A couple of weeks ago, we put some beautiful Swiss chard on the stove to steam. The other part of our dinner was ready first, and when we sat down to eat, we forgot all about the poor Swiss chard. The too overcooked to just enjoy as-is greens became the inspiration for Her Green Soup.
I don’t really have a recipe, but here’s what went into the soup: aforementioned over-steamed Swiss chard, baby tatsoi, and garbanzo beans (pureed in broth or water); carrots, onions, yellow squash, and garlic (sauteed in olive oil); salt and pepper. Serve warm or chilled.
We served Her Green Soup with sides of fresh corn on the cob and our beet salad and enjoyed the leftovers throughout the week.
The good news: I survived the potato harvest and garden day on Monday.
The bad news: We have A LOT of potatoes in the ground still.
The good news: Those potatoes look much better after Matthew completed some hard core weeding.
I experienced extreme soreness (mostly in my quads, from all the squatting) and serious exhaustion from blueberry picking on Saturday and wasn’t sure that I would make it through the garden blitz on Monday. Somehow, I did.
We started the day with a quick stop by the inner garden (AKA our bed at the community garden).
Beets and carrots at our inner garden
Next up, THE garden (AKA the commuter garden in the ‘burbs). We harvested potatoes from the dead or nearly dead plants and left the rest to grow a bit longer, hoping to increase our yield. We followed that with some general maintenance, including weeding and mulching.
Left to right: winter squash, peppers (somewhat hidden), tomatoes
After working all morning, I headed into Pam’s kitchen to make a garden-to-table lunch.
Clockwise from top: Sauteed summer squash with garlic, pasta with basil pesto, roasted tricolor potatoes with dill, steamed Swiss chard with olive oil. Pretty much everything on the plate came from our garden, most of it picked that morning — good fuel for a day of hard work!
We’re giving a garden tour to some family members this weekend. Won’t they be surprised when we hand them shovels and pitch forks and point them in the direction of the potato patch! Hands-on tours are the best kind, right?
For the past couple of summers, we placed our order for blueberries and sour cherries on my MIL’s annual trek to Michigan. We enjoyed the fruit throughout the year, though with a nagging feeling of unrest, because we knew that the orchard owners sprayed their fruit — not exactly in line with our usual choices.
Berries rank high on the list of produce with high levels of pesticide residue. While convenient, delicious, and affordable, our purchases were bad for our bodies and the environment.
With a little investigative work, we found a no-spray blueberry farm within an hour of St. Louis. Yesterday, we drove out to Huckleberry Hollow for a pick-your-own adventure.
Some of the blueberry bushes were over six feet tall — I had no idea they could get that big! We had fun, but we also worked really hard and still fell short of our target quantity for freezing.
Today, I’m suffering the effects of picking 9 gallons of blueberries (2-person effort) over 5.5 hours, only the first few of which exhibited something like pleasant temperatures.
Suddenly, the price of blueberries at the farmers’ market, pre-picked blueberries, seems pretty darn reasonable. It’s easy to walk through a farmers’ market and turn your nose up at the prices, but when you start getting your hands dirty, those prices make sense. Growing food in a sustainable manner is hard work!
If you buy really fresh (i.e., picked that day, or maybe the day before) local sweet corn, try eating it raw for a refreshing treat. Fresh corn (sans fungus) graced our dinner plates last night, and I was well into my ear when I thought to take a picture.
We’re also enjoying local blueberries and peaches. In honor of the peaches, we baked some sweet biscuits*. For a delicious and relatively healthy treat, crumble a biscuit, spoon on fresh peaches, and top with a bit of whipped cream. I often add some of the juice from the peaches and a bit of milk (soy milk works fine) to get it just right.
*Our sweet biscuit recipe comes from 1000 Vegetarian Recipes by Carol Gelles. If you’re looking for a good cookbook, vegetarian or no, check this out. It is our go-to cookbook for delicious main dishes, baked goods, soups, and much more! If your library has it, you can take it for a test run, or look for a used copy.
I kicked off the weekend with a strawberry banana smoothie, made with frozen local berries, homemade yogurt from local milk, and The Last Banana, recovered from the depths of the freezer, served in a green glass.
Delicacy or discard? That funky looking growth is huitlacoche, a fungus that grows on corn (known in the U.S. as “corn smut”). It’s edible, and in Mexico, it fetches a high price, much higher than the corn itself. Matthew handled the prep work. I avoided touching it until he cooked it. (If he’d been feeling ornery, he could have chased me around the apartment, threatening to touch me with it.) Once cooked, it looked and tasted much like any other cooked fungus (i.e., mushroom). Click here to read more details, including potential health benefits.
At my urging, Matthew bought a tomato at the farmers’ market. (He liked the idea of our first tomato of the season being from our garden, but we’re not quite there yet — soon!) Dressed up with basil (courtesy of our neighbors’ plant — hope they won’t mind 😉 ), olive oil, and s&p. Yum!
Partial results of another oven extravaganza: zucchini bread and chocolate chip pumpkin bread. I have not purchased bananas for a year-and-a-half, due to their large carbon footprint (which gives you a sense of the age of the banana that went into the aforementioned smoothie). As predicted, these two quick breads make great alternatives to banana bread.
Sneak peak of “Summer eats and treats — Part II” coming tomorrow: homemade pizza and ice cream sandwiches!
I don’t really have a recipe, but here’s what went into the soup: aforementioned over-steamed Swiss chard, baby tatsoi, and garbanzo beans (pureed in broth or water); carrots, onions, yellow squash, and garlic (sauteed in olive oil); salt and pepper. Serve warm or chilled.
Her Green Life 