My Fridge on an Average Day

Erin from Garden Now-Think Later staaarrrted it (whining like my 8 year old)! She challenged her readers to expose our fridges, and then Granny took her up on that challenge. Sheesh, ladies. You're putting me to shame with your tidiness.

I debated exposing the gully (defenition #3) of my fridge to you, because it is sorta lookin' "rough and rugged, unpolishd and hardcore..." It always does. I wasn't going to do it because it's a little embarrassing, but this morning as I was putting my pre-breakfast harvest away, my low-glucose levels took over, and said, "What the hell. Who cares. This is my fridge, my life. Show 'em whatchoo got, girl!"

Doo-di-doo... Looks like there's more beer than milk in there...

The top shelf... Guess we're having leftovers tonight...

Some of today's harvest and CSA munchies... Waaay back there is a barely-used bottle of fish sauce on it's side...

The fruit bin... That nectarine sure looks wrinkly... Oh, wait. I turned it before I took it's mug shot. HA!

The bottom half...

Now, where is that smell coming from?

CSA Wednesday, Week 10

If I do another blog series, I've learned I shouldn't use a day of the week in the title, LOL. Things just can't always get done on the day they're intended, which for me, seems like that's the case in life more often than not these days. But I digress. Here I am, on Thursday, doing CSA Wednesday, and doesn't the produce below look like it's been kissed by a rainbow?

In this week's share...
1 basket strawberries
1 basket Maglia Rosa or Black Cherry cherry tomatoes
1 (large) bunch basil
1 lb mixed cucumbers (I chose all Lemon cukes for canning)
1.75 lb heirloom tomatoes
1.5 lb eggplant
1 lb onions
3 heads Rose garlic
2 bran muffins

This week's CSA share is looking a little... skinny... but I have no problems with that, because I just know there's another big burst of produce coming!

The tomatoes that are next to the eggplant were originally in the Trade Box, and not liking eggplant the first time we had it, I traded one of them for the two tomatoes. All of the tomatoes except for the cherry tomatoes went straight to the freezer. I will. make. sauce.

Challenges: None for this week, wow! A day after pickup, and the tomatoes are in the freezer, muffins gone, strawberries half eaten, garlic pickled, the cucumbers are up for pickling tomorrow, and half the basil was given to a friend. Onions are an easy one to get rid of, so that really only leaves the (I say in a low, raspy, slightly disgruntled voice) eggplant.

Last Week's meal highlights...
Last week was a fun week of new foods, and I had the chance to do two non-CSA food related canning sessions. I'd hoped to put up a jam involving the white flesh nectarines and peaches with the strawberries I'd purchased, but couldn't find a small-batch recipe involving the stone fruits and strawberries. I'm not experienced enough (yet) to start making up my own canning recipes, so the stone fruits were consumed joyfully. I did, however use the strawberries to make Strawberry-Lemon Marmalade (from Ball). But that's not a CSA related post, so no more on the subject or else I'll get sidetracked with talking about how deliciously awesome that recipe is, and how I never want to have plain strawberry jam again.

The huge zucchini I picked was my favorite veggie from last week's share. I left the farm decidedly against another loaf of zucchini bread, and thought I'd make a savory side dish out of it. Well, I had a hankering for something baked, and I remembered ShawnAnn mentioning Granny's Chocolate Zucchini Cake. I'm a cookie gal myself, and oatmeal cookies are one of my tops, so I hunted down this Chocolate Chip Oatmeal Zucchini Cookie recipe. Heck yeah! They hit the spot, and just did again (wiping crumbs off the keyboard). Next time I make these--oh, there will be a next time--I think I'll replace the chocolate chips with rum-soaked raisins...

