A lazy weekend. . .

. . . leads to a lazy Monday morning post. I hate the heat, so this weekend's 90-100 weather was SO hard to bear. As much as we could, G + I stayed very still in the hopes that that would save us from heat exhaustion.

Sat, I had some girlfriends over for brunch. It was make your own waffles day. I tried out this sour cream waffle batter recipe I'd been eyeing for a while, set out some fresh fruit, syrup, jam, all the fixings I could think of, and thought I'd let the girls go to town. A ricotta cheese tart (that I have a great photo of but can't get to cuz work blocks off most picture viewing sites, and I forgot to grab it last nite) and skillet potatoes rounded out the meal. Oh, and some virgin peach bellini that looked totally disgusting and only tasted nominally better, so we'll forget about that.

The make-your-own part was a great idea, I thought, until I tried the first one, poured too much batter into the waffle maker, and made a huge mess. The dogs fortunately licked up most of the mess. But after that, it was G-makes-the-waffles-while-the-girls-got-to-catch-up kind of morning.

The biggest hit had to be our new whipped cream maker that I pulled out for the ocassion. The girls were super addicted, and when G finally got around to grabbing some waffles of his own, he went a little crazy with it too. Went so crazy that he ended up getting cream all over the place -- his face, his leg, the blinds, the floor. Again, we realized how lucky we were to have the dogs to help with the clean up, but even they couldn't work miracles. But at least I didn't hear another word about my waffle making abilities after that.

I guess the one nice thing about the hot weather was that the garden seemed to go a little crazy. Veggies started cropping up like crazy towards the end of last week. Or died, I guess. But the beans for example, took off. Any bean recipe ideas out there? G can't stand them too, so especially if you have something that even bean-haters would love, please send them along. I know I can make something cheesy, like a casserole, and he'd go for it, but it seems like such a shame to cover all the fresh beans with cheese and cream.

The squash are still coming along beautifully too. So far, I've been great at using them as they crop up. That ricotta cheese tart for example took care of most of what we harvested the end of last week. But by Sat, already, there were already a few more almost ready to pick. The plants keep growing and growing too, they seem to take over pretty much where ever they're at, so good thing we didn't try to plant much around them this year.

G's pride and joy -- the one million and one varities of peppers (hot, sweet, and bell) that we have planted are finally starting to appreciate his love and attention. We've already been grabbing serranos for every meal, but I think we'll soon have some full grown bell peppers too.

If you're a sweet pepper fan and are having a hard time growing them in your garden, you might want to give this one a try. Its called the Aconcagua and seems to be thriving with very little fuss. I think they get much bigger than this when they're full grown, so I haven't had a chance to try it yet. But in terms of ease/lack of finickiness, its been a great addition to our garden this year.

And then our eggplant . . . I gotta say, I'm a little confused by our eggplant. The new plants we got from a nursery this year are totally dying. They don't seem to like the heat at all. And they keep getting chewed up. We've been wondering who the culprit could be, until G got Mia licking one of the leaves last week. So we're pretty sure it must be her eating the plant. But who knew that eggplant leaves would be so attrative to dogs!! Anyway, I'm sure that's not helping any. But what's funny is that our plants from last year that were out all winter long AND hang out in a part of the yard that gets a lot more heat seem to be doing pretty darn well.

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.

Fresh Dirt

Its been fun to see the daily progress in our garden. We're probably dorks but G and I get so thrilled at every little seedling that makes its way through the dirt. Even the tiniest little spurt of growth is exciting. Our hard work is finally starting to show, too, which is nice. But I think we definitely qualify as gardening junkies now. I salivate over the garden landscapes I see in Sunset magazine. G always points out the nice yards we run across as we're out walking the dogs. Terrible, huh?

The flowers are in bloom. The cherry tree lost its blossoms but has lots of little green cherries, probably 5x more than the small little handful we got last year. The front yard can probably use a bit more work but all in all, its promising to be a good summer.

This last weekend we finally started putting some of our seedlings into the ground. The squash has been coming along well, and they're so hardy that we decided that they'd brave the cold nights just fine. So they've been scattered around the yard.

We have 6 squashes this year so we thought we'd try to plant this one in the shade where nothing else can really grow. If it dies, well, we're already going to have more zucchini than we know what to do with.

These 3 - a zuke, butternut, and yellow squash can battle it out amongst themselves. There should be plenty of room for all of them, but hopefully one doesn't choke out the other.

Maybe the hardiest of the 3, but they're all pretty impressive already. It was crazy, one of them looked a little wilted in the morning so we decided to hold off on transplanting it. But a couple of hours in the shade and it perked right up, getting even bigger than before, if that's even possible.

