Veggies are good

Marge was gone the other evening, and I was late getting home, so I did the chores. With it being hot, the steers drink a bunch of water, so I went to filling the stock tanks. When I got that done, I shut up the end doors on the three high tunnels and fed the cats and called it a day. It was close to 7:30, and I hadn't had supper yet, so was getting hungry. Marge brought home some pizza from a meeting she was at, so it was leftover pizza for supper. I had picked some red tomatoes a couple days ago for tacos, and since there were three left, they sounded real good. So I had leftover pizza and three sliced up tomatoes. Pretty good supper.

But I like veggies. Actually I really like veggies. I've got a friend who loves tomatoes about like me, and he commented it was going to be a long winter without tomatoes. I agree. We have a bunch of canned tomatoes, but there is just something about fresh garden-grown tomatoes from the garden. We will occasionally buy some Roma tomatoes in the winter, and they aren't too bad. Not great, but better than nothing. I like to buy head lettuce and make me a salad. I cut up some lettuce, add some tomatoes, then some black and green olives, some cheese and then salad dressing. My favorite dressing is Dorothy Lynch salad dressing.

Our tomatoes have done really good this year, but we've grown almost all of them in our high tunnels. We can control the water in them so the leaves never get wet and the plants are never over watered. But we also have probably eight tomato plants in our outside hill garden called Ivan tomatoes. They are a Missouri bred tomato, and they have done just super. Do a DuckDuckGo search of them. They are a pale red kind of orange tomato that has a pretty good taste. I don't think a single tomato off them has cracked.

This year our eggplants have just gone berserk for wont of a better description. Some of the plants are right at 5 feet tall and just loaded with eggplant. We have tried the eggplant Parmesan, and I can't do it. The taste is OK, but I can't get past the texture. So we have taken the hide off them and sliced fairly thin, dipped in eggs and then in panko and fried. They are pretty good. We are going to try slicing them like potato wedges and frying them as well. I look at an eggplant and wonder how to cook it, and Marge looks at them and thinks oh how pretty. They say men think with their stomachs. Might be true.

We were watching Trisha on TV this summer, and she was frying green tomatoes. She sliced them fairly thin and then went to coating them. She first dipped them in flour then in egg and then in panko. Man they looked good so we had to try them, and they are good. We had bread crumbs, but I'd never heard of panko so had to check it out at one of our favorite grocery stores. Read the label and it's pretty much just bread crumbs. Only difference is its more coarse and it has a lot less ingredients. For me less ingredients on the label is always a plus.

We tried Trisha's way on green tomatoes and also on zucchini, and it adds to the taste, but is kind of messy and takes longer. So now we pretty much skin our zucchini, cut the zucchini in two right in the middle and then slice the two pieces lengthwise. We dip these in egg and panko or bread crumbs and fry them. Gosh they are good. We pretty much grow just yellow zucchini. We like it a lot better than the green zucchini. One other reason is we have trouble growing the dark zucchini. I'll bet I've planted 30 or 40 green zucchini plants, and we haven't picked a dozen zucchini off them.

Been enjoying our potatoes. We like them baked and fried and mashed. We also like to slice them kind of thin and put in the toaster oven. Pretty easy to do and tasty as well. Corn didn't do so well this year, so we bought most of our corn. We love corn on the cob. We've had tons of peppers. Red and yellow and green and orange ones. Some have been super sweet and some super-hot. I've fried my mouth several times on a not-supposed-to-be-hot Alma Paprika. I gave a couple of my friends a bite, and we all agreed it was hot. I asked one of them, and they replied it was hotter than a jalapeño.

Since Marge is retired, she helped me clear off our hill garden, which is about an acre, and got it planted to turnips this summer. Every day I go past it hoping they would grow enough to start pulling turnips. Love turnips. A friend of mine likes turnips greens. They are OK, but I sure like the turnips better. I probably eat more of them raw than any other way. I skin mine and add some Lawry's seasoning salt and enjoy. Turnips are also good boiled with butter, but they are super fried like taters. Fry up a cast iron skillet of onions and turnips with a little garlic added in. What do they say: "Slap your momma good?"

Now don't get me wrong. I love a good "meat" or real "cow" burger, a nice steak, a good roast or a piece of brisket, some liver and onions, a good pork butt or a piece of pork loin. As I write this article we have a beef roast thawing in the ice box (for those who are younger: the refrigerator) we are going to cut up in pieces and along with some onions and garlic and zucchini make some skewers. These we'll cook on the pellet smoker, which I love. I'm sure we'll have a tomato and maybe a cucumber along with it. Just starting to get a few cucumbers. They are the stubby pickle kind, but they sure beat no cucumbers.

Every now and then I like to walk through the veggie section of a grocery store and see what they have. Some things look good and almost invite us to try them. Other things don't look so good. Try some veggies. You just might like them or at least some of them.