The Chile Experiment of 2012

As I shoveled snow off the driveway this morning, I kept sneaking glances at our greenhouse where, until about two weeks ago, we were still growing fresh, hot chiles. How I wish we still had some stew lamb left from our last meatshare from Chestnut Farms. I would love to make Lamb Chilindron on a chilly day like today (see below for recipe). Next week, I'll order some lamb from Farmers to You for the insanely cold weather to come.

Don't get me wrong. I love the snow. I grew up in New Mexico, where snow was a serious rarity, and even when it did snow, it melted by midafternoon. To this day, I have still never been sledding. I've also lived in Idaho, where it once snowed six feet in a single day! Massachusetts weather is perfect, as far as I'm concerned: not too hot in the summer, nor too cold in the winter. We get maybe one or two big weather events per year, and that's quite manageable.

But I do miss three things about New Mexico: my family, the mountains, and chile. New Mexicans take their chile very, very seriously. The official state question is, “Red or green?” Chile is a major export from New Mexico, and for good reason. Growing conditions are perfect for hot, wonderfully flavorful chiles. And I miss them tremendously.

Even though you can now buy chiles grown in Hatch, NM at Trader Joe's and Whole Foods, you can't get fresh chiles, just canned, dried, or powdered. There are some dishes for which canned or dried just won't cut it. Lamb Chilindron is one; another is Chiles Rellenos, where you take a fresh green chile, slit it open, remove the seeds, stuff it with a mild cheese such as monterrey jack, dip it in batter, deep fry it, and then serve it topped with chile sauce (red, green, or Christmas).

I've tried growing chiles in Somerville and Cambridge, but they haven't performed well, with poor yield and low heat. This year, however, I had a greenhouse handy. So I tried an experiment. I planted two varieties of chile seed, Sandia and Española, from the New Mexico Chile Institute both outside in the garden and inside the greenhouse. The greenhouse can get really, really hot in the summer, well over 100 degrees if I let it, and I can control the amount of water the plants receive more carefully. Would hotter, drier conditions produce a better pepper?

Well, this summer was a good warm, wet one, and both varieties produced well both inside and out. Each plant produced at least 20 pods. I found the Sandia to be a little hotter than the Española, and the Española to be a little sweeter, but both had very good flavor, excellent texture, and roasted beautifully. I could be mistaken, but I think the greenhouse-grown peppers were slightly hotter that the garden-grown ones, but not so much so that I'd outright prefer them.

There was, however, one huge advantage to planting in the greenhouse. The greenhouse pepper plants started producing almost two weeks earlier and continued producing, even after I'd stopped watering them, right through the end of December. I was astonished. Fresh chiles for Christmas? Who'd ever heard of such a thing? But they were amazing in the Posole I made for a neighbor's Christmas party.

Given the serious advantages, I will grow my chiles in the greenhouse from now on, freeing up more valuable garden space. It's also nice to find varieties that will stand up to the punishing midsummer heat. Who knows? If I hadn't come down with the flu (six straight weeks of coughing!), I might have been able to keep them going all winter. I may add more heat-loving crops that are well-contained: eggplant, tomatillo, artichoke, a determinate tomato. That, perhaps, will be next year's greenhouse experiment.

Let's not leave out the other peppers. I also grew chiles de arbol, which were small, exceedingly hot peppers. I only planted these outside, and they grew quite prolifically, but they just didn't have the flavor I wanted. They'd add some good punch to a salsa or mole, but I don't think they're worth growing just for that.

As for sweet peppers, I grew Yankee Bell, Sweet Chocolate, and Olympus as a red bell. All three of these performed very well. Yankee Bell is a tried-and-true variety with sweet, firm flesh, perfect for stuffing. Olympus was smaller and sweeter. My younger daughter ate these right off the plant so fast, only one or two ever made it to their full, ripe red color. Sweet Chocolate was a new variety for me, and when I finally warned my daughter off them long enough to let some ripen, they turned a soft brownish purple and had the most amazing rich smoky flavor – nothing like chocolate, mind you, but utterly delicious. I will grow Chocolate Bell and Olympic again next year and perhaps try a sweet Hungarian. I wonder if they'll do better in the greenhouse? Hmm...