I used the rest of the zucchini in fritters. They were decent... DH really liked them, but I thought they were a little too fluffy/doughy. I thought they would be fantastic with Ranch dressing, but stopped buying store-bought dressing, and didn't have any. The whole meal I kept imagining dipping them in Ranch instead of ketchup. Today while grocery shopping, I had to pick up Ranch to try with the leftover fritters. It tasted downright awful! Not the fritters (they reheated great in the toaster oven), but the Ranch dressing! LOL

Remember how I said I wasn't a big fan of snow peas? Foiled again! I was humming and hawing all week about using them, and half expected them to be spoiled when I pulled them out of the crisper today. They were perfect, as if they'd just been picked! I found a non-Asain way of preparing them, and went for it. We all gobbled the Lemon-Butter Snow Peas up, and I wish I had enough for seconds and leftovers. Guess what I'll be growing this fall?

I also attempted to make a Caesar dressing to go with the Romaine lettuce, per DH's request, but failed. I didn't have anchovies (blegh) or sour cream, and refused to use a raw egg. I'm not a fan of mayo, so it was up to him to taste the recipe I made and tell me if it was up to his Caesar standards... He ended up enjoying the Basil Vinaigrette I made for myself, LOL.

CSA Wednesday...Coming Tomorrow...

I. Am. Exhausted. A friend had an emergency this afternoon, so I helped by watching her very energetic eight year old twin boys. Let me tell ya. Three eight year old boys and a 2.5 year old running around is tiring! All you mom's out there with lots of kids--that's more than two, by the way (snicker), bravo and props to you! It has been one heck of a busy day today, so this week's CSA update really needs to wait until tomorrow. I'm going to bed...

Harvest Monday

It feels like the past month or so, I've only been posting about my harvests and CSA shares... Things are growing along out back, not a lot of changes, but I realized a few weeks ago that I'd been spending way too much time on my computer. Most of my free time was being spent in front of this screen, reading about things that interest me like cooking and baking, canning, self-sufficiency, and best of all, all of your blogs! I've decided to cut back on the screen time to get through a few books I've purchased (about said interests), and also getting back into crocheting the blankets I'm making for the boys. Once Boy Wonder goes back to school in three weeks (Do I squeal with excitement, or faint from the realization of having an 8.5 year old going into third grade?), I'll have more free time (ie brain power) to think of creative things to talk about and write about.

In the mean time, here's what I brought indoors this past week...
Wednesday... I still have one plant producing a few nasturtiums. The others have all died from the heat.
Did you know you can pickle nasturtium seeds? Me neither! I had a lot that I saved for next season, and stopped gathering them up. Here's another way to pickle them from Old Fashioned Living, with other nasturtium recipes.

I couldn't remember if I'd purchased red or yellow Tumbling Toms, and now I know! The yellow tomatoes are the first Tom's of the season. They were sorta bitter. Par for the variety's coarse? We shall see...

There wasn't time on Wednesday to weigh the harvest, so I ended up combining that day's harvest with yesterday's harvest, shown below.

The beans are separated into two piles to show the difference between production based on where they're growing. The purple and few green beans are from 12 plants (south facing, sunny most of the day) growing in front of my melons, and the spindly pile is from 50ish plants (west facing, 6-8hrs of afternoon sun) in their own bed. Crazy, huh?

Oh, and those red specs next to the tiny orange sweet pepper? They're my first Thai Hot chili's. They were fruits that were on the pods when I brought the plant home. I popped one of those lil guys in my mouth, and they pack quite a punch for being so small! I can't wait to have more! I see a Spicy Thai Shrimp dish in my future...

I decided to remove them so the plant would produce more.

Below are my first cut flowers. Zinnias and "10 week stock" (I think). I thought I'd bring some indoors before they bit the dust. Like the vase? It's a cleaned up tequila bottle, lol.

This week's harvest total...

Bush Beans:  4.8 oz

Basil: ~1 oz

Baby Belle Peppers: . too small to weigh, doh!

Viva Italia tomatoes: 9.3 oz

Tumbling Tom cherry tomatoes: 1.7 oz

I didn't bother weighing the nasturtiums or Thai Hot's.

