't grow it and put it up yourself you were likely to get darned hungry by the end of winter. We did tomatoes, beans, beets, froze corn, made jelly... all that kind of old-timey stuff. Mom didn't really enjoy the process, though. It was a matter of survival and it had to be done. Dad liked it better than Mom and he ended up being drafted on weekends.

Have finished the pickling, too. We don't use a lot of pickles and, since nobody but me eats sauerkraut, I don't bother with that. We don't use a lot of jams or jellies so I don't bother with that, either. It's as cost efficient to just buy the stuff at Aldi's.

Chicken Vesuvio

Another standby. This is a slightly simplified version which works nicely for me when it's been a busy day. Or when I'm totally disgusted with the world.
This will serve around 4 people as a main.

4 1/2 pound chicken, quartered and backbone removed
salt/pepper
1 T dry oregano
1 tsp garlic powder
olive oil, as needed for browning
2 pounds russet potatoes, each cut into 6ths.

6 large garlic cloves, peeled and quartered
1/2 tsp (minimum) red pepper flakes
1/2 c (as needed) chicken broth

1 C frozen peas, thawed
fresh parsley, chopped for garnish

Oven to 450.
Salt and pepper chicken pieces. Sprinkle oregano and garlic powder on chicken.
Heat oil in heavy braising pan.
Saute potatoes until golden brown.
Remove potatoes, add chicken to braising pan and brown on all sides. (I put bacon weights on the chicken to make sure all the skn gets browned.) Add cloves garlic and red pepper, stir until aroma is released.
Return potatoes to pan. Remove pan from heat and stir in broth. Return pan to heat and bring to boil.

Cover pot tightly, move to oven and bake until chicken is fully cooked. Add peas to pot, recover and cook for around 5 minutes until peas are done.

Serve, garnished with peas, potatoes and parsley. Pour sauce around chicken on plates.

Good stuff.

Since I discovered that there were no potatoes in the house, I ended up using canned new potatoes. This made it necessary to change things around a bit. I browned the chicken first, then deglazed the pan with a little chicken broth. Cooked that down and added the canned taters. Browned them up nicely and set them aside. Added a little more chicken broth and the garlic cloves and pepper flakes. Stirred until aroma was released and removed the garlic. (Since my chicken was about 1/2 again as large as called for I figured the cooking time would need to be lengthened so I increased the amount of broth to 1 cup.) Put the broth in the pan, brought it to a boil, added the chicken pieces and stuck the garlic down into the broth around the meat. Covered it and put it in a 425 degree oven for an hour. Removed the pan, added the browned potatoes, recovered and returned to the oven for 30 minutes. Pulled the pan partway out of the oven, lifted lid and dumped in the peas. Slid cover back on and let cook for another 10 minutes.
Removed pan from oven, put chicken on a platter, peas and potatoes in bowls and set them aside under a towel. Returned the pan to the cooktop and cooked and stirred the sauce down to a 1/2 cup.
The intensity of flavor we got using this variation we found to be a real "wow" factor.