And now for the recipes!

Lamb Chilindron

2 Tbsp olive oil

1 lb cubed lean lamb

salt and fresh ground pepper, to taste

1 Spanish onion, diced

2 cloves garlic, finely chopped or pressed

3 green and/or red chiles, seeded (for better flavor, use roasted chiles)

3 large fresh tomatoes, diced (for better flavor, use roasted tomatoes)

1 tsp red chile powder

1 tsp Mexican oregano

Heat the oil in a flameproof casserole or paellero (I use All-Clad's Everyday Pan). Season the lamb and add to the casserole. Brown evenly on all sides. Using a slotted spoon, transfer to a bowl. Add onion and saute until transparent. Add garlic and cook for 1-2 minutes, then stir in chiles, tomatoes, chile powder, and mexican oregano. Simmer until tomatoes are slightly reduced, about five minutes. Return lamb to the casserole along with any juices collected in the bowl. Cover and simmer for about an hour or until lamb is tender. Serve over rice.

Chiles Rellenos

Adapted from Southwest Flavor by Adela Amador

12 to 16 whole, long green chiles

1 lb. Monterey Jack cheese cut in thin strips

Batter:

1/2 cup flour

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 tsp baking powder

1 egg

1 cup milk

Slit open the chile, removing the seeds. Make sure to retain the stem. Insert strips of cheese into the chile pods. Mix flour, salt, and baking powder. Add milk and egg and beat until smooth. Holding by the stem, dip the cheese-stuffed chiles in the batter and fry in about 1 inch of vegetable oil until golden brown. Drain on paper towels. Serve as is or smothered with red or green chile sauce and pinto beans.

Posole

Posole is so simple, it really doesn't need a recipe. Mostly, it's dependent on what type of hominy you use. If using dried hominy, soak a pound overnight before using. If using frozen posole, thaw half of a 32-ounce package. If using canned hominy, drain one 16-oz can. Put any of these into a stew pot or crock pot with 2-3 lbs. of pork, such as a pork shoulder, and 2 quarts water. Simmer until the hominy pops, about 2 hours in the stew pot, longer in the crock pot. Remove and cut the cooked pork shoulder into bite-sized chunks, then toss them back in.

In New Mexico, this is traditionally eaten on New Year's Eve with red chile sauce. The beauty of it is that you can add as much or as little spice as you like. This is also frequently eaten for breakfast on chilly winter mornings.

A more elaborate variation, common in California, adds the following:

8-10 roasted, peeled, seeded, chopped green chiles (usually frozen)

1 medium onion, chopped

1 clove garlic, chopped

1 16-oz can stewed tomatoes (or more for a milder soup)

Finally, chicken can be substituted for pork.

Red Chile Sauce

1/4 cup red chile powder

1 cup water

1 Tbsp olive oil

1 clove garlic, finely chopped or pressed

1 Tbsp flour

1 tsp mexican oregano

In a metal or glass bowl (chile will stain ceramics), combine the chile powder and water, mixing thoroughly to create a paste. On medium heat in a cast iron or other heavy-duty skillet, saute the garlic and mexican oregano in the oil but do not brown. Add the flour, stirring rapidly to combine with the oil. Add the chile paste and reduce heat to low. Simmer until it reaches the desired consistency.

This is a critical component of enchiladas, burritos, rellenos, posole, and many, many other New Mexican dishes.

Best and Worst Potatoes of 2012

My husband Alex is half Swedish Finn, that odd little ethnic group that includes Linus Torvalds, inventor of the Linux operating system. Alex spent five years of his childhood in Stockholm, and one of the things he seriously misses about living in Sweden is new potatoes. Swedes take their potatoes very seriously, and new potatoes are a necessity for Midsummer festivities. For Swedes, they represent the beginning of summer as much as the first strawberries do for us.