I used the basil to make this Basil Vinaigrette (I halved the recipe, used white balsamic, and only 1/2 cup oil). It's a very nice dressing that is low in actual vinegar flavor, so both boys are enjoying it too. Today the purple basil had "stained" some of the roasted garlic pink, so it looks a little better than this picture.

Remember that melon plant I'd successfully saved? Yea, well, I ripped it out yesterday in an attempt to allow more sun to reach the Thai pepper plant. Priorities, ya' know?

Last Monday I mentioned a new addition to the melon family--the melon in the upper left of the below photo, and when I was peaking at my plants from the dining room window (the only way I can see their backsides w/o climbing back there), I noticed a second newcomer hiding behind leaves! Now the total is 6 pantyhose-slung melons growing on 4 plants.

I'm feeling the urge to do another video update... The next set will be more detailed, and I'll try to go slower, I promise. It's a lot quicker and easier for me to do right now than take pictures and write about them, so stay tuned!

Please stop by the wonderful blog of our Harvest Monday hostess, Daphne, to see what she and other gardeners are growing and harvesting this season.

CSA Wednesday, Week 9

Theeey're Heeere... There are many things that come to mind when thinking of summer produce, but the top two that pop into my head are always tomatoes and peppers. We've received peppers in two of our shares, but today we have our first tomatoes. Being a new tomato eater, I'm proud to say I'm quite excited!

In this week's share...
1.5 lbs white peaches
1.5 lbs nectarines
1.5 lbs heirloom tomatoes
1 bag snow peas (in July? Nice...)
1 (large) head Romaine lettuce
1 bunch savory
1 bunch chard or kale (I chose kale)
1.5 lbs summer squash (I chose zucchini)
1 lb cucumbers
Ratatouille focaccia bread

Occasionally there is a bonus box, and this week it was a very large cooler full of a few overripe/damaged tomatoes, and loads of sweet peppers and eggplant. We were encouraged to take what we wanted. Not wanting to be overly greedy, I took this small bowl of yum yums.

The tomato weighed in at 1 lb 5oz. It's pretty ripe, and slightly bruised on the under side, but I doubt that will hurt the sauce I plan on putting it in!

Today I picked up 8 lbs of super fresh Driscoll strawberries from Costco that I'm going to try hiding long enough to preserve (I already gave in to DH's demands of testing out our new blender by making strawberry smoothies). The strawberries are so beautiful, I couldn't help myself! Plus, after two years of living in CA, I still can't get over the fact that I've been eating Driscoll's berries for forever while living in VA, and now I live within driving distance of where they're grown! What was my point in telling you that? Oh, yes... I'm hoping to find a small batch canning recipe to use the nectarines and/or peaches in, and hopefully one that includes some strawberries. I need to warm up my newbie canning skills before taking on canning tomatoes (crossing fingers).

Hmm... Ratatouille focaccia bread... The bread was... different, but amazing, as has been the case from this particular bakery. I know, I say it every week we get their bread, but I love it. It's topped with the farm's peppers, eggplant and squash, and cheese.

Challenges: There was some spoilage the past two weeks, mostly due to my lack of stamina and non-willingness to get down and dirty with my pots and pans, but I'm feeling more "normal," (whatever that is) and with pretty standard fare this week, there shouldn't be any spoilage.

I'm not a big fan of snow peas, but hey. I said that about tomatoes and onions, and now I can't seem to get enough of them!

Last week's meal highlights...
As I said, there was some spoilage. I never got around to that bok choi from week 7. DH got burnt out on dinner salads really quick (I could eat them every day), and so last week's lettuce spoiled, along with some of week 7's lettuce. I'm certainly not blaming him, but there's a lot of prep work involved in dinner salads, and I wasn't going to go through the trouble if he wasn't going to enjoy participating in the consumption of my hard work! I let him know we received Romaine lettuce this week, and there will be salads, and he has requested Caesar dressing. Hmm... I'm more of a vinaigrette gal these days so I'll have to think about it. ;-)

Oh yes. Last week's food... Sidetrack central over here tonight!

