These back and forth temperature swings are beginning to take a toll on my well-being both mentally and physically. Add in that wind on Sunday afternoon and it was almost to much to bear. No, not almost, it was too much to bear, but bear it we did.
I’ve been trying to hang on to a couple of tomato plants from early fall and finally decided Saturday that they were going to have to go the way of the rest of the garden. That being “go away.”
They would have been dead after Sunday night most likely, so I took them out early.
They did not die in vain, though. I picked the last 15 green ones on the vines and we dined on crab cakes and fried green tomatoes Saturday night. It was a great way to use some of them and the rest are resting on the counter for another fry day. Maybe this Friday.
I had the same problem with two giant pots of basil. I had drug them inside, and drug them back outside, until I could drag them no more. I could have, just didn’t want to, so I cut the basil and commenced to making a variety of things — a couple of old favorites and trying my hand at something new too.
Bruschetta with tomato and basil paired well with those crab cakes and FGTs Saturday night. We love bruschetta. Especially with fresh ingredients.
Sunday I hung an arm load of the crop up in the sunroom to dry and I’ll crush that up later and bottle it for spaghetti sauce and the like this winter. I also boiled down a huge vat of leaves into basil nectar, I suppose it could be called, or the country version basil pot liquor.
Eight cups of that and a 10 cups of sugar turned into 14 half pints of basil jelly. A lot of people have never heard of basil jelly, but we’ve been making it for decades.
It is green, and it is savory and sweet all at the same time. It pairs deliciously with an aged gouda cheese baked on a thin baguette slice. It is also excellent on cornbread, if you like cornbread — I don’t — and if you don’t like regular cornbread either it is good on specialty cornbreads.
We make one that is a sausage muffin, usually during the holidays, and the basil jelly goes great on that. I’ll give some away next week too, because 14 jars is too much of a good thing.
I also took some of that pot liquor and let it cool then poured ito into quart zipper bags full of fresh basil leaves. I’m hoping that works better than the dried basil in the spaghetti sauces and the like. We’ll see after Christmas.
And finally, I thought I would make a basil simple syrup with the remaining liquor. It tasted good but when I used it with some real liquor to make a basil martini, well, lets just say not so much of a fan.
It is in the fridge, though, so I’ll do something with it.
I did have a boil over with the jelly and now the stove top has a sticky, thick coat of green brickle baked to one eye. Wife, Danny, bless her soul, feels like she and some Easy Off oven cleaner might pair up next week when she is off from school for the holidays and remedy that situation.
With those chores done, it was time to brave the elements again and harvest the pumpkins for the back yard deer. It really wasn’t a harvest as much as loading them into the buggy from the different places around the front door where they had been used as fall decor. By then the wind was really whipping it up, and the temps were plummeting and snot was running down my face and dripping off my chin. Those deer better appreciate my hard work.
With the pumpkins gone there was still one final outside chore to take care of before dark, and it would take Danny and me as a team to rig up a cover over the giant macho ferns in large planters on either side of the door, with hopes of saving them from nature’s wrath.
We got them tented with tarps and stuck some heat lamps under there to warm things up and by nightfall the reflection through the front door looked like some sort of big bonfire. I suppose from the road it might have looked like something was burning all night long. Who knows!
Who knows whether the rig worked or not either. It was 21 degrees Monday morning when I left the house so it all stayed rigged up and remained rigged up Monday night for some more of the same.
The rigging was still in place at deadline for this paper, so I cannot report as to whether those big ole ferns survived or not. About a 50/50 chance on that I expect at this writing.
Amazing the efforts folks (us) go to in order hang on to some potted plants. They are huge, though, and real pretty too.
With that in mind, I’m afraid it is going to be a long winter! At least we will have spaghetti and jelly to help make us feel better. If the stove comes clean, that is.
Not the martini, though. Nope, not gonna have the basil martini ever again.