Alex's memory of those potatoes is strong, and he's been searching for the same variety of potato ever since. Yukon Gold comes close, particularly in texture, but he says the flavor just isn't quite right. So last year, we set out to grow the perfect new potato for him. We chose four varieties to try out: Yukon Gold (as a standard), Bintje, Rose Finn, and Norkotah. Of these, we mounded the Yukon Golds and Bintjes and left the others planted flat in their beds.

It was a blighty, blighty year. I mentioned in my last post that many of our tomatoes suffered last year from late blight. What I didn't mention was that the potatoes came down with it first and unfortunately shared their fungus with neighboring plants. There's a neatly encapsulated gardening lesson: separate your nightshades!

By the end of July, it was clear that our potatoes weren't long for this world. Since the tomatoes hadn't yet shown any sign of late blight, with the exception of one hardy Stupice planted at the end of one potato bed, we chose to harvest our potatoes early in an effort to stem the spread of the disease.

On July 31st, the girls and I went out and dug up all the Yukon Golds. They loved this! It was like a dirty treasure hunt. Since midsummer, they'd been carefully brushing away soil from the mounds and making off with one or two small tubers for supper. Now, though, they could yank up entire plants and plunder the soil for potato bounty. Actually, I did most of the yanking with a pitchfork, while the girls sifted through the soil for stragglers. Here's what we harvested:

Eleanor (top) and Annelise dig up (Yukon) gold.

On August 5th, Alex came out and helped me with the rest of the potato harvest.

Rose Finn and Bintje potatoes.

Norkotah potatoes.

Here's how well these varieties performed for us:

Bintje

This Dutch variety is grown widely throughout Scandinavia, and we were very pleased to find organic seed potatoes available in the U.S. from Irish Eyes Garden Seeds in Washington. The Bintjes produced quite well in their hills with a little scabbing and wire worm damage. Alex declares that Bintjes come very, very close to what he remembers of Swedish-grown new potatoes. The one downside was that they simply weren't ready by June 21st for use as new potatoes. We ended up using Yukon Golds for our Midsummer dinner. They also were seriously affected by the late blight. They kept reasonably well and just started sprouting in the basement last week. We liked these enough that we will likely plant them again next year.

Norkotah

I selected Norkotah not as a Swedish new potato contender but rather as a reliable storage potato. This relatively new russet variety was introduced in 1987 and has become a favorite russet variety at markets. I can understand why. Despite the fact that we didn't hill them and they're late season potatoes, they produced like crazy. I think if we'd hilled them and allowed them a full season, we'd have filled that large basket, and then some. They resisted the late blight best and had the least scabbing of all the varieties, and they have kept quite well in our basement. We used the last few for Thanksgiving mashed potatoes along with some Bintjes and Yukes. We'll definitely plant these again.

Rose Finn

I wanted to try a fingerling potato in the hopes that it would mature early enough for midsummer, but Rose Finn was a thorough disappointment. They were slowest to sprout and mature, resisted the late blight poorly, had the lowest yield, and were scabby, knobby, and mealy. After trying one batch, I gave the rest away to a delighted Polish friend, which just goes to show that tastes vary widely. Not planting these again, I'm afraid.

Yukon Gold

This common thin-skinned potato has creamy golden flesh and is wonderful boiled or mashed. Yukon Gold performed well for us, maturing early enough for Midsummer and producing a sizeable harvest despite the blight. Yukons don't store well, so we used these up as quickly as possible. While this variety is a reliable one and easy to grow, I don't think we'll grow them again this year simply because they're everywhere, readily available in every farmers' market and grocery store. I'd rather plant less common varieties I can't easily get.

So, in 2013, we'll repeat the Bintjes and Norkotahs. I think I'll also try the Swedish Peanut fingerling, known in Sweden as Mandelpotatis or "almond potatoes." If I have room for one more variety, I'd like to try a red-skinned potato. Selecting for disease resistance, I think I'd try Dark Red Norland or Chieftain. If you have suggestions of your own, please let me know.

