Every year when FarWest rolls around we say “has it really been a year?”, and then we move on to the show!

You’ll note that the carpet is the same psychedelic pattern as last year. And the booth is much the same as well.

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We need your help!

Do you want your beautiful garden to appear in one of our books? Now is your chance! We are looking for images of edible front yards to potentially include in Ivette Soler’s forthcoming book, The Edible Front Yard, which we will publish next spring.

The Edible Front Yard will feature a mix of easy-to-follow advice, fun projects, detailed plant information, and a sense of adventure that will inspire gardeners everywhere to replace their roses with radishes, trade their camellias for corn, and turn their front yards into something that truly expresses their style.

We are looking for pictures that clearly show edibles in a front yard setting — glimpses of your house, walkways, and curbs are encouraged! If we choose your pictures for the book, you will receive a free copy of the book, your name in the photography credits, and of course, bragging rights.

Please post a comment with a link to 1-2 pictures of your beautiful front yard with a description of what edibles you are growing. (Or you can email us at web@timberpress.com.) Entries must be submitted by September 15th. Final images should be at least 300 dpi and 1 MB in size. Digital entries only, please.

We will contact you if you’ve earned a spot in Ivette’s book. Show us what your edible front yards look like!

I tried growing chiles this season. They looked promising back in June as tiny little sprouts began to form. Unfortunately, I grew them a bit too close to my now-hulking tomato plant, which is responsible not only for the death of my peppers but for a good portion of my zucchinis as well. Fortunately, I had a packet of dried Thai chile pods on hand when I decided to make Enraged Pasta (Penne all’Arrabiata), a recipe found in The Complete Chile Pepper Book. I liked the name, it requires few ingredients (no zucchinis), and dresses up your basic pasta quite nicely. It’s a great last-minute meal, since most pantries already include these ingredients. I added a bit of smoked paprika, which goes well with almost any tomato-based sauce.

Enraged Pasta (Penne all’Arrabiata)

• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 2 to 3 medium onions, chopped
• 2 to 3 cloves garlic, finally chopped
• 2 small fresh red chile pods (Thai, Serrano, or birdseye), stems and seeds removed, minced (be sure to rehydrate dried pods by soaking in hot water)
• 2 14-ounce cans chopped tomatoes
• 1 pound penne rigate pasta
• 3 ½ ounces Parmesan cheese, grated
• Salt to taste
• 1 teaspoon smoked paprika, or to taste

1)     Heat the olive oil in a pan over low heat. Add the onions, garlic, and chile and cook until the onions are golden brown. Add the tomatoes and cook, uncovered, about 15 minutes over low to medium heat.

2)     Meanwhile, cook the pasta al dente in lightly salted water in a large pot, according to instructions on the package.

3)     Grate the Parmesan cheese and stir half of it into the sauce. Drain the pasta well, mix thoroughly with the sauce, and sprinkle with the remaining cheese. Serve piping hot.

As the sole native Texan in the Timber Press office, I have somehow become the “salsa guy” at company potlucks — no, not because of my amazing dancing skills, but because I really enjoy making salsas. And while there are many reasons to bring homemade salsas to a potluck (people seem to like them, you don’t have to worry that they’ll get cold and icky like that other dish), my main reason is, well, because they’re so easy to make. Please don’t tell my coworkers I said that.

Strings, or ristras, of chiles pause to dry in the sun on their way to my salsa

But it’s true. After I moved to the comparatively salsa-less Portland, I spent not a little time in the kitchen trying and trying to make salsas like I’d remembered, only to end up with chunky vegetable medleys that weren’t nearly as interesting. And then someone told me the secret, which I will now reveal to you in recipe form. (But, if you can’t wait, the secret is to roast all your ingredients. Really, that’s it.)

This recipe works well with almost any dried chile, which is nice, since you never know what kind your local store will sell. Most recently I’ve made it with chipotles, which add a nice smoky flavor, but it worked just as well with the dried chiles I picked up at a roadside stand (flipping through The Complete Chile Pepper Book, they looked something like a Capsicum annuum ‘Santaka’).

Salsa Roja (Red taqueria-style salsa)

Makes about 2 cups

• 1/2 ounce dried, stemmed chiles
• half a bulb of unpeeled garlic cloves*
• 1 pound tomatillos, husked and rinsed
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon sugar

1. Stir the chiles in a dry pan over medium heat until aromatic, about a minute or two. Cover chiles with hot water in a bowl for 30 minutes (or more for thick chiles like chipotles) until rehydrated.
2. Meanwhile, roast the garlic in a dry pan until the skin has large black spots on it and the cloves are soft. Remove skin once cool.
3. Roast the tomatillos on a baking sheet a few inches below the broiler until the skins have large brown patches. Turn over and repeat for the other side. Allow to cool.
4. Add chiles, garlic, and tomatillos (including any juice or bits that leaked onto the tray) to a blender or food processor and puree. Pour into a bowl and add salt and sugar. Add water if necessary to adjust consistency.

*Adjust this to your own taste. Half a bulb is fairly garlicky, but I could do more myself.

OK, folks. Time to get the Timber Press chile pepper appreciation week really started. Because all celebrations beg for a top-notch cocktail, I present author Dave DeWitt’s instructions for making chile infused vodka, along with my somewhat made-up spicy mango martini recipe, inspired from a delicious cocktail I recently tried at a great local eatery. You should absolutely attempt this cocktail if your pepper plants are bursting with spicy fruit (which mine are), or if you want to culminate the summer season in a spicy-cool fashion.

