What We Eat

I love cooking. I especially love cooking for my friends and family, and though I am still a newbie, I am passionate about growing as much food at possible here at the homestead. With this lack of knowledge, mainly in underestimating the amount of produce each plant will yield, I have become overrun by my garden's bounty this summer. While we use our fruits and veggies as host/hostess gifts or thank-yous, we still seem to have too much, all the time. The thought of a wasted zucchini or beet riddles me with guilt, so we have been pawning off our goods on anyone who will take them--even if the food ends up spoiling at the hands of our friends and family, I won't have to witness it, so it's ok!

We moved in last December, an awkward time for planting stuff, but I figured since our growing climate is ideal for anything, it would be fine to plant whatever I wanted. So now I have: zucchini, butterstick squash (yellow zucchini), summer squash, 50 ridiculous pumpkins, watermelon, cucumber, leeks, kale, broccoli, red leaf lettuce, carrots, beets, tomatoes, bell peppers, mint, cilantro, chives, and chard--and that's just in our planters! We also have a huge macadamia tree, peach, valencia orange, grapefruit, lime, lemon, and fig tree-yikes! Needless to say, it's a part-time job just making sure everything is watered and harvested from.

Speaking of water...lately I've been debating whether the garden is really worth it, mainly because it has caused a significant hike in our water bill. It's important to me that we eat organic, slow-grown foods, and I've always just assumed that growing your own saves money, but now I'm not so sure about that theory. I'm not going to do the math, but it might actually be cheaper to just buy organic produce at the farmer's market or store. That being said, I really just can't bring myself to spend $7.99 a pound for bell peppers, are you kidding me?

For now, the garden stays. Back to the food.

Since I've had the summer off, I've been making an effort to make as many home-cooked meals as possible. I also try to include at least one thing from our own garden in every meal. Since we are bringing in new fruits and veggies from the yard every day, I've been trying to put things together in new ways to avoid redundancy. Last week I came up with a couple off-the-cuff recipe gems, and I want to blog about them so I don't forget how they happened.

Here's the first one:

Usually for lunch, Marlowe and I eat something quick and lite, but last week I was feeling a little more adventurous so I took a walk outside and looked for some inspiration. I returned with two zucchini (one green, one yellow), a pile of kale, and a baby leek. I had just bought some fluffy flatbread and decided to make some kind of tapenade-ish thing to accompany it.

I diced up the aforementioned garden veggies, and added some mushrooms and half a yellow onion. Then I sauteed it all with some garlic and olive oil for about, oh, 7 minutes?

Next, I dumped the cooked veggies into a mixing bowl, slopped on 2-3 tablespoons of plain hummus, and mixed it all together

Then, I toasted the flatbread, garnished with raw spinach, applied a quick dusting of salt n' pepa, and macked down (cooking while hungry is a no-go).

And here's Marlowe's version of this meal:

She even ate one nibble off a spinach leaf, which was a huge victory.