Catching up

Hi everyone, hope you're all having a good start to your week. The days sure do go fast, I haven't posted since Thursday! I wasn't very well over the weekend, I think it was allergies. On Friday I started getting a huge cold sore on my lip too - man do they hurt. Usually I can 'nip them in the bud' (I use Abreva, if I so much as feel a tingle - if you've ever had a cold sore, you'll know what I mean) but for some reason I didn't feel this until it was quite a large lump! And even though I put Abreva on it straight away, by the next day it had really broken out and was huge :-(  I also had a fever on Saturday and spent most of the afternoon asleep on the couch while Jason took Kristen to his work picnic.

I felt a lot better on Sunday and actually went up to the gym with Cheryl and Steve. I've decided to join again! I really need to get active. Most of my afternoons I seem to be spending on the couch, after I've done housework etc, trying to knit Christmas gifts. I know I can find the time to pop up to the gym for an hour every other day. I didn't go yesterday because I was feeling pretty tired, from the workout I did on Sunday and probably the allergy problems right now. I don't want to over do it, so I'm going to try and go again today.

I'm finding there's not much to blog about right now because I'm not really doing much. Other than housework and knitting, and baking! I did say I'd share my apple pie pics with you last week, so here they are. . . .

As I mentioned, I made the pie because we got some apples off our tree :-)  I actually made the pastry from scratch and although it was ok, I didn't think it was GREAT!  The ice cream, now that was delicious. Homemade ice cream = yummy! And it couldn't be easier, it's just milk, cream sugar and vanilla and I pour it in to my icecream maker and turn it on. 20 minutes later you have delicious creamy ice cream. 

We're still waiting for the weather to cool down here! The mornings aren't too bad, usually in the low 70's, but by the afternoon we're still hitting high 90's. This is how the garden is looking at the minute. . . . 

All those plants you see there (spilling out on to the paths) are tomato plants! We planted them back at the beginning of the summer and haven't had any tomatoes off them? I think it was just too dry. Now that we are able to water a bit more we are trying to get them going again. They are full of little yellow flowers now, so we're hoping we get a huge crop of tomatoes in the next few weeks.

The grocery store was selling plants and herbs again so I bought a few including another tomato plant! some peppers and some new herbs.  I cleaned out my herb garden. The basil I had was huge and had gone to seed, so I cut it all down and now it's growing new leaves. You can see him below looking like a small tree without many leaves.

 

This basil plant below is purple and actually smells like licorice and basil!  I haven't used it yet, and actually probably wont. I just like to have a nice selection of herbs to smell as I go around the garden!

 Another new plant I planted last week . . . cauliflower :-) I've never grown one before, although we did get broccoli a couple of years ago, so I'm sure I can do cauli too.  What about you, are you still growing anything in the garden?

Fun in the Kitchen, and Garden Update!

Hi there, sorry I didn’t get on here yesterday and post pictures, it was one of those days that just seemed to fly by. One minute it was 10am and we were heading out to return books to the library, then get some groceries in, and the next minute I look at the clock and it was after 4pm!  But I’m here now with a lovely long post all about the garden and what we’ve been up to in the kitchen!

First off – is it or isn’t it?  RIPE that is! We picked this big watermelon the other day not knowing if it would be ripe or not. There’s really no way of telling, although Jason was surfing the net to see if he could find some information on it.  We decided the only way to tell was to pick one and cut in to it (we have about 5 other large ones out there so if it’s not ripe we’ll leave them for another week or so). . . .

Alas, it wasn’t quite ready :-( I did taste it and it was ok, but not very juicy or sweet yet.

 

Things were looking ok in the garden last week, despite the triple digits we’ve had every day for about 10 days now! We kept finding zucchini that we hadn’t seen before – when you don’t pick them at a ‘normal size’ they get HUGE like the two in the picture below. I also picked some small ‘fairytale’ eggplant. I wasn’t sure what I would do with them, but I roasted them last night with the squash and they were ok – not to Jason’s liking at all!

As you can see (above) we got more potatoes out of the ground, these were the last ones, so I made potato salad to take to Cheryl’s for her ‘Father’s Day’ BBQ on Saturday.

This was a big hit, I did a mustard and mayo dressing and even put in hard boiled eggs from Patty’s Chickens (Cheryl’s sister).  We’ll definitely be planting lots more taters in the fall ;-)

    We picked more corn too – I love this picture, the corn looks perfect and it tasted delicious, but most of them had been eaten at the top by worms (which actually look more like a green caterpillar).  We got about 6 big ears of corn that day and then Jason decided he’d pull the rest of the corn out, the ears left were quite small and a lot that we pulled hadn’t developed the kernels very well either.  Still, I’d call our corn growing a success this year too and we’ll be planting more for sure when the weather cools down.

