Aproveche

¨Que aproveche¨ is what you say in Spain, instead of ¨Bon Apetit¨.

The local tomatos are finally appearing in the farmer´s market, so I did up a batch of roasted tomatoes with garlic. I am surprised at the number of tomatoes it takes to make sauce.  Mental note - plant many, many sauce tomatoes.  Hampered by not owning a food mill, the skins plucked right off and the rest was mashable. I was planning to water bath these, but there wasn´t really enough, so I froze half and ate the rest.  It was delicious.

The rest of the harvest so far includes:  fallen pears, crab apples, pickled onions and blackberries.  The pears rotted almost immediately, since they´d blown down from the very top of the pear tree.  Still undecided what to do with the crabapples as they seem small to be peeling and coring.  The blackberries are tasty, but smallish and seedy.  I was going to make jam, but finally put them in the freezer to decide later.

In latest news, the birds have gotten most of the elderberries.  And the elder with the most left to ripen got taken out by one of our dead apple trees when it fell over in a windstorm.  Instead of making elderberry syrup, we´re now faced with splitting and stacking a lot of applewood.  I´ll have to investgate smoking something - bacon anyone?

And, inspired by the tomatoes,  I planted some cilantro and sweet basil seeds in pots.  They´re coming up very, very slowly and may not make it before frost.  Fingers crossed for future salsa and pesto.