This year, I'd really like to try growing potatoes in box towers. Irish Eyes has some excellent instructions for how to do this. If we can find the time to construct these, we can easily fit four varieties in our garden.

Note: Irish Eyes offers mini tubers as seed potatoes for some varieties. I highly recommend these. Cutting seed potatoes leaves them vulnerable to disease. Whole tubers resist far better and sprout faster.

Alex relaxes with his potato harvest.

Best and Worst Tomatoes of 2012

Ah, January. Snow covers the garden, and fresh tomatoes are a distant memory. How I miss them! I've been making do with homemade tomato sauce all week, but nothing beats a fresh, homegrown tomato, bursting with juice and flavor. So it's time to snuggle down with my pile of catalogs, think about ordering seeds, and ponder the successes and failures of last year.

2012 was an interesting year for tomatoes. It was the best harvest season I've ever had for Brandywines, that fussy, late-producing heirloom. I suspect the mild winter, early spring, and warm, wet summer provided almost optimal conditions for Brandywines and their cousins here in coastal Massachusetts.

I say almost because it was also a year filled with fungus. Early blight, late blight, and leaf spot all hit our tomato plants with widely varying impact. While the Brandywines weathered the late blight fairly well, our  Hillbilly tomatoes started rotting on the vines. This didn't stop our raiding woodchuck from eating them like candy, and he was welcome to them. Even applications of copper fungicide could not stem the decay.

We grew ten different varieties of tomato last year. In alphabetical order, here's how they performed for us.

Bellstar

I chose Bellstar for its reputation as a reliable early plum tomato. It was non of these. My Bellstars produced very little and succumbed to early blight within a month of planting. The few fruits I got from these were round, not plum-shaped, and seriously lacking in flavor, although they did have good texture. I won't be trying this variety again, which leaves me looking for a good plum tomato variety to replace it.

Brandywine

Brandywine is a pink heirloom variety with a well-established reputation for excellent sweet and fruity flavor. Not a good choice for sauces, they are fantastic for slicing or salads. The drawback is that Brandywines take a long time to mature, 78 days on average, and I've had many a crop cut short by an early frost. Not this year. For the first time ever, my Brandywines started producing in late July and kept on going despite encroaching late blight and leaf spot. They were some of the best, tastiest, most productive Brandywines I have ever grown, and I'll grow them again next year, giving them a nice early start in the greenhouse.

Defiant

Defiant is a hybrid slicer bred specifically for blight resistance, and it did resist well, but it produced poorly. While heirlooms were blooming and fruiting like mad all around them, our Defiants produced very few rather small fruits. They were tasty, though, and I have to wonder if they simply got completely overgrown by the other tomatoes in our bed. Given their excellent disease resistance, I think I'll give them one more try but interplant them in another bed, perhaps with onions, so that they have more space to develop.

Gold Nugget

I planted this pear-shaped cherry tomato primarily for my children to nibble, and the first few we got were delicious, firm, and not overly sweet. I suspect I would have loved them, but alas! Early blight did them in almost instantly. My husband ripped them out of the beds in July, and that was the end of that. Regretfully, I cannot recommend planting a tomato so sensitive to blight.

Hillbilly

One of my seedling customers provided me with Hillbilly seeds. I'd never heard of the variety before, and they were certainly interesting. A close cousin of Brandywines, these yellow-orange tomatoes are firmer and meatier. They grow robustly, and one actually pulled down its tomato ladder. They also produce earlier than Brandywines and quite prolifically. Unfortunately, they proved to be highly vulnerable to late blight. The fruit developed dark brown pitted bruises which eventually split and turned moldy. I didn't see this kind of response on any of the other tomatoes, and it persisted despite two treatments with copper. So, with further regrets, I have to pass on this variety as well. I won't be planting it again.

