Moolie - Happy Thanksgiving :)

[moolie]

Chicken Pot Pie

2 cups cooked chicken, chopped/cubed
2 cups chicken stock
1 onion, chopped
celery, chopped
Rosemary, salt & pepper to taste
2 cups mixed veggies
4 potatoes, cubed

Bake in casserole dish (no lid!) until hot and bubbly and veggies are starting to get tender, stir in ~1 tbsp flour to thicken, cover with[/i] pastry or biscuit/dumpling top and bake till golden.

 

[moolie]

Pepper Beef

Brown stir fry strips or stew beef after dredging in salt & peppered flour, add a jar/can of crushed tomatoes and lots of chopped onions, slow cook all day, add chopped red or green bell pepper about an hour before serving--serve over rice or noodles.

 

[Denim Deb]

Looks and sounds yummy!

 

[moolie]

So I had some concerns about a batch of tomato plants and kept them back from planting out because they had small black specks on the lower leaves. I re-potted them all into larger pots and kept the tray on the patio table away from the garden and the other tomato plants, and kept searching the internet for something that looked like what I was seeing, and finally determined after talking to a friend that these plants had Septoria leaf spot.

All of my Tiny Tim cherry tomatoes.

I binned them all a few days ago, but now I'm worried and constantly checking the rest of the tomatoes that were planted out. I harden off all of my seedlings on my patio table, and all of the trays were out there together for about two weeks before going into the garden. I didn't notice the spots till planting day, and kept them apart at that point, but I think it's possible that the other trays could have been infected so I'm watching the the other tomatoes like a hawk.

The other varieties I planted this year were Yellow Pear cherry-type (which most of the websites that talk about Septoria seem to indicate is resistant to the fungus), Early Girl, and San Marzano.

And it's been raining cats and dogs for over a week here, really pounding rain and high humidity--this is our rainy season in a very arid area. So if it's going to spread at any time, it's now.

Really sad about losing the cherry tomatoes. And concerned that I may have introduced this into the garden on some of the other plants. Ugh, I hate blight--haven't had it since we lived in Vancouver where it is quite common.

 

[Joel_BC]

Sorry to hear about your blight attack. We had blight last year. It did-in our tomatoes (several varieites in the G.H.) and potatoes (two varieties - but that was all we planted last year).

In previous years, even though some people in our area had suffered blight, we had not gotten it in our solanacious plants. Weather-wise, 2012 is so far a lot like 2011 - wet, coolish spring... lots of humidity in the air when it isn't raining.

This year, we took a defensive stance. We researched varieties that have shown resistance to blight. We planted the spuds from clean seed-potato stock, and with tomatoes we started our own plants and made sure the starts were strong. We're growing the tomatoes in the one and only small greenhouse that we have, but we've moved the location of the potato patch (about 30 ft - but within the same general garden area). And we've treated the seed spuds and the tomato plants and the soil they're growing in with a bacterial fungicide, bought under the trade name Actinovate.

Blight is a subject I'd brought up several times in various posts I've made since I joined SS here, late last November. I mentioned it partly because I wanted to get some dialogue going about organic ways of dealing with it.

We have high hopes for our plants at this point. So far, so good.

 

[moolie]

Thanks Joel

I've read your blight thread, and may even have posted in it, but you know way more than I do about how to deal with it. It's really rare around here because it's so arid here, but something obviously happened. None of my neighbors have tomatoes, so it had to have come from someone's flower garden--it's quite common (apparently) on a few perennials.

I've been reading up on this particular blight like mad and all I've found says that you can still get a crop off, that you should remove all affected leaves (starts on the lower portion of the plant and works its way up), and that you should remove all plant material from the garden at the end of the season and plant that crop elsewhere the following year. I've seen recommendations for various organic fungicides including the one you mention.

I'm really hoping that by tossing the plants outright before they hit the garden that the problem is solved, but we'll see if any of the garden-planted tomatoes caught it while the trays were all hardening off together on the patio table.

 

[moolie]

So here's my menu plans for this week (which is done today, got a little behind on posting) and next week:

(We had teriyaki salmon with rice and salad from the garden instead of the salmon quiche)

Crock Pot Cranberry Sauce Pork Roast

Place roast in crock pot, season with garlic/salt/pepper, pour jar/can of cranberry sauce (we use homemade) over top and add 1/4 cup water, cook on low all day and enjoy with coleslaw etc.

Salmon Quiche

Make pastry for a one-crust pie and fill with a mixture of:

1 can salmon
1 onion, diced (I use the food processor for this recipe so that the pieces are small)
4 eggs
2 cups cheese (we like a mixture of Swiss and Jarlsberg)
salt, pepper, dill

Teriyaki Salmon

Pour bottled teriyaki sauce over fish portions and grill or bake 15-20 minutes till fish flakes with a fork.

Sweet Mustard Pork

1/2 cup molasses
1/4 cup dijon mustard
2 tbsp apple cider vinegar
salt
pork chops

This is a freezer recipe, so I mix all of the ingredients together in a freezer bag or casserole dish and freeze. Then thaw it in the fridge and pull the chops out of the marinade and grill or bake. You can heat up the marinade in a pot on the stove and baste the chops with it as they cook!

 

[moolie]

I took some photos the other day when I was out in the garden, but now I can't find them. I thought they were on my camera, but they must be on my phone (which is charging at the moment) so I'll post them later.

Total score this evening, had a busy day as we are totally re-arranging our laundry room (building risers for our washer and dryer and building more/better shelving--I'll post before and after images when we are done!) but when I sat down to have a much needed glass of water and check my email I also checked kijiji for "canning jars" and ended up calling the lady which resulted in hubs and I driving a few neighborhoods over to pick up these:

16 dozen canning jars of various sizes for $60

Some really cool antique blue ones, 3 two quarts and 3 quarts:

Close up of the "Beehive" blue quart:

 

[Wannabefree]

VERY COOL moolie!!!!

 

[moolie]

My hubs actually asked me tonight, "I'm not complaining because some of these are really cool, but when will you have enough jars?"