wednesday

This weekend we made tomato, onion and cheese omelets with our San Marzano (roma) tomatoes. They were delicious!

I also made some cranberry banana bread and shortbread with dried cranberries and chocolate chips this week. I only took pictures of the shortbread as the banana bread has already made an appearance on the blog.

There hasn’t been a lot of knitting updates because I have been mostly working on the Sprossling and there would only be a lot of the same to show you. I am nearly done as I have both sleeves, the back, and am completing the second half of the front. I have made a few modifications to this pattern (will post if they worked out) and here is hoping that they work out so I don’t have to rip back.

Tomato porn and apricot preserves

More tomatoes from the garden:

I also made apricot preserves sometime last week from the apricots I bought at a farmers market the weekend before. We enjoyed them this weekend on crumpets!

Food!

There have been a lot of good eats out in my little world, mostly revolving around tomatoes. Sadly I was having computer issues so I couldn’t blog about all the food over the weekend and had to wait until today.

Brownies were made last week and turned out excellent. I wrote the recipe down somewhere but now I can’t find it. If I find my recipe notes they will be in a future post in case you were interested in trying to make them. They aren’t as dense as most brownies but are still very good.

Before I finished off the last two pieces of pizza mentioned in the First Real Tomato of the Season post I remembered to take a picture of the pizza Sean made with our first ripened tomato from our container garden. It was delicious pizza.

This weekend another tomato ripened and we picked it and added it into our Sunday lunch sandwiches. The heirloom tomatoes are turning out to be very meaty and delicious.

Today’s lunch consisted of my first ripened Black Tula tomato. It was just this tomato cut up with bocconcini cheese on melba toast. It was delicious and this is coming from someone who typically will only eat tomatoes when cooked. But garden fresh tomatoes are just soooooo good! Wish I had a picture of it sliced up so you could have seen the inside! I will definitely be growing more Black Tula’s in the future as I loved the flavour of this one. I could have just eaten it plain.

First Real Tomato of the Season

Our first tomato has changed colour! It is one of the mystery tomato plants and it turned a vibrant orange. We picked it today and sliced it to go on our pizza for dinner tonight. We couldn’t resist a little taste of the ends that were hard to slice. Sooooooo delicious and sweet! There is no acidity and it is smooth. Luckily more of them are changing colour; one looks to be turning yellow and another has just started turning so it is hard to tell. Hopefully I will have pictures of those to show in the future.

tomatoes gone wild

All the plants are currently located at Sean’s place since they all needed to be in one place when we were on vacation and they are much to big to be moving around a lot now, so there they stay. They have taken over and claimed his balcony as their own.

Today I took a pair of heavy duty scissors over there (Sean does not own a pair) and did some serious pruning. There have been other attempts prior to today but there is only so much you can do with a pairing knife. Silly me forgot to take a picture prior to the hair cut so all the pictures are the after shots.

The majority of the tomato plants are at one end of the balcony. Except for the one that hangs out with the pepper plants. They rotate so they will all get some of the optimal space.

The chili peppers, red bell peppers (which are still green) and the purple container peppers are all doing very well. I will probably have to do a harvest of the chili peppers tomorrow. I will keep some in the fridge and then blender the rest and freeze them in small usable portions for fresh chili’s all winter long! I might do some research to see if there are other ways to preserve them as well. Still waiting to be able to pick the peppers from the other two types and getting impatient!

All but one of the tomato plants have beautiful tomatoes growing. The first picture shows my black tula tomatoes. I can’t wait til they change colour to see what they look like and taste like. The oblong ones are the San Marzano and will make delicious tomato paste or canned tomatoes. The rest are my mystery plants I started from seed and we will just have to wait and see what colour they become.

And here is a picture of the pruned branches to give you an idea for how much was taken off. I place the cuttings on top of the soil to act as mulch and to keep the soil of the tomato plants from drying out. It does seem to work quite well.

If the tomatoes keep doing so well I will have to hurry up and get some canning equipment so none of our produce will go to waste!

while waiting for coffee to brew

This morning Piper and I went to look at our container garden. The tomato plants are doing very well and have beautiful flowers on them. The purple container bell peppers have the prettiest little purple-white flowers and the chili pepper plant has chili’s (although those pictures all came out a bit fuzzy).

