A lot of my blog friends are thinking about the coming growing season. It makes me itch to get out and dig in the soil. Feel the ground in my hand...get my fingernails so dirty they don't look like they will ever come clean again. Anyway, the talk of the coming growing season spurred me to look back at photos of the past.
I don't recall what kind of bell peppers these were...
I think the above was taken the same day....
This is from a couple years later. I sure have missed having my own bell peppers to freeze the past couple or three years. They are so handy to have to add to chili, or spaghetti sauce or whatever else you use them in. Instead of making stuffed bell peppers, I slice up a couple bell peppers in the bottom of a casserole dish, add my browned ground beef which I have also added onions too, cover with tomato juice and bake in 325ยบ oven for about an hour and a half. (I don't like to eat big chunks of cooked bell pepper, so I came up with doing this.) Roger still gets the bell pepper, and I get the flavor...I used to add a bit of rice and cheese, but we like it simple the best.
And this is one of those dishes that I love better the second time around. If I have enough to have it the second time around. Both girls loved it, and I served it to one of Roger's friends one time and he loved it. I want it with mashed potatoes of course.
Though I love to add a few red bell peppers to things...I add red ones for the color. But I want to add lots of green ones for the flavor.
One of my loves is salsa...
but above all else, I love home canned tomato juice. It is like sunshine from a jar! In the winter if I am sick with a cold, etc. there is nothing like it. The stuff you buy in the store does not compare.
************
The last time we had tomatoes was not good. I had 16-20 plants and only ate one whole tomato...the flavor was not good and all the tomatoes were all messed up...you can see samples HERE. It states that they did not all look like that. The thing was, I would pick a pretty one and cut into it and it would have a mess inside...
The next year I bought a couple of the tomato plants they have in huge containers, thinking maybe I could at least have some to snack on, but they did not grow good either. I messed around and did not try anything in 2016....and that August is when Roger had his stroke. So I have not tried any since. But I would love to try some this year...just to have a few to eat fresh from the garden.
Do you grow your own tomatoes and if so, how do you grow them, specially if not directly in the ground?
