Got shoes, got tomatoes

I didn't go very far in my search for shoes this morning.  An anonymous commenter suggested I go to Walmart and buy a pair of Dr. Scholls.  Got to Walmart, tried them on, bought them.  Oh, I'm not done with my search for the perfect pair of shoes, but these are much more comfortable than the New Balance shoes I've been suffering with for months.  I figured for thirty bucks, I'd give them a try.  I'm keeping my list of shoe recommendations for future reference.  
There's something else I've been looking for:  flannel pajamas.  Not that there aren't plenty of them around, but good grief!  Since when do people pay twenty to thirty dollars for flannel pajamas?  
J. C. Penny has a lot of stuff on clearance today, so we went there; the cheapest marked-down flannels they had were $16.  I refuse to pay more than $10, so I may very well end up sleeping in sweats before this winter is over.  
I did get a coat worth the money, though.  Cliff said he's tired of looking at that long, red coat I've worn for three years, so he helped me pick out a new one.  If you need a coat, this is definitely the time to buy one.    


On to the subject of tomatoes:  My garden really let me down last summer, most of the tomatoes rotting on the vines before they got up to any decent size.  I didn't have enough to can, but I was able to try something new with the few extra tomatoes I managed to save.  I washed them, cut out the stems, put them in gallon bags, and froze them.  To use them I just immerse them in water for a little while and the skins come right off; they are then ready to be used in soups and stews.  The only drawback is that until you get them thawed, you don't really know how much you have.  I'm getting to be a pretty good judge of how many it takes to make two cups full, though.  
My tomato patch also redeemed itself by providing me with fresh tomatoes clear through November.  All my efforts weren't in vain.  

Steak

Until the last couple of years, I have been a failure at cooking steaks.  It all goes back to the days when I wanted my meat well-done; if there was the tiniest bit of pink in the middle of the meat, forget it.  I've since learned that steak well-done isn't usually a good idea.  

Even if I had been able to do a good job of cooking steak, who can afford it?  So I've stuck with roasts, something economical that isn't so easy to ruin.  

When we took Sir Loin to the butcher shop, we had him mostly put into ground beef; the only steaks we saved were the fillets, because they are tender no matter what.  You see, we had never had such a young, grass-fed animal butchered.  He hadn't been fed any grain, and we were afraid the meat would be tough (remember, I didn't know how to cook steak anyhow).  Cliff had the best roasts saved, but mostly we had a freezer full of ground beef.  That isn't a bad thing:  ground beef is versatile; you can make meat loaf, chili, tacos, stuffed peppers... the possibilities are endless.  

Once we tasted the steak we had saved from Sir Loin, we realized we had made a mistake.  That grass- and milk-fed steer was as tender and tasty as could be.  

So when we butchered Clyde this year, we saved lots of steaks and roasts.  

A year ago, with the help of the Internet, I managed to cook some steak without ruining it.  Oh, baby!  I closed my eyes and thought I was at Outback.  It just goes to show that you are never too old to learn.  

Of course, those steaks were fillets, the most tender cut in existance.  Today I will branch out.  

I'm cooking sirloin steak.  

From what I'm seeing on the Internet, it can be cooked just like fillets; I'm a little concerned at the words, "Sirloin steak is a cut that's easy to overcook."  

One recipe suggests using a meat mallet on it, but the other recipes make me think that shouldn't be necessary.  

I found a marinade that I'm going to use; perhaps that will insure tenderness.  

I have harped all summer on my lousy tomato crop.  While the vines went wild, the tomatoes produced were few and far between.  Most of them rotted before they could ripen.  There weren't enough to can, although I did freeze some whole, in baggies.  I've always heard you could do this, but had never tried it.  It works like a charm, and is easy to do.  I've used some of them in taco soup.  

A couple of weeks ago, with frost threatening, I brought in some green tomatoes I planned on frying.  Before I could get around to using them, though, they ripened, right there on the counter.  I tasted one, and it was just like a fresh summer tomato.  I brought more inside, and we are still eating delicious tomatoes.  It's good to know those vines are finally giving me back a little something for my efforts.  

    
And in non-food-related news, my granddaughter Monica turned sixteen yesterday; to celebrate the day, she went and took her driver's test... and PASSED!