Here’s Jason pulling out the first stalk!

So on Saturday (while I was making the potato salad, you can see the pan boiling there on the stove), Jason decided he wanted to cook something with his zucchini – zucchini corn fritters to be exact!  He looked for a recipe but in the end decided to just make his own. He used a box of Jiffy corn muffin mix and added shredded zucchini then fried them in the cast iron skillet (which he loves to use when he can).  The first few came out kinda like fritters because there was more oil in the pan. They were pretty tasty. The others he did afterwards were more like pancakes . . .

  So, we drizzled maple syrup on them, and they were even more tasty!

I tried making chocolate zucchini muffins but they weren’t good. Not very sweet at all (I won’t be using that recipe again!). I think I’d rather stick with zucchini bread. The recipe I have comes out great every time. I’m planning on making more today.

As for other garden news, things are starting to look a bit ‘sad’ out there, may be a combination of the heat and, well we seem to have ‘borers’ in the squash. You can click on the link HERE to see what they’re like. We’ve pulled a few squash plants out and thrown them away.

The grapes though have finally started turning color. Problem is they are filled with pips and hardly any flesh. I think actually my grapes are for making wine, not eating. Jason bought me a concord grape this year which is more to eat once it’s ripe. Hopefully we’ll get something off that next year. These ones now seem to be just feeding the birds! Still, nice to look at. I’d like a nice gazebo out the back filled with these, wouldn’t that look pretty!

     

The summer squash may be just about finished but we’re now starting to get spaghetti squash and butternut squash :-) I made my favorite butternut squash soup yesterday. . . I’ll be having it again for lunch today – LOVE it!

This is a bowl I made last year! I use the same Paula Deen recipe every time. It’s just squash, carrots and onions boiled in chicken broth then blended. Of course she adds butter and cream at the end which I never do. It really doesn’t need it, and I save 100’s calories! I’m guessing a cup of my soup is no more than 50 calories.

And finally, apples :-)  We had a ton of them last year and I made apple sauce which Kristen loved. They won’t be ready for a good few months, but they’re coming along nicely.

So, that’s it for today. Hope it wasn’t too long a post for you! I’ve got to get back to chores. . . . there’s nothing like a friend telling you she’s coming to visit to make you get up off your butt and clean house ;-)  Ha ha, MORE about that next time!!

Oh, and I’m a few days behind (again) on the 30 Day Photo Fun, so that will be coming next too!

Sunday Catch Up!

I thought I’d join in with a new party I just found over at Kim’s blog . . .

It’s hosted by Three P’s in a Pod, Carrie with Children and Mommy Head Adventures.  It’s a blog hop each Sunday, so hop on over and say Hi :-) but don’t forget to leave a comment here before you go, I’d love to know you stopped by.

There’s so many things I would love to blog about, it’s just trying to find the time to sit down and type that’s the hard part! I’m a few days behind on the 30 Days Photo Fun posts, and I think I’ll have to do a separate post just to catch up!

Day 9 was Fresh Fruit, and I wanted to take this picture but didn’t get around to doing it until this morning. . . .

 

When you think ‘fresh fruit’ you’re probably imagining a fruit bowl filled with apples and oranges, bright colors and everything looking ripe! This might not look very fresh but it soon will be – the above picture is a cantaloupe currently growing in our garden, and the picture below is our first watermelon this year. In fact I hadn’t even seen this one until today, I nearly died when I saw the size of it!

 

The garden is doing so well (another thing I wanted to blog about) we’ve had corn this week AND we finally pulled up some potatoes to see if there were any underground (Jason thought we might have planted them too late) and we were happilly surprised to see we had been successful. . . .   We had corn yesterday which was really good, the kernels were a bit small but still very fresh and tasty.

and here’s the potatoes we pulled up last night. I boiled them this morning and made potato salad

We still have quite a few plants in the garden so we’ll pull them this week and I’ll make some mashed potato for dinner.

I deliberately planted an eggplant this year (aubergine) to make my friend Cheryl Eggplant Parmesan (it’s one of her favorite dishes). See the eggplant above. I picked that yesterday and then went to pick two more from the same plant. This morning I made her eggplant parmesan using THIS recipe from allrecipes.com

I didn’t use as much sauce and didn’t layer the eggplant, which I think made it much better. It turned out delicious and Cheryl loved it.  I made a smaller dish for me and Jason and even he liked it.

