Category Archives: Garden

July garden tour

Here’s another slide show from the garden.  Given the fact that we’re baking here (and will be for the foreseeable future), we’re very thankful to have the new drip irrigation system in place (guest post on that coming soon).

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It’s come a long way since May:

  • We ate our first tomato, with lots more on the way.
  • We’ve been enjoying new potatoes.
  • Matthew and his mom harvested all the Yukon gold potatoes, but there are many potatoes that need to be harvested soon.
  • Despite the large quantity of onions planted, our harvest may be fairly small — it got too hot before they had time to get much size.
  • Summer squash and cukes are pouring in, with a couple jars of pickles in the fridge.
  • Matthew made a couple of small restaurant sales (fennel, artichokes, kale, and golden beets)!
  • We named the garden, and I’m working on a new page for all things garden-related.

Sungolds for my golden boy

A little less than a year ago, Gabriel arrived with a good bit of fairly dark brown hair.  I assumed he would have Matthew’s nice, deep brown hair color, but over the past year, G’s hair lightened quite a bit.  I now describe it as “golden,” especially when the sun hits it, and in this picture, it looks red.

Moving day photo in front of our first home

Anyhow, Sir has been vacationing in Iowa with Baba (Czech for “Grandma” — Matthew’s mom’s side of the family is Czech) for the past few days.  We’ll be apart for over 72 hours (previous longest separation was 27 hours), which made me a bit apprehensive.

Fortunately, Baba reports that things are going very well.  Sir’s only complaint is that she didn’t bring enough sungolds.

I headed to the garden this morning for a picking session, since Sir said he would refuse to see us if we did not come bearing gifts.

Sungold cherry tomatoes

Happy 4th of July!

The first tomato and some ‘chokes

I’ve seen tomatoes at the farmers’ market for almost two months now, and I’ve avoided them like the plague (if only I were so good at avoiding the regular daycare plagues courtesy of Sir).  Sure, they’re locally grown, but most of the very early ones grew in tunnels or hothouses, and they lack that perfectly ripe, hot summer weather tomato taste that makes a REAL tomato.

My waiting paid off last week when my MIL presented our first garden tomato of 2012.  In our eagerness to dig in, I neglected to take a picture before slicing it, but rest assured that it was big and beautiful.

We enjoyed it pure and simple, with some salt and a drizzle of olive oil.  It served as the perfect addition to our meal of quinoa salad and . . .

. . . garden-grown artichokes!

Growing artichokes in our zone requires some special tricks, but Matthew managed for the second year in a row.  I didn’t write much about them last year because most of the harvest came in right around the time Gabriel arrived.

We enjoy them steamed and dipped in a olive oil and butter sauce.

Artichokes with dipping sauce

Recipe by Melissa

Ingredients
Whole, fresh artichokes
1 T. olive oil
1 T. butter
1/2 t. lemon juice
salt to taste

Directions
Cut stems off of artichokes (if not already removed) to leave a flat base.  Place artichokes on the bottom of a pot, standing upright.  It helps to choose a pot where you can pack the ‘chokes tightly so they stay upright.

Add water to cover the bottom of the pan, place a lid on the pan, and steam the artichokes until tender, 15-30 minutes, depending on size and freshness.  They are ready to eat when you can easily pull out on of the leaves and/or when you can easily insert a fork in the base.

While they steam, melt the butter and combine with olive oil, lemon juice and salt to make a dipping sauce.

Serve  artichokes whole with dipping sauce.  To eat, pull off outer leaves, dip in sauce, and then scrape the flesh at the inner base of the leaf with your teeth.  As you get closer to the heart, there will be more tender, edible flesh on the leaves.

Once near the heart, use scissors to snip off the top, pointed portion of the remaining leaves.  Dip and enjoy!

Still gotta eat

As would be expected, the move altered our usual cooking and eating patterns a bit.  I cooked on Friday night, but by Saturday it was time to start saying goodbye to our kitchen.

We planned to go out to eat on Saturday with my mom, who came to see Sir and help pack.  Unfortunately, I came down with the latest disease from Typhoid Gabriel and didn’t really feel like eating much of anything, much less leaving the apartment to do so.  We settled on take-out from Pho Grand.  Not the greenest dining option, giving their use of the standard large polystyrene containers, but desperate times call for desperate measures.

We had a decent supply of leftovers in the fridge, so we worked on lightening that load at both lunch and dinner on Sunday.  We enjoyed a “deconstructed” pumpkin lasagna for lunch (yay for frozen homemade pasta) and a Swiss chard and chickpea dish for dinner.

All bets were off on Monday, our actual moving day.  When lunch rolled around, we’d been up packing and moving for hours.  I picked up some sandwiches and deli-case salads at a nice little deli within walking distance of our new place.

Except I didn’t walk (hangs head in shame).  I was heading back to our old apartment to get Matthew and a last car load, and the deli was more-or-less on a direct route anyway, and it was like eleventy-million degrees outside with high-noon sun, and with a second floor to second floor move, I’d already walked up and down more flights of stairs than I cared to count.  So that’s my excuse for choosing inactive, gas-guzzling transportation.

But lunch was good, though, once again, some disposable containers.  Matt’s mom brought us carry-out pizza for dinner.  The pizza box was pretty darn clean, so that at least got recycled.

The good news is that despite the still-crazy state of our apartment, we’ve gotten back into the kitchen the past few nights.  By which I mean Matthew’s gotten back into the kitchen, of course, per our usual weeknight routine.

The garden supplied almost all of the ingredients for Wednesday night’s dinner.  Boiled beets — some cubed for part of the main dish, some thinly sliced for a side with goat cheese.

Potatoes “baked” in the microwave, cubed, and tossed with olive oil and salt to serve as a base for sauteed cabbage with onions [previously] roasted elephant garlic, edamame, and the cubed beet.

The only produce on the plate NOT from the garden was the edamame and the onions (both of which we’re growing but are not ready for harvest yet).

Plum out

I’ve been trying to lighten the load for our move (less than a week away!) by eating through some of the dry goods in our pantry.  While the shelves are by no means bare, they are a bit emptier, and the post-move shopping list on the fridge grows longer every day (I’m afraid this grocery trip may give new meaning to “Whole Paycheck”).

We ran out of raisins a couple of weeks ago, and we have extremely limited quantities of a couple of other dried fruits, so I’ve gotten creative with my morning oatmeal.*

The plum trees at my MIL’s have yielded a bumper crop this year, and, while cutting the flesh away from the pit is a bit of a pain, they contribute to a delicious bowl of oatmeal.

This variety of plum is very tiny, perhaps a bit larger than a big cherry.  Small and delicious!

Sir also finds the plums an acceptable (if messy) addition to meals.

*Raisins are not the only fruit I eat in my oatmeal, but they’ve become a go-to when apples aren’t in-season.  While not local, shipping dried fruit from California is better environmentally than shipping fresh fruit, because of the water weight.