Walk Widely. Eat Wisely. Live Gratefully.
We were craving something delicious for lunch and there was an avocado that had just reached that moment of perfect ripeness. We diced it into some salmon and mayo, and served it on homemade whole wheat sourdough bread. Delicious with a cold glass of milk!
Today we’re headed out to the plot to do some compost maintenance and give the gardens a general walk-around before some visitors arrive this afternoon. Our fuel for the endeavour consists of local harvest foods, some of our own, and some from others nearby.
We cooked a melange of veggies – potato, onion, celery, peppers, mushrooms in a tiny spoonful of bacon fat (vegetarians, canola oil is fine, or a nice herbed olive oil if you have one). When they were nearly tender enough for our taste, we broke in some fresh eggs, lidded the lot and let them poach until just softly done. This is our tasty result:
As the weather cools and many of our garden crops have been harvested, it can be easy to turn our thoughts to root vegetables. Well we should! But it isn’t too late for salad yet, even without cold frames. Yesterday we harvested delicious beets and Swiss chard, an we still have a healthy crop of mizuna. All of this was turned into today’s lunch salad, along with some chopped apple, walnuts, and feta cheese, held together with this vinaigrette (for two):
15ml/1T each of red wine vinegar, tarragon Dijon, and olive oil, whisked together. If you don’t have tarragon Dijon, use regular, and add some chopped herbs of your choice.
Tasty – although we admit if the chill stays in the air, we will turn our thoughts to soup!
Number one child arrived home yesterday, and we had great plans to make bean burritos for dinner. Somehow in the midst of all the harvesting, pickling, canning, and freezing, though, our food inventory-keeping went awry. We were okay with substituting chickpeas and Jacob’s cattle beans for the black beans. But no tortillas, either? That was problematic. So we hit on a plan. Bulgur would play the part of the tortilla, in a manner of speaking. For three:
Boil 1 cup (250ml) water. Add 1/2 cup (125ml) bulgur and 1 tsp (5ml) olive oil, and simmer for 30 minutes.
Meanwhile, cook 3 cloves of garlic and 1 tsp (5ml) chipotle powder in 1 Tbsp (15ml) olive oil. Add a drained can of beans or about 2 cups (500ml) beans and 1/2 cup (125ml) broth. (Go crazy – black beans, chickpeas, whatever strikes your fancy…we are improvising now). Simmer until bulgur is cooked.
Line 3 bowls with greens – we still have mizuna in the garden, so that’s what we used. Stir the bulgur into the bean mix and spoon over the greens. Top with chopped tomato, diced avocado, fat free yogurt, salsa, and grated cheese. (Did I mention we were also out of salsa?) Spicy chioggia relish to the rescue!
All this is to say, in a cost-conscious kitchen, it isn’t always necessary to run to the store when you’re short on ingredients for a recipe. Use a little imagination and you might invent a whole new kind of delicious.
We’ve been traveling, attending a couple of family weddings and doing a little business along the way. It didn’t seem realistic to ask them to postpone their special events on account of our vegetable patch, so the consequences when we got home were, well, interesting…
First, beans were just nicely coming into bloom when we left. Which means Jack’s beanstalk had nothing on us when we arrived back. Beets are still growing, and we’ve already harvested potatoes. A few tomatoes were spared the post tropical storm blight that has attacked local crops.
All in all, we had the makings of a lovely salad (and roasted veg are in our future). The eggs, olives, and tuna are not our own, but the rest is absolutely home grown.
For two:
Cook 2 small red potatoes and 1 large golden beet (reserve the greens for the salad). Throw the beans in to blanch, just at the end of cooking.
Hard boil 2 eggs.
Chill all of this (we cooked ours at breakfast time).
Arrange the chopped greens on a plate. Top with the cooked, cooled veggies, some sliced tomato, olives, and good quality water packed tuna.
For the dressing, mix 1T/15ml each of Dijon, olive oil, and vinegar (your choice).
Enjoy!
Thanks to the amazing team of women and men at St. Anthony’s, who put together a delicious roast beef dinner last night. This was our first visit to this annual fundraiser, but it definitely won’t be our last. We hardly need more food after such a feast, and yet, here we are…time for breakfast!
Ever-bearing local strawberries were in stores and stands this week, and we’re of two minds. When we were young, everything had a season, especially strawberries. When it was the right window, we ate strawberries in every conceivable form and fashion. Then we put up, jammed, froze, or canned as many as we could, for the other seasons.
This year we missed the traditional strawberry window, on account of the happy event of gaining a son-in-law. So we were sort of relieved to see another crop appearing in our local shop. They look delicious on this almond-y French toast, we think you might agree. But we must say, it seems a little of the magic is lost. The nip of fall is in the air. We’re turning our attention to beans, root vegetables and kale. True, they might not be as tasty on our morning toast…but we think it is a better idea not to press the seasons too far. With so much bounty to enjoy, we’re fans of the ever-unfolding mysteries of what we will find in the garden that needs to be eaten next.
This morning we were out for a walk in the early morning, keeping our commitment to be fitter, not fatter, in 2014. This is especially important if you’ve had far too much fun with friends or family on the weekend. Don’t give up, just get on track.
Breakfast was a healthy affair – a piece of plain wheat toast, topped with 1/3 of an avocado mashed with lemon juice, 1/3 of a medium tomato, diced, a poached egg and a sprinkle of lemon pepper for me, and two servings for the big guy.
We’re so grateful that the good weather continues and we can get outside and keep fit without ending up drenched or freezing! Hope you’re having a healthy, happy day as well.
These veggies are as fresh as can be – harvested in our own garden and roasted within minutes of being picked.
Choose your own mix of veg and herbs. Chop into bite-sized pieces, toss with a little olive oil and wrap in a double layer of foil. Put this on your grill while it’s heating, turning occasionally. It’ll be done when your steak or pork chop is cooked. Not grilling meat? About 10 minutes (plus the preheating time) should do the trick.
So many good things are coming out of the garden this time of year…it makes all the cold, wet planting in spring worth it. Today we had a small grilled steak with a little chipotle spice and the remains of our crunchy potato salad from the weekend. Paired with a lovely mix of greens (mizuna, Simpson lettuce, romaine, and red leaf lettuce) topped with green onion and mushrooms, dressed in a balsamic Dijon vinaigrette, it truly was the taste of summer at its best.
It’s the rainy Monday of a long weekend and we’ll be working to prep for the coming week. Something with a multitude of flavours should inspire us. We started with four slices of homemade whole wheat bread – nutty and tasty. We dipped these in a mixture of egg and milk (2 medium eggs and about half a cup or 125ml of 1% milk in our case). Our electric grill/griddle has both smooth and rippled plates so we heated it up with one of each in place. French toast on the flat side, and tasty local plums on the ridgy one. They might stick a little, but the flavour is fantastic.
Topped with a little maple syrup from our friends down the road at Acadian Maple Products, this was a sweet start to the day.
To our Nova Scotian friends, happy Natal Day. Happy Simcoe Day, Ontario….and for all of you celebrating some sort of holiday Monday, have a safe, fun holiday, however you spend it.