Juliet

This early-producing  mini-plum, closely related to Santa tomatoes, was a delightful discovery. The fruit was excellent, a wonderful balance between sweet and meaty with a good firm texture. Our Juliets produced prolifically and were outperformed only by our Sun Golds. Better yet, they resisted cracking quite well. Towards the end of the season, they did begin to exhibit some fungal pitting, but they kept on producing right up until the first hard frost. I will absolutely grow these again.

Stupice

This potato-leaf heirloom from Czechoslovakia looks exactly like Brandywine until it fruits. It's reputed to be cold-tolerant and early producing (52 days), but they actually produced about the same time as the Brandywines. Stupice did not stand up to either early or late blight well, though it did better than many other varieties. To my surprise, I found that it grows quite well in a greenhouse at low temperatures, even down to 50 degF. So while I probably won't grow it in the garden next year, I may well start another one in the greenhouse in the spring to replace the one that has just now stopped producing.

Sun Gold

In my opinion, Sun Gold is the king of cherry tomatoes. The round orange fruit is incredibly sweet, and even my tomato-hating eight-year-old will eat them right off the vine. They are incredibly prolific and vigorous, shrugging off blight, drought, and even frost. It took three frosts to finally kill ours off! They do have downsides, though. They split at the the least provocation, so they're not great for market, and they tend to overgrow everything around them. They require very sturdy trellises and plenty of space. That said, this is our favorite tomato, and we'll be growing it for years to come.

Valencia

I chose Valencia as an orange heirloom slicer. I love to make tomato salads with a variety of tomato colors for interest and variety. Valencia was billed as a reliable mid-season tomato, and it was. The fruit, however, was, well, boring. I honestly can't recall now how a single one of them tasted. They weren't particularly blight resistant, but neither did they instantly wither and die. They didn't produce much, but they did produce two or three fruits per plant pretty reliably each week. So, this wasn't a bad tomato, but neither was it a great one. I think I'll pass on this one in 2013.

Washington Cherry

Billed as the earliest cherry tomato to market, I think Washington Cherry was the biggest disappointment. They did produce early, but with nowhere near the yield of Sun Gold. They resisted splitting quite well, but in exchange, they just had no flavor whatsoever. I may as well have bought them in the store for a good deal less trouble. So no more Washington Cherries this year.

The big winners this year were Brandywine, Juliet, and Sun Gold. Stupice and Defiant are worth trying again, I think. But the rest we'll chalk up as learning experiences. 

This leaves me wanting a good, normal-sized plum tomato, a large beefsteak, and some good color. I also want to find more good determinate varieties that don't require quite so much staking and maintenance. I should also add in a couple of blight resistant hybrids.

I'm considering trying the following new varieties next year:

Amish Paste - Mid-season heirloom plum tomato reputed to have high yields and excellent taste. Available from Bountiful Gardens and Johnny's Selected Seeds.

Attention - A new beefsteak hybrid, highly adaptive and resistant to a range of fungal infections and viruses. Available from the Natural Gardening Company.
Celebrity - "A perfect main crop tomato", highly disease-resistant with a long growing season. Available from Johnny's Selected Seeds and the Natural Gardening Company.
Golden Treasure - Yellow storage tomato. Available from Territorial Seed Company.
Grandma's Pick - "Heirloom flavor with hybrid production, uniformity, and disease resistance." Now, how can I say no to that? Bright red with orange shoulders, this tomato is a heavy producer with high lycopene content. Available from Territorial Seed Company.
Gregory's Altai - Bred in Siberia, this heirloom big slicer is reputed to be a very early producer. Available from Bountiful Gardens.
Indigo Rose - So dark purple, it's nearly black with high anthrocyanin content. Available from Johnny's Selected Seeds and Territorial Seed Company.
Legend - Early slicing tomato with excellent late blight tolerance for an heirloom. Produces big 4-5 inch fruit. Available from Territorial Seed Company.
Longkeeper - This semi-determinate hybrid will keep for up to three months when picked green or not-quite-ripe just before the first frost. Available from Territorial Seed Company.
Mountain Magic - Early hybrid, blight resistant, high yields. Available from Johnny's Selected Seeds.
Pruden's Purple - An early Brandywine cousin with dark pink skin and crimson flesh. Available from Johnny's Selected Seeds.
Taxi - Early, determinate yellow tomato, reputed to be easy to grow. Available from Johnny's Selected Seeds and Territorial Seed Company.

