First Seeds of 2015

We got our first seeds for 2015 down last week.  All onions: White (Walla Walla), Red (Red Bergundy), and Yellow (Sweet Spanish).

Garden Tour - June 2013

First, I must apologize to anyone who was disappointed to see I didn't get a Savory Sunday post up this past week.  There was really nothing unique and exciting to post from our garden meals last week.  We've been bring in a lot of lettuce and just had a lot of ordinary salads with it.

In the mean time, I finally shot a video tour of the garden a couple weeks ago and am just now getting around to posting it for anyone to view.  It's a bit long, but there was a lot to show being the first time I've done a video tour.  Future video updates will focus on only major changes between then and what you see in this first one, so they should be much shorter.

So to spare you any more time it may take to view it, I'll get right to it:

Savory Sunday - 23 June 2013

This post is a day late, but that's because I spent much of last night shelling peas after dinner.  We pulled out just about all of our pea plants on Saturday.  So far we've weighed about 10 lbs of them.  

Since a few of the plants were snow peas, we used some of them in a stir fry last night.  We also added in some leftover broccoli harvested a while back.

Earlier in the week I tagged along with a youth group from our church to hike King's Peak, the highest point in our state.  I'll probably do another post a little later all about that trip.  I often refer to trailcooking.com for tasty and easy to prepare meals for the trail.  I stumbled across this one for fish tacos, but instead of cabbage, I subbed in some collards from the garden.  It made for a great post-summit meal with protein, carbs, greens, and all the vitamins, minerals, anti-oxidants that come with it.  

Savory Sunday - 16 June 2013

Mother's Days and Father's Days are always a treat.  Like many other holidays and other special days, they are days to enjoy time with family and good food.  Today was no exception.  We spent the evening at my wife's grandma's house with her parents and a brother-in-law and his family.  We traditionally do these get togethers "pot luck" style.  Some of our Dino (Lacinato) Kale has been getting quite long, so we figured it could be incorporated into our contribution.  So we hauled in a basket full of Kale this morning...

...and turned it into this...

It's called Super Summer Kale Salad.  We found the recipe through a search for "Kale" on allrecipes.com.  I don't have a nutrition fact sheet on it, but it looked like something loaded with antioxidants and other good nutrients for the body.  It's tangy sweetness was also good for the taste buds.

Other meals featuring food fresh from the garden this week:

Lettuce was cut for use on some hamburgers.  By the way, my wife makes the buns from scratch! Well worth it! Some Broccoli was picked and steamed and spinach was eaten like a salad.  Also pictured are some organic sweet potato fries.  While we are attempting some sweet potatoes ourselves, they won't be ready until end of summer, assuming they thrive OK.

Some of the left over ground beef not made into burgers was saved for tacos later on.  My wife also makes the tortillas from scratch.  All well worth the time and effort!  I enjoy them much better than store-bought packs.  This meal featured more lettuce from the garden.  We are flooded with lettuce now and will be for the next few weeks, I imagine.  Hopefully we can get some neighbors to come back and help themselves to a bit as well so I can get all those squares filled in with some beans and some other summer crops.  As for the rest of the tacos, I wish I could say the tomatoes and salsa used on them were also fresh from the garden, but we won't be able to start harvesting our own tomatoes, tomatillos, and so forth for another few weeks, at least.  Our tomatoes plants are just now setting out their first clusters of blossoms.

Savory Sunday - 9 June 2013

I've decided I'm going to try and do a weekly "Savory Sunday" post each Sunday, where I post what we were able to use from the garden for our Sunday dinner and/or highlight any other meals that were unique or noteworthy from the prior week.

With that said, here is the first of my Savory Sunday series...

Today's harvest featured bok choy and broccoli. I like to recruit one of my kids to come out and help with the harvest whenever they're available because it's a good bonding moment and because I, like many parents, feel it is good for my kids to see how and where good healthy food is produced. Today my three year old took up the basket-holding duties.

Little helper

Bok Choy & Broccoli Harvest

Not ever having cooked with Bok Choy before, I consulted with the Internet for some recipes as I so often do when looking for a way to incorporate something from the garden in a meal. I found two recipes that stood out to me:  Sautéed Broccoli & Bok Choy and Bok Choy, Apple, & Carrot Slaw.  The former was great because it allowed me to use the broccoli as well, and the latter, I wanted to do just because we happened to have everything else needed for that already on hand. 

My wife made some fresh rolls (in addition to a loaf of bread) and cooked up a pot of rice to put the Bok Choy & Broccoli over which rounded out the meal. In the picture below, the slaw is in the upper right and the sautéed veggies are over the rice at the bottom of the plate.

Dinner is Served

The Broccoli and Bok Choy over rice was delicious.  I thought the slaw was also very flavorful and enjoyed it myself but my wife and kids thought it to be too tart & sour, probably a result of it having quite a splattering of lemon juice tossed with it.

Some other meals we enjoyed this week with something from the garden was a grilled chicken salad and a chicken-arugula-radish pizza.  The salad featured Mesclun mix lettuce and spinach from the garden.  Also added to it besides the chicken was some cucumber, tomato, grated cheese & dried cranberries.  For the pizza, we pulled some radishes and a couple of arugula plants from the garden to complete the recipe.

Grilled Chicken Salad

Chicken, Radish & Arugula Pizza

For those of you who have gardens or other ways of growing some of your own food, I hope these posts can deliver some more great ways you can enjoy your bounty and for those of you who don't or lack the resources to do so, my hope is that these posts will inspire you to work toward obtaining the resources to be able to grow some of your own food, even if it is only some culinary herbs in a windowsill.  Your taste-buds will thank you!