Bless My Heart I Married A Yankee

With summer over and fall beginning, I figured I need to finish my tomato posting.  If you have read any of my tomato canning posts you know I love tomatoes but the last few years our tomato plants have not done so good.  This year was pretty good not as good as 4 years ago but it was good enough for me to get a lot of stuff canned.   I like having tomato sauce canned because I use a lot of tomato sauce it.  I also use a lot of  past e and  marinara .  All 3 are made very similar.  The first steps are the same.  You start with clean tomatoes and chop them up then ... put them in a pot.  Cook them down and mash them up.  I like mashing them with something to help with using the food mill.  It just saves time.  Put them through a food mill to separate the seeds and peels from the liquid.  Save your seeds and peels to make  tomato powder . Put the liquid back into a clean pot. Now you can have plain tomato sauce or you can add seasonings.  I like plain to

Have you ever thought about making your own tomato paste?  Do you even use tomato paste?  Well, the answer to those 2 questions for me is YES.  I think it was 4 summers ago when we had this magnificent crop of tomatoes.  By that I mean I had so many beautiful tomatoes that they were running out of my ears.  God is good because he must have known that the next 2 years tomatoes were going to be horrible.  I canned so many types of stuff with tomatoes that year that it lasted us during those lean years.  Well, my tomato paste only lasted a few months into the winter.  It is good stuff. I will warn you though that it takes a lot of tomatoes and lots of time.  You basically cook it like making tomato sauce and just keep on cooking it down and down and down until you get this thick gooey stuff.  To make it good, it will take at least a day.   This year I will admit I made it due to being lazy.  I pretty much had picked the rest of my San Marzano tomatoes and thought I would mak

The first weekend in September held the day I turned 50. It also was when my husband brought home Dimitar.  Let me tell you Dimitar is this really super cool dude.  He currently lives in Vermont but is from Bulgaria.  I have to admit I was a bit leery on meeting him because he is a Vegan.  Not that being a vegan is a bad thing, just more I had no clue how or what to fix for him to eat.  You see where and how I grew up, food brings people together.  It is the building blocks for relationships.  It also is what you do to make someone feel comfortable in your home.  That is why I was so concerned with meeting Dimitar.  How foolish I was, he cooked for us.  Oh and boy the man can cook.    We love hummus and low and behold Dimitar loves it too and made this for us.  I think this night Brooke and Matt were over as well.  Dimitar said it is his goal to find the perfect hummus recipe.  Well, he rocked it!!  Let me say the hummus did not last long because the 5 of us destroyed it.  It wen

Okra, hmm, it is such an interesting vegetable.  Either you love it or you just can not stand it at all.  Yeah, it can be slimy but oh my it is so good if you cook it just right.  I have to admit Scott makes better fried okra then I do.  It really is all in the batter.  You have to know how to make it.  I think the trick of it is you need to use flour and cornmeal.  Not just one or the other, the combination of both makes it so good. We grow okra in our garden.  Okra is one of those things that will keep on producing until the frost kills the plants.   FRIED OKRA Ingredients 3 cups okra 1/2 cup cornmeal 1/2 cup plain flour 1 egg Salt and pepper to taste 1/2 cup canola oil Directions Wash and dry the okra. Cut off the tops and slice into 1/4 inch pieces.   Combine the cornmeal, flour, salt, and pepper into a shallow pan. Stir the egg to scramble and pour into a small dish. Dip the okra into the egg and then into the cornmeal flour mix. Heat a skillet and p

My husband, Scott, is part polish.  Does that surprise you?  I mean, I am all the time saying he is part Italian.   A few years ago he decided to make golumpkis, stuffed cabbage rolls.  He grew up eating these as a child.  He has memories of his grandmother making them and then his mother.  This dish has good juju for him.   There are lots of different ways to make them due to so many different nationalities make them.  Here is a  History of Stuffed Cabbage Rolls .  Not only are there different ways to make them, but there are also different spellings.  The ones we make are Polish and can be spelled many ways such as galumpkis and others spell it golumpkis.  Or even golabki.     While the recipe is simple it is a time-consuming labor of love. Maybe this is the reason they were made on special occasions.  Golumpkis are basically cabbage leaves, pork, ground beef, and rice. While Scott was working on the onions I made some rice.  Do not cook your rice done.