We tried eggplant for the first time. I marinated it in a parsley and basil marinade (minus the oregano, and used white balsamic) along with onion and crookneck squash before removing and marinating chicken in the mix, then grilling it all...

The onion and squash tasted great, although crookneck squash isn't the best grilling squash, I've learned. The eggplant? DH and I took one bite of it and both agreed under our breaths that we wouldn't make the boys eat more than a taste of it. Blegh! None of us liked it. It was cooked well, but the flavor of it! Yuck!

Oh, the delicious, creamy fingerling potatoes... I quartered, coated in olive oil and kosher salt, roasted, then garnished with chopped parsley. So simple. So tasty. I love potatoes...

These were served with grilled Magda squash and tilapia that were both marinated in that Spicy-Lime-Cilantro Sauce I keep mentioning. Can you tell we love the stuff? I've used it on squash, steak, chicken, shrimp, tilapia, as a salad dressing, and veggie "dip."

It dawned on me yesterday that it's been a really long time since we've had tacos or ground beef for that matter, so I defrosted two pounds of ground beef I purchased through our CSA (I don't think I shared that with y'all, but our farm purchased two grass-fed cows from a client, and they were butchered to sell to CSA recipients), and cooked it up with onions and peppers, and divided in half. I made half of it into tacos, and the rest will be made into sloppy joes for Friday's dinner because there's celery floating around somewhere in my fridge that needs to be used.

Sorry the picture isn't very appealing. It's imperative that tacos be eaten while the meat is hot, cheese unmelted, and lettuce crisp (not that that ever happens with children around, lol).

Hey, if you have a good small batch canning recipe involving any combination of peaches, nectarines, and strawberries, please share it in the comment section. My peaches and nectarines are white-flesh, in case that matters.

I'm off to bed!

Harest Monday

This week was a fun harvest for me because I was able to get a few small harvests over a couple of days. Having such a small garden means my harvests are going to look mostly the same for the rest of the season, just more of everything as the peak draws nearer...

Here is what I picked on Tuesday...

Then again on Friday...

This was the first of the Siam Queen Thai Basil...

All of the purple beans were from the set that's growing in front of the melons. These plants are huge! I swear there is some symbiotic relationship going on between the melons and beans, because the beans growing in their own bed are half this size, and scraggly. Maybe it's that they're soaked in the sun all day vs the other bed of beans only gets afternoon sun. Who knows...

These were picked this morning...
See the new tomatoes in the middle? Those are my first Pearson tomatoes, with the red coming in at half a pound! The red one was way in the middle and barely visible, and I accidentally pulled the green one off with it.

Does anyone know why the top of the tomato has cracked around the stem? Is it still good to use?

Some of the basil and a couple tomatoes have been used on personal pizzas, and the rest are in the freezer. I have a quart sized ziploc almost bursting with basil leaves now.

I try to make my own breads and pizza crusts as often as possible, but seeing "5 minutes," had me suckered into trying these crusts. They're pretty good for ready-made crusts...

This week's harvest total...

Bush Slicer Cucumber:  4 lb, 5oz

Bush Beans:  3oz

Basil: 1.8oz

Baby Belle Peppers: .5oz

Viva Italia tomatoes: 2 lb

Pearson tomatoes: 10oz

There are three more cucumbers growing, but where I was complaining of only female flowers showing up before, now I only have male flowers. Doh! Next year I think I'll start the plants 2-3 weeks apart to help with this.

I don't know how long it'll take for the Charentais melons to ripen, but they're starting to look really yummy!

There is also a new one, so it will be nice having a staggered harvest.

I didn't think this would ever happen... My White Habanero's are finally starting to fruit!

