Garden – Page 7 – Her Green Life

Foods of summer

The garden kindly waited to hit its full summer stride until we returned from our trip. After a week of being creative with frozen veggies, I was ready!

The zucchini on the bottom right got away from us, but it was perfect for zucchini bread. I whipped up a big batch and made some with chocolate chips as “cupcakes” for Sir’s belated birthday celebration with his childcare friends.

After I made them, I had a bit of baker’s regret, wondering if three- and four-year-old kids would go for my healthy treat: no frosting, made with whole wheat pastry flour, and chock full of grated zucchini and chopped pecans.

The kids’ verdict? Yummy!

I made use of the hot oven to roast some veggies for dinner that night: red beets, golden beets, and broccoli romanesco, served with pasta with garden veggie sauce and a side of garlicky collard greens.

Garlic featured prominently in the roasting marathon. Matthew peeled hundreds of cloves of garlic for a taste test of the twenty-four varieties he grew. Unfortunately, my method of roasting the garlic in muffin tins, with individual varieties separated in the cups, and perhaps the fact that the cloves were already peeled, didn’t lead to the best roasting ever.

Edible, just not that really delicious carmelization that you can get with roasted garlic. Matthew also sauteed several of the varieties to try them that way.

After all that work, our general conclusion is that the different kinds all taste like, you guessed it, garlic!

Another meal, this one inspired by a magazine recipe for pasta with anchovies, walnuts, and raisins, served with tomato-topped kale and cannellini beans, plus some sauteed squash.

Finally, this dish was actually a pre-vacation meal: a simple pasta salad with [raw] kale, spinach, and last year’s sun-dried tomatoes, dressed in olive oil, white wine vinegar, parm, and salt and pepper. Some chopped olives would have made a welcome addition.

Unpictured eats: quinoa and summer squash salad, gazpacho, lentil chili, and garden veggie curry.

Stay tuned for some recipes, including more details on the polenta dish and a simple, refreshing cucumber salad.

Garden update

It’s one of those, “I haven’t posted in over a week, where do I start?” kind of mornings over here. So, how about a little June garden tour and update?

Strawberry season has given way to red raspberry season (with black raspberries — my favorite!) soon to follow.

We’re currently harvesting artichokes (those crazy, spiky Jurassic-looking plants in the background — see here for artichoke serving suggestion) and the garlic (on the right) is almost mature.

Matthew harvested over six pounds of garlic scapes a couple of weeks ago, four pounds of which we sold to Local Harvest Grocery in Kirkwood.

We’ve been incorporating the rest into our meals, mainly using it as you would garlic, but adding it toward the end of cooking time since it’s more delicate.

Pictured from front to back: feathery fennel fronds, cruciferous veggies, onions, and potatoes.

We’ve been harvesting fennel, including some for sale to Five. We roasted most of the fennel the last two years, but I’m experimenting with very thin slices for use in salads this time around.

We had a beautiful lettuce harvest (and lovely salads) for a few weeks, but most of the lettuce is bolting now.

It’s probably just as well, as I’ve concluded that all the greenery in huge salads makes my stomach grumpy. It doesn’t happen every time, but often enough that I’m scaling back a bit and trying for less lettuce and more toppings.

We’ve also been enjoying fresh peas, including our first experience growing shelling peas. They require a bit more work (i.e., the shelling) as compared to sugar snap peas, but they’re sweet and delicious — worth it!

Sir finds peas of all kinds delightful, and I learned the hard way that sitting next to him on the floor, attempting to shell and snap peas while he played, was a losing proposition when my goal was actually having peas left for dinner!

What’s growing in your garden and/or what fun local produce is on your plate this week?

Garden in my salad bowl

With a variety of lettuce types, as well as abundant arugula and spinach, salads have graced our table quite frequently in the past two weeks.

At their simplest, I dress salad greens with vinegar (or lemon juice), salt and/or honey, and a drizzle of good olive oil.

Once you have a base of greens, the add-ins are limitless. Here are some favorites:

Nuts or sunflower seeds (toasted/roasted for optimal flavor)
Black beans or chickpeas
Dried fruit
Roasted beets
Grated Parmesan cheese
Goat cheese
Tomatoes, in season (i.e., not yet here)
Avocado
Marinated tofu
Frozen corn or peas, thawed

I recently made this Asian-inspired salad with the idea of creating the flavors of a spring roll without the work of actually wrapping the filling.

