August marks the end of our summer garden. Only a few plants remain including watermelon, pumpkins, and tomatoes, tomatoes, tomatoes. Time to bring out the canning supplies and make some sauce.

Plum tomatoes from our six plants had completely taken over our refrigerator and as the only person in the house that eats them fresh, I couldn’t seem to make a dent in their numbers.

I pulled out a fantastic recipe we’d used several years before from Biba Caggiano’s Modern Italian Cooking. It’s modified slightly to include some fresh garlic from our garden and a few other minor additions.

Three hours and a steamy kitchen later, we have sauce. Ten pints of “Teagan and Ayn’s Totally Tomato Sauce” to be exact. All natural, fresh from the garden, and one full pound of tomatoes per jar.

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A simple mix of flour, water, milk, salt, butter, yeast, sugar, vinegar, and a little time nets you the most delicious of foods—bread.

I recently picked up a 25 lb. bag of bread flour and prepared a loaf tonight. Start to finish, it took about 2 hours, most of which was simply waiting on the yeast. The result was a 24” loaf with a dense, chewy crumb and a thin crust with a good bite. It smelled so good that Anitra and I ate almost all of it minutes after it came out of the oven.

You can see more photos on Flickr.

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Despite calls to the contrary by some, I couldn’t get enough of the rain this weekend.

The cool, wet weather is doing wonders for the buttercrunch and the two other leaf lettuce varieties I planted this year. The potatoes are finally up along with first signs of the beans, sunflowers, beets, and carrots—although it looks like Mr. Rabbit may have had a midnight snack on some of the beet sprouts.

And of course, the asparagus beds are in full force now - with more and more purple spears coming up each morning. Those crowns were the best gardening investments I’ve ever made.

In another week or so, I’ll get some tomatoes and squash going. It’s going to be a bountiful summer in our back yard and we’re not the only ones.

John’s peas are looking great and Foodie has as an eclectic a mix as I do.

What are you growing this year?

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I first learned about the Turducken from Jim at MaxPitch Media and this fantastic holiday beast feast has since become a steady source of conversation in our household (don’t ask why, we’re weird that way).

Today, I stumbled across the Turducken to end all Turduckens.

Ladies and gents, may I present the Turgoobarfowlmalpousquapartsquapheachucken.

This roast of 48 birds of 12 different species costs £665, serves 125 people, and is the creation of Anne Petch, a farmer from Devon.

Anne, who runs the Heal Farm shop near Kings Nympton, said: “The True Love Roast has a bird for each of the 12 days of Christmas.

“It uses skinless breast meat from several birds of each species with flavours that work well together.”

The roast contains turkey, goose, chicken, pheasant, partridge, pigeon squab, Aylesbury duck, Barbary duck, poussin, guinea fowl, mallard-and quail with herb and fruit stuffings.

Anne added: “It takes about 45 minutes to build the roast. However, it takes at least three hours before that to bone the birds and another couple of days to make all the stuffings.

There’s great comments on the article over at the dailymail.co.uk site too. Go read them.

[source: dailymail.co.uk]

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