Purple Hull Pea Runners, Broccoli up - August 18, 2020

 

Coming up with something for supper every day is such a pain.  

We had a bowl of about 12 nice tomatoes on the kitchen table yesterday, and I wanted to come up with something to do with them that did not involve canning.  When I was a kid, my mother's weekly grocery shopping almost always included a can of okra & tomatoes.  Somehow, the okra was never slimy, but always semi-crisp.  Since there was okra in the garden, I decided to try home-made okra and tomatoes.

I searched the internet for recipes.  The one I chose called for slicing the okra on a steep angle and searing it in a screaming hot skillet for a couple of minutes to reduce the slime.  The recipe said to let the okra cool for a bit before adding it to the tomatoes.  

I could not resist sneaking a bite of the okra as it cooled.  It was slightly brown, not quite crisp, but so good that I hated to make it soggy by adding it to the tomatoes.  I decided we'd just eat it as a side-dish.

But what to do with the pan of tomatoes, peppers, and onions simmering on the stove?  By itself, it wasn't a very exciting dish.

The Husband's grandmother used to make a dish that the family just called "macaroni and tomatoes."  Sauteed onions, cooked tomatoes, and cooked elbow macaroni, with only salt and lots of black pepper for seasoning.  I decided to throw a handful of raw elbow macaroni in my tomato mixture (had to add some chicken stock for some extra liquid to cook the macaroni) to make it more substantial and hearty.

It was absolutely wonderful.  The starch in the macaroni tightened up the sauce and made it creamy and delicious.  We ate it with sauteed squash, the seared okra, pork loin medallions, and toasted home-made biscuits left over from Sunday morning.  Supper was gooooood.

While I was in the garden cutting the okra, I saw that a few broccoli plants had sprouted.  At least, I think it's broccoli and not weeds.  

All three hills of butternut squash have sprouted.  I thinned the hills down to 3 plants per hill.

The new purple hull peas are putting out runners.  I planted those rows so close together that the plants are shading out the grass.  Bonus!  If the plants produce well, I will space the rows closely from now on.

I am a little perplexed about what to do with the potatoes in the tub in my back yard.  This is a new experiment.  The online instructions say to add dirt around the potatoes when they reach 6" tall or so.  My problem is that some of the plants are 6" tall, but others are much smaller.  I'm afraid that if I add too much dirt to the tub, it will smother the smaller plants.  Over the weekend, I tried to pile up dirt around the tallest plants without covering up the smaller ones.  This did not work very well.