We planted the strawberries in the front. There's been a lot written these days about edible front yards. And I'm not going there yet, but I have to admit that I'm a little intrigued. We do occasionally get kids messing around in our front yard, so I'd hate to tempt them more. But between the dogs (one night, I let them out when I heard horsing around and some kid who was still hanging around the yard actually kind of dropped to the ground as Mia rushed him . . . probably to lick him, but he didn't know that) and G scaring them off with a pellet gun (that was pretty hilarious too, they took off running), we're probably safe. So we're hoping to start a little something in the front yard this year -- a few strawberry plants, hopefully a blackberry bush if I can find one, and a grape vine for our front porch. If it works, we might be looking at even more crops next year.

One of the strawberry plants already has a few berries!


And of course, our pride and joy is our "pepper kingdom." G ordered a bunch of crazy pepper plants from an online vendor in the east coast. So we're now the owners of some of the hottest peppers in the world. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the hottest pepper is one from India called Bhut Jolokia. Guess whose house you can check it out at this summer? We have some other super hot ones to0 -- 2 different varieties of habaneros, something else called the Trinidad Scorpion and the Devil's Tongue. Plus we still have the tamer ones we grew last year -- some serranos, jalapenos, thai dragons, cayennes. We planted all of the peppers in a planter box last year and stuck it in our dog run where they get the most sun. This year, we've decided to add to the group by planting the new varieties in individual planters that are big enough to house them throughout the season. The entire collection (along with some sweet peppers) is now ready for viewing. And of course, if you're looking for some heat later this summer, come on by.

Its nice to know that our dog run is getting some use after all, seeing as how our dogs don't actually hang out in it.

spring buds

Our garden's officially back, hopefully bigger and better this year. During the last week and a half, all of our little seedlings have begun to sprout. Our cherry tree is blossoming. A lot of our chili pepper plants survived the winter and are starting to produce new little peppers now that G has been trimming away the dead leaves. AND more plants are on the way. G ordered a whole bunch of super hot chili plants (he ordered them online while we were on our honeymoon, believe it or not, and was SO disappointed that they wouldn't ship until April) so we should have even more heat than last year. By the time we're through, our crop this year should include: green beans, zucchini, 3 other other varieties of squash, 3 (?) types of basil, bell peppers, 2 types of eggplant, strawberries, couple of types of tomatoes, chives, cilantro, 6-7 varieties of chili peppers (one of which is supposed to be the hottest pepper in the world), and a bunch of flowers.

Its a bit early, and we've had to do a lot of moving around and covering on cold nights. But they're all looking great, so guess they're handling it all just fine.

garden madness

So Gregg has a couple of long stretches in his yard that aren't covered in grass, so for the last couple of years, we've been planting vegetables along the side of his yard. Last year, we started too late and never quite got the hang of watering regularly. This year, we planted so early that on some nights, he had to go out and cover everything to protect them from frost. And he got all into setting up a drip system all around the yard so that everything in his yard is watered automatically now. We even got excited and built another planter so that we could buy more plants. Well, G built it but I provided some moral support along the way. :) We ended up with zucchinni, tomatoes (3 types), eggplant, bell peppers (2-3 types), corn, basil (2 types), cilantro, mint, japanese cucumbers, chili peppers (a million different varieties, it seems). I don't know if we just got a little too excited or what, but we've been swimming in vegetables now for a couple of months. These pics are about a month old, so a lot of our plants are even bushier and bigger now. Except for the corn which seems be done now for the season and has been slowly wilting away.

Gregg does most of the tending - the weeding, fertilizing, spraying, that kind of stuff. And I've been trying to actually use everything. I like veggies, but its been hard keeping up. So if anyone has any good recipes out there that involve A LOT of vegetables, please pass them along. The winner so far was a night about a week or so ago when I made veggie paella (with just about very veggie we have) and gazpacho (which uses a lot of both tomatoes and cukes!). A couple of zucchini casseroles, a corn chowder, pickled cucumbers, lots of pasta primavera -- Its been fun trying out new recipes, but enough already. Especially if your recipe is easy and doesn't involve a ton of chopping, I'm be so ready to hear it!

And if you want any chili peppers, please come and take them. This is definitely a case where we went a little overboard. They sell a lot of peppers as six packs at the beginning of the season. And that's actually a lot of peppers, seeing as how one plant is more than enough to feed a family of 4 for the whole summer but we didn't know that. We started off with six packs of serranos and jalapenos. Happened to run into some Thai Chillis, Anaheims, then some Cayenne. We searched all over for Jabaneros and then even found these super hot Carribbeean peppers. Needless to say, our taste buds have been slowly withering away. Lately now we've taken to sauteeing a bunch of peppers in some oil, then blending it all up into a pure chili hot sauce that we've been throwing on everything. Fortunately for us, they seem to be staggered, the serranos will probably die off here in a bit just as the super hot ones like the Carribbean and Jabaneros are starting to ripen. But still, we have more heat than we can handle, so any help would be appreciated.