Three Days Left to WIN while Celebrating Women

Jamie Leeds' oyster happy hour at Hank's Oyster Bar earns a big gold star in my book!

The October 31st contest deadline is fast approaching!  Go check out my Bite Book, then join Smorgie and make your own Bite Book celebrating women in the culinary world.  Who am I missing?  What female chefs, mixologists, pastry chefs, and restaurant owners do I really need to check out?

When you’ve made your Smorgie bite book, go back to my original post and leave a comment with a link to your bite book (e.g., http://www.smorgie.com/1525) for a chance to win a $25 gift certificate to Tracy O’Grady’s Willow in Arlington!

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Time for Fried Green Tomatoes

Please advise me if you think I’m wrong, but I don’t think these tomatoes are going to ripen before frost:

I planted this heirloom tomato plant kind of late in the season after most of my other tomatoes failed.  But it took too long to grow big, and now these green tomatoes are just hanging around.  And even though I think of fried green tomatoes as a summertime food, there’s not a lot of other ways to make use of the inevitable green tomatoes left over at the end of the season.  I like recipes, like Gourmet’s, that use cornflakes for added crunch.  So unless I see a little color improvement on these tomatoes when I’m out in the garden again this weekend, I’m just going to pick the green fruits and have a nice little fry.

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October Delights

Alas, a trip out of town and a bad cold and life in general got in the way of blogging, but I’m back now.  🙂  After a couple weeks away from my garden I wasn’t sure what I would find when I went out there this morning.  But wouldn’t you know, my garden is still producing amazing things!

Maybe the most amazing was a small number of delicious little Tri-Star strawberries.  I gave that big one to my dad, who happens to be in town right now, and it happens to be his birthday.  Happy birthday, dad!

But there were other great things to harvest today as well.  I got almost a pound of string beans, and I think I’ll get a few more next week as well.  And I harvested the last of my Corno Di Toro peppers:

I roasted them in the oven, but haven’t used them yet.  Hmm, not sure what to do with them, but it’s never a bad idea to have delicious, sweet roasted peppers on hand.

As it gets colder out, I find I appreciate my garden’s produce even more.  I should have chard and kale and arugula through November and maybe even into December.  What a treat!

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Runty bean seeds – worth saving?

My fall beans are coming in now, but back a month or two ago I let some of my summer beans stay on the vines until they dried up.  My intent was to save the seeds and plant them next year, saving myself a few bucks in seed costs.  And since the variety, Soleil French Filet, is an open-pollinated variety, I knew at the very least that the seeds would breed true (using the seeds of hybrids can give weird results, they say).

The problem is that the bean seeds I saved are looking kind of sad.  Here they are on the right, compared with some extra seed-packet seeds on the left:

If I plant my runty saved seeds, are the resulting plants going to be runty as well?  The seed contains nutrients that feed the sprout before it can absorb nutrients from the soil on its own, so I wonder how much a somewhat diminished nutrient packet would stunt early growth.  Hmm…  Maybe I’ll do an experiment next year and do one row with the saved seeds and one row with a new packet.

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