Oh, about my tomatoes

I think there might be one tomato plant left of those I started in the house.  It isn't cutworms getting them, after all; I only wish I knew what it was.  Something is eating all the leaves off the tiny plants... every leaf!... and leaving only the stem standing.  The expensive plants I bought, so far, are faring OK.  Perhaps God is telling me I don't need to can tomatoes this year, since I'm having surgery.  Whatever.  Aldi's canned tomatoes are still forty-nine cents a can, so I'll just buy those; the way prices are skyrocketing everywhere, I'd better hurry up and get them.  
Jody is doing fine; hopefully she has adjusted to the change, from real milk at her previous home to milk replacer here.  Everything looks as it should this morning, and she ate grain and then frolicked and bucked and played for about five minutes.  
In my early days of calf raising I used raw eggs and Pepto-Bismal and Kaopectate and all sorts of other home remedies and human medicines, when scours hit.  When I began raising twenty-five to fifty calves per year, though, I started using more modern remedies.  I get really good anti-scours pills from the vet, and I buy electrolyte solutions to mix with water and give them in place of milk when they're sick; if I'd stayed with the home remedies, half my calves would have died.  As it worked out, the only calves I ever lost through the years were the ones that were already sick when I got them (from a sale barn).  Sale barn calves are a risky business.  Jody came to me straight from a dairy farm.  

The highlight of my day

The older I get, the harder it is for me to get through winter with good grace.  I used to milk several cows year-around, which meant I was outside doing chores for a total of two to four hours a day even in the bitterest weather.  These days I leave it up to Cliff to feed Bonnie-the-Jersey-cow; after all, he's going outside anyhow.  
We do take our daily walk in most all kinds of weather; since we got our Muck boots, the snow doesn't stop us, and we know how to dress for cold weather.  That walk is the one thing that forces me outside on cold, blustery days, and honestly I do it more because I want to keep Cliff's ticker in good shape than for myself.  
Once flowers start growing and I have a little garden planted, going outside as soon as it's daylight is the highlight of my day.  It's exciting to see living things grow and bloom and change day by day.  
It's funny how, three years ago, I started gardening again just for the fun of it; now prices have risen so much that the garden is almost becoming a necessity.  It's still fun, though.  
I regret that I can't raise heirloom tomatoes; they have the best flavor, but they are terribly susceptible to blight.  My favorite canning tomato varieties used to be Big Boy and Rutgers.  No, they're not heirloom tomatoes, but they are also not blight tolerant.  I also used to love Ponderosa for slicing; it's an heirloom tomato, I believe, rather pinkish in color.  These days I stick with Legend, Celebrity, or Jet Star.  None of these has flavor that compares with my old favorites, but I do what I must to even have tomatoes at all.
I need to have a talk with Jennifer of Hidden Hills Farm, to find out when the best time is to start tomato plants inside.  When I can do that, I'll  have something growing, and that will be a boost to my spirits.  I envy people who have lovely house plants, because I'm sure that brightens up their winter days.  Unfortunately, I forget to water house plants and they die of thirst.  It's all I can do to tend to my tomato seedlings; last year I didn't do so well remembering them.        
Yes, from spring through fall the garden and my flowers are the highlight of each day.  
In winter?  My first cup of coffee in the morning is the highlight, and things pretty much go downhill from there.  
Come on, springtime!


P.S.  While ordering my twenty Legend tomato seeds, I found an improved variety of Rutgers that's supposed to be more disease resistant.  I'm going to give it a try!

Here comes winter

It's harder for me to come up with subjects for my blog, this time of year, because there's less going on around here.  The garden is a thing of the past, although we're still eating tomatoes I brought in before the frost.
  

They aren't pretty.  In fact, I didn't have a pretty tomato all year.  They all developed splits.  However, they taste fine, even the ones I brought in green that are gradually ripening.  We don't subscribe to a newspaper any more, so I didn't have enough paper to wrap all the green ones; that's what you're supposed to do with them. They're still better than store-bought tomatoes.    
Cliff plowed up a new spot for me, and that's where I'll put all the vegetables that are susceptible to blight next year.  The experts suggest a three-year rotation, and I believe I have my rotation figured out.  
Cliff wasn't happy with the performance of the plow, which he bought to use with the 550 Oliver.  He adjusted it every which way and it still wasn't turning over the soil as well as it should have.  He thinks it needs new shares; I believe the main problem was that the ground is hard as a rock from no rainfall for a month.  Perhaps it's a combination of both factors.  

good stuff

Remember how concerned I was, back in early-to-mid-July, that I might not get any tomatoes at all?  As it turned out, I got plenty to can, and we've had all we've wanted to eat fresh.  