Base of greens with rice noodles, thinly sliced garden veggies (including radishes, carrots, and asparagus), green onion, cilantro, and marinated tofu, in a dressing of seasoned rice vinegar, toasted sesame oil, soy sauce, chopped peanuts, minced garlic, and a dash of sriracha chili sauce. It totally tasted like a spring roll in a bowl!

After spending Monday morning in the garden, the strawberries were calling. I detoured by the store on the way home to pick up goat cheese for this salad:

Base of spinach and arugula, tossed with sea salt and good balsamic vinegar, then allowed to sit and wilt slightly. Topped with sliced (and lightly sugared) strawberries, toasted pecans, goat cheese and a drizzle of olive oil. Yum, just what I had in mind!

Your turn
Any favorite salad combos that you’re enjoying these days? I love suggestions, because even with all the options, it’s easy to get in a rut!

Baby, weaned

Thursday night marked the culmination of over twenty-two months of breastfeeding. We started our weaning journey sixteen months ago, when we offered Sir his first tastes of solid food.

While Sir was enthusiastic about solid food from the get-go, the majority of his calories continued to come from breast milk until about the 10-month mark, and the balance has continued to shift to more food, less milk ever since.

When my job ended last summer, I continued with the regularly-timed nursing sessions that made it possible for me to breast feed instead of pumping at work (i.e., he wasn’t nursing on demand, and really hadn’t (other than overnight) since I went back to work when he was 14 weeks old). The routine feedings worked well for us, and I didn’t see any need to switch things up at that point.

Our process of eliminating milk feedings felt pretty natural. We went from five times a day to four times a day somewhere around the 12-month mark, then dropped another feeding around 15-months when he went from two naps a day to a single nap.

We stuck with the 3-a-day routine for quite awhile. I wanted to continue nursing through the winter sickness/germ season, and winter weather certainly encouraged snuggling up.

In March, when the time change pushed his nap wake-up time very close to the time of his afternoon [solid food] snack, I dropped the post-nap feeding.

I wasn’t really sure where we would go from there, other than knowing that breast feeding would culminate sometime before our current nine day separation.

Six or seven weeks ago, I dropped the first-thing-in-the-morning feeding. He seemed happy enough to get out of bed, have a big drink of water, and reunite with all of his toys while I made breakfast, so we went with it.

That left us with the before-bed feeding. I didn’t plan to continue that feeding for more than a few weeks, partly because I didn’t expect my milk supply to last with such infrequent nursing sessions. Somehow he kept finding a bit of milk every night, and I had no compelling reason to stop nursing him, so we continued right up to the eve of his departure for Florida.

I held him a little extra long that night, gazing at his sweet face and heavy eyelids, savoring the end of this stage of our relationship.

——

Related post: Breastmilkin’ it

Garden duty

I’ve traded mommy duties for garden duties for the next few days. It’s not a bad swap, since one of the major tasks is picking [and eating] strawberries.

At this point, the berries are just starting to trickle in, and (like so many crops), they would be best grown in your own yard, where you’re there to pick them fully ripe every day, instead of at a commuter garden twelve miles away. I draw the line at hopping in the car every day just for a few strawberries, so I’ll be headed there every other day at the most.

Also on my garden task list for the day:

Pick asparagus (there was none)
Pick lettuce, arugula, and spinach (now have WAY too much lettuce, as I’d been planning to give some to my FIL who ended up with plenty of greens in his CSA share)
Squash flea beetles on eggplant — success!
Water areas with recently planted seeds

I also harvested some cilantro and mint (not quite sure what I’m doing with the mint). There may be something else, but that’s all I’ve got at the moment. Of course, it’s a three-thousand square foot garden — there’s MUCH more that I could have done, but I am, alas, a slacker gardener.

Also, I made it a quick visit so I could run by the farmers’ market and buy strawberries. I know, I know, I just wrote about how I’m picking strawberries at the garden, but I’m not sure our harvest this [first] year will be enough to yield much for the freezer.

As long as I was out and about in the car, I decided to hedge my bets. Once at the market, instead of buying tons of berries (as I’d originally planned), I ended up with a very moderate three quarts. The price break for buying eight quarts was less than fifty cents per quart, and I just wasn’t sure we needed that many. Turned out I could have gone by bike after all.

After spending the morning on spring bounty, I spent the afternoon working with some of last fall’s bounty. Yep, we still have winter squash and sweet potatoes! With possibly the coolest temps we will see for months, I fired up the oven and roasted three large squash, plus some sweet potatoes.

After all that, I thought about biking to Forest Park for some Shakespeare action, but I really just wanted to call it a day. If you can’t give yourself a break, who will?

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