Fall crops

I'm really not sure where the time goes. But I always mean to post what is coming out of the garden. It just never happens some how.

Yesterday my mom picked 2 beautiful green bell peppers and 2 eggplant for the green curry we had for dinner. And today when I went looking around I came in with 2 Beets, a basket full of super sweet 100 tomatoes and a couple of patio tomatoes, 3 immature zucchini and a lone strawberry.

Lately the garden has been the pepper zone. All peppers all the time. Sounds like I need to do some pepper experimenting!

We are waiting for peas to get taller, fava beans, more beets, and some greens. I don't think our arugula or lettuces are going to grow well with hungry bunny rabbits and birds outside. But I can always try again I guess.

Well, now that those beautiful beets have been picked, looks like I have to figure out what to do with them! Happy gardening :)

Thank You Annie's Granny!

Oh snap. She is a darn amazing woman! I came out of the garden on Friday with a monster zucchini (really, who hasnt at some point or another?)  I really didn't feel like baking a stuffed zucchini today.  Plus I have been hearing all about zucchini bread, zucchini muffins, chocolate zucchini bread, etc.

A quick site search and bam! got my project for the day (nope, not cleaning, running, gardening or anything else that needed to get done).  Let's face it, who doesn't want an excuse to eat some chocolate muffins? Annie's Granny has a recipe for zucchini fudge cake that I have been meaning to try out for a while. But I didn't want a whole cake, and muffins are just easier to divide up and give away to friends.

Ok, into the kitchen! I followed the recipe (go figure) and baked the muffins for 20 minutes (closely monitored by my sous chef). Barely managed to allow them to cool before cracking one open. Delicious! Didn't even need the frosting. Just the cake/muffin was sweet enough for me. (and obviously the middle.child as well as he inhaled one quickly).  The question is, will any make it to my running group today?

Happy gardening all! Now go eat your zucchini!

Hearing the sizzle outside

Holy bells and whistles. It is hot out. Our estimated temperature for yesterday was supposed to be 93, and the hubs kept getting texts from the office notifying him of ever increasing temps. At the peak yesterday it was 103. Today we reached 104. What happened????

I did go for an extremely short and hot run after dropping the boys off at their schools yesterday, I did 2 miles and I was so glad to be done. Today I gladly gave up my alone time yo the hubs so he could play basketball, it was 96 degrees at 930!

I managed to sneak outside this morning to check on the plants. Last night the fava bean seedlings were flopped over and the mint looked like someone had tried to dehydrate them in the pot. The mint rebounded, but the favas might be a goner....

I also found an abandoned zucchini on the plant. Oops!

I didn't realize I lived in an oven. Gasp!

Fridge Challenge

Michelle over at From Seed To Table asked to see my fridge. And I'm not sure why, but here they are.

The indoor fridge

 The top shelf in the indoor fridge is mainly made up of misc condiments that we 'need'. The first large shelf contains some super old aloe juice that I drank when I was pregnant to help alleviate my blood pressure (turns out it was the fact that my legs were dangling off the exam table that caused it to be so high....thanks Doc for freaking me out) [and yes, my daughter is 4 months old, so that should really be tossed], 2 blocks of tofu (we love the stuff!), more condiments, half a watermelon, fridge pickles, some chicken..... and the lower self contains eggs (it is really amazing how quickly we go through eggs!), leftovers from the week and fruit. The two drawers are jam packed with veggies (store bought) and whatever we have managed to bring in from the garden.  The bottom skinny drawer is mainly my guilty pleasure drawer, cured meats, cheeses, pate..... yummy stuff that I couldn't eat when pregnant but love. And a fruitcake. I LOVE fruitcake....

The garage fridge

This was supposed to be the husband's beer and work lunch fridge. I commandeered it. And this is before I added milk, eggs and strawberries to it!  This is the fridge that I make sure is mostly empty when my Mom comes to visit, because one trip to the Asian market and out fridges are overflowing.

So I showed you mine....

Harvest Monday, August 27,2012

Ok, I know it is actually Tuesday, but I still wanted to post my harvests. I didn't weight anything, and I'm sure there were actually some that escaped photographing, but here is most of what we harvested this past week.


Most of the things coming in from the garden are arriving out of necessity, which I am very proud of. I usually give away most of our yummies and hardly use any, I have no idea why.  I think I am just too used to making grocery lists and using what I buy that way and forgetting that I have a kind of nice garden outside. The eggplant and tomatoes were immediately cooked up in a Rogan Gjost that I have been craving. The eggplant were wonderfully sweet and melt in your mouth good. And the home grown tomatoes added a depth to the meal that is usually absent in store bought tomatoes.

Another night I did use store bought tomatoes to make a dish called chicken Nartaya with the jalapenos and bell peppers from the garden. Yum, yum, yum!

And this whole lot almost escaped being photographed.  I finally got my mommy morning to run sans stroller and brought these to my friends. The box of tomatoes went to the nice lady who volunteered to watch baby girl while I ran my 7 miles. I figured I could be away from her about an hour, but not the usual 4 hours I am gone on Saturday morning with driving, running, gabbing and grubbing. It worked out well, I got almost free childcare!  The same lady is coming over this Friday to watch all three kiddos while we go to see Les Mis with some friends. Wish her luck!

I spend a good amount of time pulling out still productive plants that were covered in buggies and removing roots from areas that (hopefully) will be planted soon. More on that later!

I hope your gardens are all doing well, and hope on over to Daphne's Dandelions to see what others are harvesting today (ok, yesterday).

Garden helpers?

I was working on some summer garden clean up  to make way for the fall plants and came across some interesting critters.

Ok, I did a search and saw that the leaf bugs aren't too bad for the garden, and the Praying Mantis is good (ish) for the garden because it will eat the bad bugs (but doesn't discriminate so might eat the good guys too), but what about those other things? They are all over my eggplants

Fig

This one is for you RG. The once we started in on the figs they were gone pretty fast! I did manage to get a picture of one in half.

They did not disappoint, they were sweet, juicy and delicious. We are looking forward to the rest of the harvests this year!