Each week Daphne over at Daphne's Dandelions hosts Harvest Monday. Check out her page to see what other's have been munchin' and crunchin' on this week.

CSA Wednesday, Week 8

Boy, I knew I lived a sheltered vegetable life, but it's not until I bring new items home in my CSA share, and wonder, "How the heck am I suposed to cook this," that I realize how limited my vegetable consuming experience really is.

In this week's share... Please forgive the lack of quantity. I've forgotten what half of them are, and don't have *any* desire to re-weigh them...
Yellow peaches and white nectarines
French fingerling potatoes
Speckled lettuce
Summer squash
Mixed "specialty" eggplant
Sweet and mild peppers
Parsley
Mixed cucumbers
Honey wheat bread

Not in the group photo above is the honey wheat bread. I stopped by the farm after picking Boy Wonder up from chess camp, and he was drooling-at-the-mouth-hungry for lunch. I took a quick picture before he shoved me out of the way to devour his favorite; warm open-faced PB & honey...

The sweet onions in the picture weren't a part of the share. I needed some onions, and bought them from the farm since they had them available, and for only $1.50/lb. I believe the grocery store sells non-organic sweet onions for $1.69/lb.

When DH got home from work, he took a look at the table, and said, "It's amazing how the variety of vegetables is changing as the season goes on." Why yes, dear (slightly sarcastic), I noticed that too... The peppers are beginning to come in, as are the cucumbers, and we have our first eggplants!

Challenges: Playing catch-up from last week is this week's challenge, lol... The cucumbers will be hard to consume, simply because I have several more that are almost ready to harvest. I may need to make more refrigerator pickles to keep up. Oh, and eggplants are another first for me. I've eaten eggplant parmesan once or twice, but that's it. Never cooked with it!

Now onto last week's meal highlights...
Well, I have to admit, I don't really have any "highlights" per se, but I do have food to share. It was a rough week for me, you know, one of those weeks where new foods just seems impossible, and leftovers and "easy" are the name of the meal game?

The cilantro was turned into a double batch of the Spicy-Lime-Cilantro Sauce I mentioned last week (and I am in love with). I froze half the batch, marinated chicken in some, and coated the Magda squash in a little, and grilled. I actually finished the leftover chicken and squash with dinner tonight. Sometimes cooked veggies don't really work well as leftovers, but these squash are wonderful. And so, I've picked another one for the third week in a row, and plan on grilling it too!

Today's Magda

When I was putting this week's share in the fridge, I noticed last week's carrots, and decided to try a Quick-Glazed Carrot recipe from How to Cook Everything Vegetarian. One variation was to cook the carrots in balsamic vinegar instead of water with lots of garlic. We didn't like it.

The one new food from last week was the cheddar cauliflower.

I was torn between using it in a gratin and making mashed cauliflower "potatoes." At the last minute I went from the gratin to the mashed cauliflower (Literally. I pulled it out after steaming for the gratin, then put it back in to cook it to "mushy").  Less steps to make? Fiine...

The problem I ran into with making the mashed cauliflower came when I misread the ingredients, and put an extra cup of milk in... It didn't even dawn on my over-tired brain until after I'd mashed the cauliflower, and it was still runny. It tasted amazing, and DH said it'd make a great alfredo, so I threw it in the fridge and put some cold veggies on the dinner plates instead.

So, when is mashed cauliflower "potatoes" not mashed cauliflower "potatoes?" When you turn it into macaroni and cheese! Say wha-huh?

It was an alright dish. A little heavy on the Parmesan cheese, but definitely a doable dish with the cauliflower.  We didn't save the leftovers.

Most of the lettuce is still in the fridge. If it's good or not is to be seen. I haven't touched the bok choi either. It's looking a little limp, but will have to wait until Friday to be used. I have kickboxing tomorrow, and have learned the hard way not to do Asian, spicy, or heavy meals before working out, hehehe.

Oye! It's 11pm, and I'm way tired. Goodnight!