A culinary experience or just another supper?

The garden is slowly coming to an end. Everything is a bit late this year and not everything is growing that well, either. I planted 4 Cherry Tomato plants, (my wife loves those. I'm planting them just for her), 6 Super Fantastic and 12 Roma tomato plants. This year, I don’t have as many tomato plants as I usually have. It is a lot of work and we can only eat so many tomatoes. Mind you, there is nothing better than a Ham and Tomato sandwich with a slice of fresh picked home-grown tomato. I like the European type rye bread. It is not so soft. We have enough tomatoes for the two of us, probably more than enough. I’ve been harvesting cherry tomatoes and a few Super Fantastic. The Roma aren’t doing so well this year. We use them to make Salsa.

My peppers are plentiful but still green and yellow. They still have a ways to go until they are red. That’s when I pick them. The only red ones I already have are the hot Hungarian Peppers. I have over hundred pepper plants. Half of them I bought and half of them I started from seeds in my basement in the winter. We love peppers.

 

We’ve also been eating zucchini, fried and stuffed with meat and rice. Delicious. My beets are quite large already. My wife made one batch of Borscht, but with the rest we’ll wait another couple of weeks until she makes more Borscht and she cans a whole bunch for herself. I don’t eat them canned. I don’t care much for beets except for in Borscht. Somehow, they taste different. My wife loves them and she doesn’t mind that I don’t eat her canned beets.

I planted 18 plants of Peaches and Cream corn. I started them in the basement. They are a disappointment this year. We ate a few cobs, but even small they tasted starchy and not sweet. A farmer told me I should wait longer and let them ripen. I did that. Yesterday we boiled 2 cobs for 3 minutes. It was worse than ever. Starchy. I think next year I'll buy my corn in the store.

Today we had Swiss Chard with mashed potatoes, eggs and wieners. You can’t get this kind of food in a restaurant. To make a supper for two takes a huge pail full of Swiss Chard. I used to grow Spinach, but Spinach shoots out too fast when it gets hot outside. Swiss Chard doesn’t do that. It lasts longer in the garden. Of course, this year we had a couple of deer help themselves to my Swiss Chard in the Spring. It grew back, but only  one of the patches, the Rhubarb type. It has red stems.  The ‘Bright Lights’ didn’t come back anymore, but we had enough Swiss Chard for four meals.

My wife strips the leaves from the stems, after she washes the Swiss Chard. Then she boils the leaves for about 10 minutes until they are tender. She drains the water and chops them with a knife. Then she fries up chopped onions with margarine and flower. She mixes that with the chopped Swiss Chard. We eat it with fried eggs, wieners, (European ones) and mashed potatoes. We mix some Maggi (Soya Sauce) into the Swiss Chard to give it more taste. A little bit of mustard for the wiener. Like I said, you can’t get that in a restaurant. It would be too expensive to make because it takes a lot of Swiss Chard to make a meal. I usually have a beer to wash everything down. It’s a culinary experience.  I’m getting hungry again just writing about it.

Here is a picture what it looks like on the plate: