Brave's AI summarizes: "Fried squash blossoms are a popular Italian-inspired dish, typically made with zucchini blossoms stuffed with a savory filling and then battered and fried to a crispy golden brown."
Lots of recipe variations online.
Posted on 07/01/2024 6:30:55 AM PDT by Diana in Wisconsin
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A LONG time. Pumpkins are usually 100+ days on the seed packet. Don’t worry, you’ve still got plenty of growing time by you.
Make sure you keep them watered each week in your heat! Also, if you can give the vines some shade, they would appreciate that. (7a, Right?)
Getting even just the top plastic will give me a visual moral boost to this long project.
Need to head back out and pick some Shishitos before it gets dark and take them to work and give them away.
Brave's AI summarizes: "Fried squash blossoms are a popular Italian-inspired dish, typically made with zucchini blossoms stuffed with a savory filling and then battered and fried to a crispy golden brown."
Lots of recipe variations online.
I would eat my left foot if it were deep fried in a Tempura batter, LOL! :)
Same date, same potatoes and at the far end, carrots (Valerie, Chanterey, and Kuroda) in sieved soil in a metal raised bed box. Japanese green multiplier onions on the right. (They grow large, the outer skin ages and splits, pull it off, and you have 3 green onions. Replant 2 and use one and start again.)
Mid june...Heat arrived and I decided to harvest the potatoes and carrots. Peas already gone. Got some small potatoes. (Then, of course, it cooled off for 3 weeks!) Seed potatoes for next year. The carrots were not full grown, but they were pretty crowded in the box and some animal decided to use the carrots for bedding at night. Time to pull them up! Kuroda was a very sweet variety. Others were also very good.
Once cleaned and the soil turned, I replaced them with Seeds and Such Bush Early Butternut squash. (90 days?) Some volunteer squash was growing in one of the sweet potato pots. I replanted it alongside but not in a pot and it has surprisingly grown well. Its climbing up a trellis and by the first female flower/fruit it looks like a butternut squash, probably full sized and 100 plus days.
Late July...picture on 7/11/2024. Sweet potatoes have taken over the picket fence. I am trying to keep them cut back to about 3 feet and limiting them to one or two plant stems to promote larger roots. (I hope.) Watering regularly. The volunteer squash is climbing the trellis.
Comments; Last year was squash bug hell. I have seen almost no spotted or striped cucumber beetles this year. The House Finches are hanging out in the spruce tree near my Plum trees eating the Japanese beetles settling on the watersprouts. I set out yellow cups with soapy water to catch cucumber beetles but nothing so far. (Is 5G driving them away or killing them??)
Vine Borers; I have syringe and injected s dilute amount of BT into the stems of my squash and zucchini this year in hopes of killing any squash vine borers. (When the holes stopped weeping the next day I covered them with a spot of Gorilla glue.) Will see how this works. Butternut is supposed to be resistant to squash bugs and wilt. I have already found and dispatched a number of squash nymphs. I suppose at some point I will need regular sprayings of high detergent dishwash soap to kill any that sneak in. (Really...a simple solution of soapy water kills them!! 1/2 cup to gallon of water! IIRC)
Off to bed. More photos later!
Ah, a good thing you live in Wisconsin where you have access to surplus squash blossoms and zucchini and onion rings and deep fried cheese curd!
Everything looks great! :)
My mom still makes an awesome “Everything Relish” I guess it is called, made with sweet Vidalia onions, and it is awesome on pork ribs, chicken, burgers, steak, hotdogs.
The sauce is like “Flo’s hotdog sauce”, which is world famous, but way better. And it is especially great on ribs. And really great on chicken too.
Make sure you check the blossoms for squash bugs though. The WEF hasn’t “forced us” (not gonna c9mply lol) to eat bugs yet lol
When you say that you “gave the sweet corn a shot of urea,” does that mean you tinkled on them?
I started a project that has been of interest to me for a while.
I am going to grocery stores and buying vegetables (sometimes the discount veggies) and using what is valuable and replanting them in my garden.
I have been successful with green onions, radish, and peppers.
Those dollar store wire baskets are fabulous for protecting small plants! They also provide a bit of shade. I’ve got 16 or 20 of them out and about.
Happy Saturday, everyone!
We had our first real taste test of shishito peppers a couple of nights ago. I sautéed them with onions, mushrooms, corn, in olive oil and a little soy sauce. We topped with cilantro and shredded cotija cheese. Wow! It knocked our socks off!
I had marinated a prime sirloin steak in a Vidalia onion, sweet pepper vinaigrette, then dried it off, and use a Brazilian steak rub on it. Hubby grilled it caveman style for a nice char. What a heavenly meal! He has asked me to make the shishito sauté mix again.
https://thefitfork.com/east-west-shishito-pepper-mushroom-saute/
Do any of you with shishito extras freeze them? I’m wondering if I should chop them up first, or just freeze whole?
Bkmk
I LOVE onions, even looked up once what it meant if you ‘crave’ onions - I think it was liver issues and I don’t have any :-)
Headed for the new house today, packing up now & I hope to stay at least a week. I need to scrounge some lumber from the back pole shed to take with me. I have been away for almost 2 weeks - hope everything is ok up there. I saw a pretty nasty storm on radar earlier this week ... purple spot just north & it looked like we were in a deep maroon blotch, so that all meant heavy rain.
Projects to work on (most on the ‘to do’ list for a good while, but with 105 - 110 heat indexes, working outside has not been something I wanted to do):
Clean up/season a 10” cast iron frying pan I bought at least 2 years ago at a yard sale for $1.00. I have one here at ‘home’ that I use all the time - really need one at the new house. Inside project if it’s too hot outside.
Work on my rock project at the back of the shop - I still have more to haul up there, but what I do have needs to be put into place.
Make 2 raised beds (3 x 6, out of cedar fence planks) & see if I can figure out how I want to site my raised beds. At some point, I need to do the ‘heavy’ work here and dig up my galvanized beds. I noticed my compost pile from leaves last year is about 12 - 18” high, so the maple leaves have seriously decomposed since they were about 4’, top of the fence, when I put them in there. I am using our trash cans to haul it to the new beds, but I need the trailer to do that & I left it at the new house when I had to dash home because mom had to go to the ER. Parking at the hospital is hard enough with a small car - PU truck is terrible & I doubt I could have found a place if I had the trailer in tow, so I put a lock on the hitch & left it in the barn.
See how it goes to make at least 2 of the DIY posts for a clothes rack. I am hoping to find some 2 x 4’s here that I can use.
If it’s not too hot & the ground isn’t rock hard, work on getting two post holes dug so I can install a 4 x 4 on each side of the driveway. We plan to put a chain across to keep unwanted folks out ... the driveway runs along the side of the property & forks left to go behind the house & if you stay straight, it goes to the barn/pole shed. More than once, I’ve had people show up at the back door & I had no idea they’d come up the driveway. I have since installed motion detectors on the driveway & back door - helps a lot. No WiFi yet and I need that for cameras.
The usual mowing .... some rain up there so I know there are weeds that will need knocking down, even if the grass doesn’t.
Try to trap some groundhogs ...
If I get really ambitious, I might hop across the mountain to my niece’s - she has saved some blackberries from her bushes for me and I am out of Blackberry Merlot Wine Jelly. This is my ‘go to’ for gifting ... people love the stuff. Jalapeno Pepper Jelly is a close second. Another inside project.
Last but not least - last night I was checking the back door around 11 to make sure it was locked. The back floodlight was on ... figured it was Mr. Fox or a raccoon. When I looked out, it was ‘Angel Deer’, the white deer that was born in the spring. She’s all grown up & really beautiful, almost like a ‘ghost’ in the dark. If she had a fawn, it didn’t survive, because I haven’t seen one with her. Another normal colored doe has a fawn following her around - a real cutie pie, even if it’s a future hosta-sedum-rose bush-day lily muncher!
Last weekend in July - where has this month gone???
Re: Angel Deer ... she was born spring a year ago (not this past spring), somehow survived hunting season in the fall. She’s old enough for a fawn so we were hoping she’d have one this year.
I was planning to ask the same. What is the freezing process? I picked a bunch Thurs and forgot to take them to work to give away so now I have about 100 peppers.
A quick web search says bell peppers or other large peppers are chopped mainly to save freezer space but peppers can be frozen whole. Every article says chop the top off and scoop out membrane and seeds. I think that's done beforehand because after thawing, they'll be softer and it would be harder to do that then. Most articles also say to freeze them on a cookie sheet and then bag them so you don't end up with a frozen mass of peppers and you can pull out a few at a time as needed.
No blanching required.
For a few seconds, the map made no sense but then I realized closer to the equator/sun is different than the angled rotational path of the sun. Missouri is intermediate but the onion seeds I was looking at say "Long day (potentially intermediate)" and they grew good at Baker Creek which is 100 miles South of me so they'll work.
Selecting veggies based on ease of slicing. Some may call it lazy. I prefer utilitarian.
Speaking of sun. I'm having tomato issues. Not getting many and they're slow to ripen. Last year I had shade cloth over the W/NW facing back half of the little garden to give afternoon shade. This year I did it over the whole garden thinking about last two years of near 100 degrees for weeks on end. If it was 20-30% shade cloth it would probably be fine but it's 40% iirc. Peppers are along the South end so they're doing great. Live and learn.
Off to do some more astronomical onion learning.
When I do bell peppers, I either slice or dice them before freezing, and put on wax paper on cookie sheets first. Then I stick them in freezer bags. (I do onions this way also).
I’m thinking that for some of the smaller shishitos, I can just freeze them whole, and will chop up the larger ones. Not that I have a ton left, but I do intend to buy more when I can find them.
I’m not usually a Target shopper, but that’s where I found these. I was only there to get a juice that I use to make rum punch, and it’s the last store that had any in stock. I didn’t want to make another stop so did a quick check in their produce section, and I was very surprised to find the shishito peppers there. I haven’t checked Meijer and Fresh Thyme yet, but I can say that Kroger and Walmart do not carry shishitos. At least, not the ones near me.
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