The plants look awful, but I'm still getting all the tomatoes we can use, even though they aren't the prettiest tomatoes I ever raised.  

Boy, do those plants look awful.  But I brought in tomatoes this morning...

and these should be ready tomorrow.  
Yesterday I turned Bonnie and Clyde out into the big pasture.  After Cliff went to work, I went to check on them; they were in one of Bonnie's favorite hideaways.  

Clyde was lying down, but when Iris and I went around the tree so I could take a picture from a different angle, he got up.

And huddled up next to his mommy.  This is the kind of behavior that will keep him safe.  They came up to the lot last night and I shut them in; this morning I let Bonnie in the barn to see if she needed milking.  One quarter appeared to be pretty full; I milked almost a gallon out of that one quarter!  
One thing I haven't mentioned is that Bonnie developed mastitis in the off front quarter (by "off" I mean on the side I don't normally milk); that quarter is pretty much not giving anything now.  If I were a dairyman I would be upset.  As it is, Bonnie still gives enough milk for three or four calves.  Besides, I'm thinking she will be at less risk for milk fever next time, since this cuts her production by 25%.  

Yummy things

I was in the mood for some "peachy" dessert this morning and ended up making this cobbler.  Now, I really prefer the kind of cobbler my mom and grandma used to make, which was more of a square or oblong pie; you know, with top and bottom pie crust.  Unfortunately, that would mean we'd be consuming several tablespoons of shortening with each piece, and we don't need that.  
I thought about making peach crisp, but in my experience the crispness doesn't last.  It's only "crisp" right after you make it.  
So I made this kind of cobbler with the shortcake topping; it'll be wonderful with just a little vanilla ice cream.  
Because Cliff gets up at 10 A.M. and leaves at 2:30, it's hard to squeeze in breakfast and dinner; often he'll have just a tiny bit of breakfast to tide him over.  But sometimes, when I am planning a more elaborate dinner, he gets dinner almost as soon as he's out of bed.  I cooked one of the roasts from our butchered steer overnight in the crock pot (it's unbelievably tender).  This always leaves lots of tasty juices with which to make gravy.  I peeled some potatoes from the garden, and I will cook some sort of vegetable to go with this.  
We'll be eating by 10:30.  The worst thing about having dinner for breakfast is that we take our walk after breakfast; we will have some full bellies, walking in the heat of the day.  It's really hard to keep up the daily walk when we don't get out there until 11:30 with temperatures already hitting 90 degrees.  
I have good news from the garden front:

Although my tomato plants are succumbing to blight, it looks like I'll be able to can a few before they're all gone.  There are enough in this picture, I think, for fourteen quarts.  Of course some of them have to ripen a bit first.
I also have bad news on the garden front:  I found a squash bug on the zucchini plant that is almost ready to produce.  I sprayed, but that hasn't helped much in the past.  Oh well, I get an "E" for effort, right?

Garden stuff

I have had some outstanding successes in the garden this year.  I shouldn't let my life be ruined by the fact that my favorite vegetable, the tomato, has broken my heart by running off with Mr. Blight.  

The Bodacious sweet corn, for instance; this is my second planting; I'd say we'll be eating corn-on-the-cob again in a week or so.  Corn planted later in the season tends to be awfully wormy, so I went out this morning to use a trick my daddy told me about.  

As soon as the silks appear, I put a pinch of Sevin dust on each ear.  If it were to rain in the next day or two, I'd probably go out and re-apply the Sevin.  

Remember the zucchini plant that was ruined by squash bugs?  It tried to resurrect itself, but the new incarnation isn't doing much.   

My recently planted zucchini, on the other hand, looks great and is forming blooms.  I'm not getting my hopes up, though.  I may even put up a sign saying, "Welcome, squash bugs; enjoy your new digs."  

Because I laugh at pain.  

I have eggplants galore.  

