Trending
I recently bought my first peppers of the season. They came from a local farm. I knew right away that I wanted to make stuffed peppers. I looked through my recipes. The last time I stuffed peppers I used all vegetables. This time I wanted to use ground beef.
In the end I combined several recipes and came up with my own recipe that was very good. I shared them with my son who came up to winterize my camper. He was glad to take them home.
That was not the end of the peppers. I also wanted to cook some peppers and onions to go with sausage. I have found that if I saute the onions very slowly they get very sweet. We had some onions and peppers with sausage at the fair and everyone liked them.
I finished off my peppers by making stuffed pepper soup. Since the weather turned cold it was the perfect time for soup. This recipe I acquired from a friend that I taught with. We used to bring food to school as a treat. This recipe came when we featured different types of soup.
I frequently freeze peppers to use later. I just cut them up and throw them into the freezer. Since I use them in a cooked dish they do not need any other treatment. When I am ready to cook I just throw them in.
Tomatoes are also in season. My favorite treat using tomatoes are BLTs. I have learned to bake my bacon on my broiler pan. That way the whole pound is ready to use whenever I want to use it. I toast my bread then add a little Miracle Whip. Then I pile up tomato, lettuce, and bacon.
The other thing I like to do with fresh tomatoes is make caprese salad. I slice up the tomato, then arrange slices of tomato and fresh mozzarella cheese. Usually I put some cucumbers in the center and pour on a little olive oil and balsamic vinegar. This makes a refreshing appetizer or a side dish.
As far as I am concerned the only tomatoes fit to eat are tomatoes fresh from the garden. Back in the old days I canned tomatoes. I blanched the tomatoes, then put them into cold water. It was just minutes until the skins were ready to peel off. Once I had them skinned I put them into the jars. I pushed them down until the quart jars were filled. Then I added salt. After that I put them through a water bath to seal them. While I do not miss the canning process I was a bit nostalgic as I wrote about it. It just reminded me of times when my whole family was together.
In years gone by I canned many things from the garden. I think I have noted before that the garden was always down at the farm because the soil is so much better there. We have clay here and that is not as good as the gravelly loam at the farm.
One year I canned green beans. Well, I must not have done something right because when I went into my mother-in-law’s basement the beans were popping and there were beans everywhere. That is when I bought my pressure canner. I had cooked them in a water bath and that was not adequate.
I also used to can peaches. We usually bought a couple bushels of them. They tasted so good right out of the can. One year, sugar was hard to come by. That year I used some of our own honey to do my canning. I’ll tell you those peaches canned with honey were delicious.
We also had our own plum trees. Those little prune plums were oh so good. I canned some and froze some. When I used them they tasted very different. The ones from the freezer were more like prunes while the plums I canned were still red and very sweet. I miss those little plum trees. They got some kind of disease and all died.
One year we had trouble getting canning lids. That year I cut my plums and fit a lot more of them into each jar. I also froze my applesauce that year to conserve lids.
The thing I liked to can the least was pears. They were so juicy that I ended up with juice up to my elbows. The other thing about pears is that they did not all ripen at the same time. Each night that I came home from school I had pears to can – those that were ready. I just kept my canning equipment on my stove so that I was ready.
Usually I froze the corn. I heard one of the television cooks tell about putting a bowl inside of a bowl to keep the corn from spilling out. Well, that was something I figured out for myself long ago. When you had a lot of corn to process you did whatever worked to get it done.
The children always helped me shuck the corn. It was fun for them to pull the cobs out of the husks. It was not so much fun to remove all of the silk but that was part of the process. Of course, we saved the husks for the cows. That was their treat for the day.
Stuffed Pepper Soup
1 lb. ground beef 1c. uncooked rice 2 qt. water
1 qt. tomato juice 3 med peppers 1 ½ c. chili sauce
2 ribs celery 1 lg. onion, diced 3 tsp. chick bouillon
2 cloves garlic. minced ½ tsp salt
Brown ground beef, then add the rest of the ingredients. Cook until the rice is cooked and the vegetables are tender. Often do this in my crock pot so it does not burn.
Ann Swanson writes from her home in Russell, PA. Contact at hickoryheights1@verizon.net