Sip this at your Labor Day Weekend bash. The vibrant color will pair nicely with your summer whites.

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We have two types of peppers growing in our front yard, and they’re doing well! Unlike most of the veggies that have been unhappy with the long winter followed by unseasonably hot temperatures (see my sad tomatoes as a perfect example), the peppers are thriving. They are long and green and round and purple, but I don’t know what they are because I didn’t keep the seed packets. Oops. Here’s a kind of old picture of them mixed in with beans and melons.

They are hot though, really hot. I tested them by asking my very gullible younger brother to eat the green one first. If he had been a comic book character, smoke would have blown out his ears. I then told him to follow it up with a purple one because they are sweet, knowing full well I was lying. Turns out they’re hotter. He spent the rest of the night trying to cool his mouth with Popsicle and beer, and I finally knew the heat scale of my mystery peppers.

But I hadn’t cooked with them yet. I pulled this recipe from The Complete Chile Pepper Book. I made a few tweaks based on what I had in the pantry and a strong distaste for eggplant, and I really liked it. Warning, using my unknown peppers made it hot.

Harissa and Seven-Vegetable Couscous (as adapted by me with one less veggie and random, unknown chile peppers)

• 2 Tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
• 1 large onion, chopped
• 1 clove garlic, chopped
• 1 cup Harissa
• 4 dried piquin chiles (or, do what I did and use whatever peppers are growing in your garden)
• 1 1/2  Tsp ground cumin
• 1  Tspground ginger
• 1 TSP ground cinnamon
• ½  TSP round allspice
• 4 cups vegetable broth
• 1/2 TPS saffron (or turmeric)
• 2 large potatos, peeled and diced
• 4 medium tomatoes, chopped
• 2 carrots, peeled and julienne-cut
• 2 cups chick peas
• 2 zucchinis, julienne-cut
• 1 cup peas
• 4 cups couscous

1. Heat the oil in a Dutch oven or stockpot over high heat; when hot, reduce the heat, add the onion and garlic, and sauté until soft. Add the harissa along with the chiles, cumin, ginger, cinnamon, and allspice and continue to cook for 5 minutes.

2. Add the broth, saffron, and potato and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat, cover, and simmer the mixture for an hour, adding water if necessary to thin if it becomes too thick.

3. Add the tomatoes, carrots, and chickpeas and simmer for 20 minutes. Add the zucchini and peas and simmer until the vegetables are done. Taste and adjust the seasonings.

4. Add the cooked couscous.

5. Stir the lemon juice into the stew, taste, and adjust the seasonings.

You may know this already, but:

When you write a blog, you have the power to declare that your entire week of blog posts must be dedicated to chile peppers.

It’s true! August 30th through September 3rd is Chile Pepper Week on the Timber Press blog. We have declared it so, and five of us will be writing posts about cooking, growing, possible world domination, and other chile topics as they strike us. After all, the Labor Day weekend at the beginning of September means that everyone is going to be doing some cooking, and ’tis the season for fiery chiles.

To kick off Chile Week, here are some chile facts culled from The Complete Chile Pepper Book.

• Chile peppers are native to Mexico, and Central and South America.

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Timber Press had its annual potluck/animal costume contest a week ago in sunny (and huge) Laurelhurst Park. While engaging in the festivities, I noticed an enormous staircase in the park’s corner that seemed to be placed there for no rhyme or reason. Honestly, it’s not something that I would have usually given a second glance. But then a congregation of Buddhist monks descended the stairway, which added a surreal element to the scene. Was the stairway built for a Buddhist Temple? Or maybe just easy access to the street? But why is it hidden in a random corner of the park and not at the entrance?

Reading The Portland Stairs Book by Laura Foster, I was able to satisfy my curiosity. It turns out that the mansion of Portland’s 1912 mayor H. Russell Albee is directly above the staircase. The mansion features the same architecture, and could very well be the mayor’s grand staircase to the park below. This was back when government officials were able to divert public money into personal projects, which is something that’s unheard of today.

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Tom Fischer reviews a plant per month on our blog.

The good news is that rock roses (members of the genus Cistus) are beautiful, vigorous, drought-tolerant, spring-blooming evergreen shrubs that make excellent groundcovers. The bad news is that most of them are hardy only to about Zone 8 (a few will squeak by in Zone 7) and they don’t like muggy southeastern summers. But if you live where winters are mild and summertime humidity relatively low, you’ll find few other shrubs so easy to care for or so generous in flower.

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I’ve grown garlic for three years running now, and and love it. It’s a sublimely easy crop — stick the bulbs in the ground in October/November, and then forget them until they come up. ‘Round about June, I harvest the scapes to make garlic scape pesto, and then in July I pull up the garlic,  and hang it out on the back porch to dry.

Last year’s garlic fail involved me forgetting to write down what kind of garlic I planted. (Also, abject failure at braiding garlic.) This year I was really excited about my garlic crop, because I planted ‘Spanish Roja’, which our author Ted Meredith insists is the Last Word in garlic awesomeness.

For inexplicable reasons, only three of the twelve planted garlic bulbs came up. Maybe I planted them too deep? The winter was too wet and they rotted? I don’t know. In any case, all I got was one normal garlic, and two small and puny ones.

At least they fit nicely in an attractive bowl.

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