Well, I don’t want this post to get too long, so I will try my best to make daily posts next week, share with you the cocktail we tried this weekend, and show more garden pics too.

Hope you’re all having a wonderful weekend.

Update on Boo . . .  I’m happy to say he was fine the next day and not limping on his paw at all! I really think it was a sting of some sort or Jason thought he could have stepped on a nettle?  It certainly isn’t broken and he’s back to looking 100% :-) Thanks for all your well wishes.

It’s starting to pay off. . .

. . . all our hard work in the garden, that is!  We have been enjoying some things from the garden the past week or so and I haven’t even had a chance to blog about it.

I’m gonna make this a super quick post, I just got back from a 25 min walk/jog around the neighborhood – it’s only 9.15am and already I’ve taken over 5000 steps! I should hit 10,000 today :-)

Last night Jason and I went out back as we usually do after dinner, and this is what I picked . . . .

Acorn squash, summer (yellow squash) and a zucchini, 3 peaches and 3 green beans!!! Yes, just 3 green beans, that is so funny I think. Usually we would get a lot more all at once, but this small crop we planted first didn’t do so well in the beginning, and there’s not much on them right now. We have another larger crop we planted a few weeks after that are looking really good, and we have a whole row of ‘pole beans’ that are growing up the netting really fast.

These aren’t the first peaches from the tree, we had some last week

 

We can’t remember what kind of peach this is but it’s definitely different to the other two trees – a much earlier producing one for sure, as the other trees have tiny peaches on, and they’re no where near ripe yet. But these babies were . . . and they were delicious.

I can’t tell you how nice it is to just pick them off the tree and sit on the back porch eating them, they’re so juicy, and still warm from the sun – truly amazing.

Here’s a meal I did last week…. rather eclectic but we wanted to eat what was harvested from the garden – We had soup I made with the chicken from the Farmer’s Market. Our first acorn squash were ready, so I roasted two with a little butter and brown sugar. You can see a small bowl of plums (they have all gone from the tree now – we didn’t get as many as we did last year, and they were smaller, but still so good)

Here’s one just before I picked it off the tree!

There’s also a bowl of salad from our garden. I’ve since cut much more, just look at the bowl fulls I got this week:

The corn is getting high but I don’t see any ‘ears’ yet! Cantaloupes are flowering as are the watermelons. Peppers are starting to grow better too. It’s all looking great.

Linking to:

Outdoor Wednesday

Tuesday Garden Party

Garden Update

It’s midweek already! I’m busy planning my Mother’s Day lunch menu, and I think I’ve finally decided on a menu (which I will share later).  But I told you I’d show pictures of the garden, so I will do that in this post . . . . come see how things are growing!

First of all, remember the ‘pizza garden’ I planted while the work was still being done on the yard? I forgot how small it looked until I went looking for the picture. . . .

  What a difference huh?! I’ve had a few snips of basil and cilantro from this pot. I love that it’s just outside the back door and I can pop out and ‘snip’ whenever I like :-)

 

 

We’ve had our first harvest of the season . . .  of course it was radish. These little guys are fully grown in about 25 days! We just pick a few each day and chop them up on our salads.

 

Beets are coming along nicely, next to the radishes.

Corn is getting big too!

Squash! These ones are Acorn (the two larger ones on the right) and the one at the bottom (smallest one) is zucchini, and the one next to that is a Patty Pan Squash. I had two Patty Pan but one didn’t make it so I put a zucchini one in it’s place.

The Acorn Squash already has flowers on and tiny little ‘acorns’

 

We planted potatoes! It may have been a little late, but they’re growing well. Jason is thinking of pulling them out though as the bed is infested with ‘Morning Glory’ weeds!!!!!! I love this flower but it is evil in vegetable beds

Trees are starting to bear fruit :-) We have a ton of peaches on two trees. I hope the manage to ripen.  I hope they all ripen.

   

Plums!

Pears!

This is MY grapevine that I DIDN’T cut back last year!! It looks great but the grapes are tiny!

 

Jason is training this vine‘the right way’, and I must say the grapes are much bigger because of it!

So, there you have it! Things are growing well for the most part, although we are having some issues with the soil. Jason tested it and it was deficient in nitrogen still AND the acidity is high. Our peppers aren’t growing well at all. We’ve added fertilizer and we have some lime to add this weekend.

How is YOUR garden growing?