My kitchen smells amazing

Tomorrow will be all about baking for the Thursday farmer's market but yesterday and today I have been canning.

six heads of roasted garlic

Right now I am making roasted garlic pasta sauce.  It starts by roasting six heads of garlic and 4 green peppers and I have to say that roasted garlic has my kitchen smelling pretty amazing.  It will be a couple of hours before the sauce is ready for the canner and then another hour or so before the jars are cooling on the counter. I am trying t new recipe and will be sharing the recipe if it is successful over at the farmstand cookbook (link on the right sidebar).  It incorporates many garden treasures.  The garlic I purchased but the tomatoes, green peppers and herbs are all grown on the farm.  

Earlier this week I was making Bloody Mary mix, dandelion jelly and pepper jelly.  

I had a few more dandelions so an opportunity arose to make another couple of batches of dandelion jelly.  That recipe has been previously shared and can be found here.

The Bloody Mary mix also uses tomatoes from the garden along with bell peppers and jalapeno peppers.  It will be fun garnished with the pickled asparagus that was made earlier this spring.  I am making two versions, one with Worcestershire and a vegetarian one without.  

I make a pepper jelly with green bell peppers and jalapeno peppers.  My kids also make pepper jelly although their choices of hot peppers is a lot more adventurous than mine.  This year I tried a recipe for a zucchini pepper jam to sell at the market.  The zucchinis are a substitute for the bell peppers and the flavor is similar but it is a great way to use a spare zucchini.  I used farm grown zucchini and jalapenos.  You can't get more local than that.

 Earlier when my plums were ready I made a single batch of roasted plum blackberry jam.  I only had enough plums for five small jars but it was the first batch of plums from our young trees.  

I have grapes in the fridge to be processed and the elderberries are ripe and this year I will be making jelly with them.

 I will update this post with links for the other recipes as they are posted. 

Garden harvest

This afternoon and evening i braved the mosquitos to harvest the ripe peppers and tomatoes and zucchinis.

My wagon filled with produce.

Green bell peppers and mini bells.

three types of summer squash and pink and black cherry tomatoes

These are Brandywine tomatoes

slicers

Paste tomatoes

All in all this time I picked 9 zucchini, 4.5 pounds of bell peppers, and over 75 pounds of various varieties of tomatoes.  The tomatoes have had a rough time and it shows with some scarring of the skin.  We had drought, monsoons and now cold.  They will work well for canning even if they aren't going to win a beauty contest.  I have started to can, making pepper jelly and zucchini pepper jelly and Bloody Mary mix so far.  Today there were a few dandelions in the yard so I collected some for another batch of dandelion jelly.