If you've grown any of these varieties in the past, please share your experiences and help me narrow down my selections. Also, many years ago, I grew a small Brandywine cousin called Lillian Yellow. Alas, I didn't save the seed, and I haven't been able to find it since. If you have some seed or know of a good source, please let me know.

Happy New Year!

I can't believe it's been so long since my last post. In fact, the last post was by my husband while I was on vacation with our daughters in New Mexico. Now, why would I take a vacation in August, the peak of growing season? Well, when we bought our home, it had many wonderful features, such as the greenhouse and the yard, but it also had some serious drawbacks.

Worst of these was the kitchen, which had not been changed since the house was built in 1940. It had lower-than-standard counter heights, no space for a dishwasher, and very little cabinet space. The adjoining dining room was so cramped, we couldn't entertain more than a few guests without turning the table diagonally or adding a table in the living room. So we embarked on a radical kitchen renovation: add a structural beam in the basement to level the sagging floor, tear down the wall between the kitchen and dining room, pull out the cabinets, add a food prep area with a high counter, and provide enough cabinet space overall that we could stop using the linen closet as a pantry.

We chose to do this in August while on vacation so that the bulk of the work could be done with the girls out of the house. Our younger daughter has asthma-ish problems, and we didn't want her home, breathing in construction dust. We also wanted the kitchen finished before harvest season hit full swing so that we could be canning and preserving our hard-won garden bounty. Every contractor we interviewed assured us they could finish the renovation in four weeks.

It took over three months. We began the 6^th of August, and the kitchen was not completed until the week of Thanksgiving. There are still outstanding issues. Our new induction range arrived with a manufacturing defect. It is scheduled to be fixed on Tuesday. Also, somewhere along the way, someone made a measurement error, and our refrigerator does not quite fit in its allotted space. So we're now looking for a 30-inch-wide fridge that won't seriously bust our budget.

The renovation ate all of my spare time, hence no blogging. Worse, with no kitchen, I couldn't cook most of the veggies we were growing. What on earth do you do with an enormous garden full of veggies when you can't cook? You give them away. We gave veggies to all our friends and neighbors. When the girls returned to school, we sent bin after bin of cherry tomatoes, bush beans, broad beans, bell peppers, cucumbers, carrots, zucchini, summer squash, husk cherries, and sunflower seeds to their classrooms as snacks. Every Monday, I'd pick everything ripe and bring it to the food pantry at Beverly Bootstraps, a local charity. By the end of the growing season, we'd given them nearly 100 lbs. of our fresh, organic produce.

We did manage to freeze some tomatoes, corn, and roasted green chile. We stored potatoes, beets, and squash. I dried broad beans and blue corn for meal. Some friends kindly took all our basil, converted it into pesto, and gave us half the batch. Many of our attempts at storage failed, including green tomatoes wrapped in newspaper and stored in our basement, which simply rotted, and dehydrated red chiles. After hours in the dehydrator, I ended up with red chile leather that then went moldy two weeks later.

And the worst, most frustrating part of this was that the garden was, with a few exceptions and despite raids by a determined woodchuck, wildly successful. Even the corn stalks infected with Gibberella produced bushels of corn. The husk cherries completely overgrew their bed and carpeted the garden paths with their fruit. The bush beans kept on producing right up until the first frost. Even now, with the garden blanketed in snow, we're still picking fresh kale, cauliflower, and broccoli.

At last, the renovation is over, the holidays are past, and I have time to reflect on our successes and failures. Seed catalogs have begun arriving in the mail, and I'm beginning to think ahead to this year's garden. So over the next few days, I'll be posting on all the varieties I planted, reporting on what worked, what didn't, and what I'm considering trying this year. First on my list: tomatoes.