Harvest time

The first of our crops came in last week, and of course its just the beginning! As always, that first batch is kinda exciting. By the end of the summer, I feel like I never want to see a zucchini or tomato again and am paying people to take them off my hands. But I'm not there yet.

First, our cherry tree has been about 6x more fruitful than last year. Since we just planted it a little over a year ago, its not a ton. And the one harvest is all we'll get until next year. But last year, our pitifully few cherries were mostly eaten by birds before we managed to get them off the tree, so you can imagine our pride at being able to have any fruit at all. G bought a big piece of netting that we covered the tree with as soon as the fruit started appearing. It was this humongous ugly black thing that we just draped over the tree. We meant to clean it up a bit and make it look less horrendous than it was. But we got lazy, of course, and ended up just leaving the extra netting laying on the grass. Then we started worrying about the dogs peeing on it, so we wadded everything up and tied it back a bit with zip ties. Not the most attractive feature on our lawn. I nagged G about it for a while, but I guess I'll stop now, since we ended up with this for our troubles:



I forgot to take pictures of the chives, cilantro, and serrano peppers. And then I didn't think to put the herbs in the fridge so they were all kind of wilted and not so photogenic by the time I remembered, so you'll have to wait for the next batch of those.

But our zucchini started taking off, too. I'm already scrambling for some good squash recipes, so if you have any, please send them my way. We have something like 6 squash plants this year, so feel free to keep the recipes coming; I have a feeling that I'll never have too many.

Fortunately, my favorite cooking site highlighted some zucchini recipes just last week, and I thought I'd try my hand with this one for the first of what I'm sure will be many squash-centered dinners (with some substitutions of course -- using basil/cilantro/chives for the green sauce to use my garden produce). The only thing about this site that's a little demoralizing is that the pictures are always SO pretty and my end result never look quite as appetizing. I so admire cooks that make cooking seem easy and turn out such fabulous looking meals. I love to cook, but presentation has never been my strong suit. Its part of the reason I don't really bother baking. Half the best part about desserts is them looking so pretty.

And for all that I love to cook, there's always plenty that I have no idea about. For example, with the squash recipe, who would have thought that fresh bread crumbs would such a pain to produce. I'm guessing Heidi didn't burn out her brand new blender when she threw her bread in the food processor. And how the heck did she get such homegenous bread crumbs? After the blender made this high pitched whirring sound and started to smoke a bit, I had to resort to tearing bread by hand and just going with whatever shape ripped off. Plus, I don't know what else she did differently, but as is often the case with me and recipes, the end product is a far cry from what it should be:



Not to mention that I highly doubt she ended up with as big of a mess as I did. Or a cut on her finger from her really sharp knives. How do people pull that off?

But anyway, despite the issues, it still tasted amazing. And smelled amazing too! I left it in the oven while I took the dogs out; when I came back, I could actually smell it as I walked up the street. I hope that a lot of people walked past our house that evening and wondered what we were having for dinner.