Piper was the supervisor, watching while I took these pictures. She’s happy to do the job provided her travel cage is propped up on a chair and not on the dirty floor.

After all that hard work Piper had some lychee juice while I took pictures of some knitting.

I finally have three repeats of the lace edging for the Queen Ring Shawl. I don’t know why but it does seem to be giving me some difficulty. It is the first time I have employed lifelines in lace knitting and boy am I glad that I have. I pinned it out for this picture as best I could so you could get an idea of how pretty it will looked when the whole item is soaked and blocked.

And the back of Sean’s sweater is almost done as well. If I can keep this up it should be done in time for Christmas. Hmmm maybe I should go and knock on some would before I jinx myself.

Oh I think the coffee is ready and it’s calling my name.

the garden

Well it was not this past weekend but the weekend prior to that that my tomato and pepper plants all finally got planted in their “forever” pots. We went and got some drainage stone and some 20L plaster buckets for the tomatoes and the intermediate tomato pots are the pepper plant’s forever homes. The soil we picked up holds the water very nicely so it does not dry out to quickly. Sean and I each have 4 tomato plants on our balconies. 3 each of my heirloom seedlings, I have the black Tula a friend from work brought me and Sean has the San Marzano my work roommate grew from seedling. We also each have a chili pepper, two red peppers and 2 small purple container peppers.

After a little over a week of getting settled into their new pots they are all doing very well and seem to be growing like weeds!

The tomato plants on my balcony.

The purple container peppers.

The red peppers.

The chili pepper and a close up of one of its pretty flowers.

Lace

I felt the uncontrollable urge to knit something lacy so I cast on some cashmere and am making this little scarf. It is supposed to be a shawl but I don’t have enough of this yarn so I’ve converted the pattern into a scarf sized width. I’ve also decided to make 5 stitch nupps instead of 7 in an effort to save more yarn. I am making pretty good progress so far.

I’ve also been working on Sean’s sweaters in drips and drabs. Here is a picture of it in progress from last week.

I spent the weekend replanting my tomato and pepper plants and now my little vegetable garden needs to be shown in not one but two pictures.

randomness

There is not too much going on knit-wise to show pictures of at the moment. The Bean’s sweater is getting close to completion. That will be a finished object to show off soon.

Not so long ago I bought myself a new knitting book about designing sweaters, Knitwear Design Workshop by Shirley Paden. I’m finding it excellent as it shows you how to do a lot of the math (which is good if you want to make patterns with multiple sizes). It also shows you how to design for different sweater body types, sleeves, necklines, collars etc as well as skirts and dressed amoung other things. It should be an excellent resource. One of my favorite things this book includes is all the measurements you should take and how exactly to take them. It also seems very well suited to my learning style which is both visual and very logical.

Dinner on Thursday was an experiment that turned out excellent! We had lamb chops that were soaked in red wine overnight and then patted in Madras seasoning for a crust and seared before being put in the oven. Since madras seasoning is spicy I made a nice cooling mango pineapple salsa with tomato, onion and fresh cilantro. The vegies were potatoes, carrots, onion and raisins with fennel, mustard and coriander seeds amoung other spices. The lamb was extremely tender.

The tomato plants are growing like weeds. I think it might be time to transplant them!

Some Piper cuteness. She insisted on keeping her “hat” on for the photo shoot.

tomato and pepper plants

I’ve decided to have another container garden on my balcony this year only this time I’m going to start some of the plants from scratch. I got a package of mixed heirloom tomato seeds and have to wait to find out which plants will be red, orange, yellow, green zebra stripes or black tomatoes. They are about a month old right now and you can see some of the differences between the tomato plants. The main difference is that some have the typical jagged tomato leaf you would expect to see and some of them are smooth leaves! They are starting to smell like tomato plants.

I also have chili pepper plants that are growing and are also almost a month old as well as some little seedlings popping up that will be mini purple peppers for containers.

I have bought purple beans that I’ll plant when it is warm enough to plant outside. They’ll be staggered so that there will always be a small supply of beans available. I also bought zucchini plants that don’t require pollination to grow fruit, scarlet runner and container carrots. There are also going to be the following herbs: thai basil, cinnamon basil, rosemary, spearmint and thyme. Luckily Sean is also going to let me use his balcony so I should have enough room for a good supply of vegetables.

Here is my little garden all together as it stands now.