As long as I occasionally apply a little Sevin dust, green beans have never let me down.  

This one hill of cucumbers is producing far more cukes than we'll ever eat.  

And now, we'll talk about those tomatoes.  

These tomatoes are ripening prematurely because blight has almost killed the mother plant.  I may can a few of them, although I really don't have the heart.  They are pathetic little things, misshapen and splitting. 

 

Some plants aren't as "blighty" as others, and I have hopes of getting a few larger, prettier tomatoes for the table from these before blight overtakes them completely.  

So there you have it.  And how does your garden grow?

One thing and another

The Oregon guy posted a link to my blog yesterday, and that link brought me lots of new visitors. One lady spent hours reading back through my archives. Cliff said, "Sounds like she needs to get a life."

Obviously he doesn't appreciate what a fascinating person I am.

I explained to my husband who that guy in Oregon is, and how I came to be reading his blog. Since Cliff was on the laptop, I went over and found that blog for him. Bad mistake. He got to an entry where Guy talks about Macs, asking why they should cost so much more than other computers. There were comments on that entry that Cliff had NO business reading, since he knows I'm about to buy a Mac. Thanks a lot, Guy. Of course, I'll still be getting that Mac Mini; since Cliff's spending a small fortune on that old Oliver tractor that's too big for him to use on our place, I have some leverage here.

Back to the traffic on my blog: The most daily hits I ever get is when I post a link on Tractor Tales that I think the group might find interesting. My stats will double or even triple on those days. Which is really strange, because only about a couple dozen people usually post on that board. Evidently there are hundreds of lurkers there.

This morning I removed the cages and T-posts from the blight-riddled tomato plants, both in my garden and in what's left of Cliff's garden; it's a job I wouldn't normally relish, but with my Ipod playing, it was a whole different experience. I have it on "shuffle", and there's no way I could get bored with songs by such a variety of artists playing. Sometimes I'm surprised by a song I've forgotten putting on there.

I found enough decent tomatoes for me and Cliff to have a couple of BLT's, our last for the summer.

And that's how things stand today.

My tomato and pepper experiment

The instructions say that once the seedlings have developed their first "true leaves", I should put them outside during the day to harden them off. All the tomatoes are ready for this move, but not all the peppers. In fact, some of the peppers are just now starting to germinate. I may start putting them outside for awhile anyhow.

So far, all the little plants seem to be doing well. They look a bit leggy, but that's to be expected.

Hope arrived in the mail today

Indeed, hope came in the form of herb seeds for my spring garden.

I was making spaghetti sauce one day recently and wondered why I'm not raising all those spices myself, rather than buying them. Now, my green thumb waxes and wanes; so I wouldn't bet the farm on whether any of these tiny seeds makes it to adulthood. But it's worth the price I paid for the uplift my spirit received when I opened the package. Stay tuned to see what happens.

Heartened by the promise of a garden, I Googled for some variety of tomato that is blight-resistant and found a relative newcomer developed in, of all places, Oregon. Check it out. Notice that it's not blight-free; nobody has come up with a tomato that's guaranteed not to get blight. But it appears to be the most resistant of any tomato thus far.

Celebrity tomatoes have performed pretty well for me in the past, and those will likely be my main choice when I go to buy plants. But I think I'll order a packet of Legend seeds, just for the fun of it.

Spring lies ahead, and that's change we can believe in.

Hamburger Stew

Let's face it, with temperatures hovering near the freezing point, it's time for hearty soups and stews. A local small-town grocery had ground beef for $1.69 a pound; I used a pound-and-a-half of it for hamburger stew. I've blogged about this before, so I won't go into great detail. But it always amazes me how many meals can come from a small amount of ground beef when you use it for stew.

Any form of vegetable stew gives me an opportunity to find veggies in the freezer that need to be used; I just toss them in the mix, and nobody's the wiser. At some time in the past, I thought I had a hankering for Lima beans. After serving some of them with a meal, I realized I wasn't such a big fan of Lima beans and the half-empty bag lay languishing in the freezer. Yesterday, though, they made a great addition to my hamburger stew.



The neighbor who always gives us fish to eat was getting his garden ready for the freeze that's forecast, so Cliff went over there and picked some tomatoes, both green ones and ripe ones. I skinned some of those ripe tomatoes and added them to the stew. Yum! (Cliff came back with more fish, too.)

My daughter's family ate stew with us Saturday. Cliff and I had stew that evening. I fixed something different yesterday at lunch, but we had stew for supper. And there's still a couple of servings left. No, we're not tired of it yet.

Because there's also corn bread left, I asked Cliff what he thought about my getting some cooked beans out of the deep freeze for today. He thought that was a grand idea, until I remembered the bacon I bought at the local grocer's when I got the ground beef... it was "buy one, get one free". And I saw those ripe tomatoes on the table.


So the beans went back into the freezer... they hadn't started to thaw... and so did the corn bread.

We're having BLT's today! And who knows, we might have fried green tomatoes tomorrow.

By the way, I'm learning to Twitter. Haaaaaaa!

Amazing, imperfect tomatoes

I had not raised tomatoes for perhaps three years. I got tired of blight taking the plants, just about the time they started bearing. This year my husband declared he was tired of never having a good tomato, and set out to raise some for himself.

"Fine," I told him. "Just don't be disappointed when blight gradually kills all your plants from the ground up."

"Well," he answered, "If we only get one tomato, it'll be that much."

I told him he could try fungicide on the plants, although it hadn't helped me much in the past.

We've been eating tomatoes from his vines now for over two months. In that two months, we have perhaps received two inches of rain, total. The plants haven't been watered. I don't know why or how they're alive. They look a bit haggard, but they're still bearing. I'd take pictures of the plants, but it's 4:30 A.M. and they're behind our rental trailer-house. I don't want to scare our renter. If I waited until daylight, I'd be out of the mood to do this post.

I've shared our abundance with my sister, canned a few jars, and made spaghetti sauce and chili using fresh tomatoes, all summer. At this point, the tomatoes look pretty sad. They're cracked and blemished, and they won't keep for over two days because those flawed spots rot pretty fast.

When I slice these babies, I end up throwing away more than I keep (the next-door neighbor's chickens are glad to eat the bad parts). But the taste is unbeatable!

The granddaughters were here yesterday and I made one of their favorites, tuna-noodle casserole. Nothing goes better with that dish than fresh, sliced tomatoes.

Ditto on Pioneer Woman's Chicken Spaghetti, which I made last Sunday.

Any day now, those plants could wither and die from lack of water. But while they last, we are enjoying the tomatoes my husband raised.



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Now playing: Bing Crosby - Sweet Leilani
via FoxyTunes

tomatoes

Joanna asked for pictures of the tomatoes. Because she's special, I'll show them:

The plants...

The tomatoes. So far, so good.

CLIFF'S GARDEN

I've had big gardens in my time, as evidenced by the one in the background of the above picture; that's my daughter, on the right, with the kids who lived next door back in the early-to-mid 1980's . I've canned hundreds of quarts of green beans throughout my married life. Tomatoes, too. I've frozen sweet corn until the freezer was overflowing.

Then I got a job, and it just wasn't so much fun any more. I always had tomatoes and a few pepper plants, though.

Then the blight came along, nasty fungus that it is. It seemed as though each year, my tomato season got shorter and shorter as the blight killed off my plants a little earlier in the growing season. And last year, I simply called it quits.

"We'll buy tomatoes," Cliff said.

Trouble is, we couldn't really find good ones to buy. My friend Carol gave me quite a few, enough to can, even. But it isn't like having them right outside, fresh from the vine, when you need a tomato.

This year Cliff decided to have a garden. Just a few things, you know. Especially tomatoes.

Here, you see one of his tomato plants. That largest tomato is about the size of a quarter. I told him that ideally, a person would remove those little fruits so the plant could establish a good root system... but that it wouldn't matter all that much if he left them (since blight will likely get them anyhow... I'm a real positive thinker, ain't I?).

I suggested to Cliff that he might try spraying the plants with an anti-fungal stuff regularly; maybe that will stave off the blight, although from what I have read, it's a slim chance.

Here's one of Cliff's bell pepper plants, blooming merrily in the rain.

The mustard greens are almost ready to eat. I remember what a pain it is to check all those little curly edges for bugs as you wash the leaves.

Yesterday I actually managed to find four radishes, which Cliff had with his dinner.