I made dinner and the papparazzi forgot to show up.

As I posted earlier this week, the mister and me are participating a nutrition challenge for 30 days (September 16 - October 16).  Since we've moved away from gluten and legumes, many of our dinners have seen an increase in meats and greens.  It felt like I haven't made an all-vegetarian dinner for some time, so I did on this night.  I also had a smattering of foods that I half-prepped over the weekend and wanted to use:
- mushrooms from Oley Valley Mushrooms
- sweet potatoes from the LFFC CSA share
- chard from the raised beds
- beets from the raised beds (I harvested all of them on Sunday--see below and roasted them whole for later use)

So, this evening I decided to get creative. While sweet potatoes were wrapped in foil in the toaster oven and cooking, I began prepping the rest of dinner--scrubbing and cutting the mushrooms, removing the peels from the beets (it was super easy after roasting them the day before), and the mister helped me by chopping and rinsing the chard. 

I grabbed my two Le Creuset pans (the frying pan and the large sauté pan).  In both, I put about a teaspoon of ghee.  In essence, ghee is clarified butter; baked slow and low so that the milk solids are removed from the butter.  It is incredible to cook with and does not have the oxidization that occurs when heating EVOO to high temps.  

In the frying pan, I added the mushrooms and allowed them to cook on low until they were nice and browned.  It takes 10 minutes or so. 

In the large sauté pan, I added some sage to the melted ghee and let those flavors mix for a minute. Then, I added some chopped walnuts to toast them (let the walnuts get warm for about 2-3 minutes).  From there, I added 4 or 5 large beets (chopped into 1" pieces) and let them warm through.  At that point, I topped the pan with chard and put the lid on to wilt the greens.  After 5 minutes, I grabbed my silicone spatula and made sure to mix the beets and greens.  Once the greens were wilted, I was ready to put everything on our plates.  

We ate the mushrooms separately with just a touch of salt and pepper. They were divine!  I got more creative with the second half of the dinner -- and warned the mister that I was doing so.  I took the sweet potato out of the toaster oven, removed the skins, and mashed it in my bowl.  I then topped the sweet potatoes with the beet/chard/walnut mixture and added a dash of EVOO.  It was a terrific mixture of flavors and the mister followed suit and prepared his plate the same way.  

Problem is, I never took a picture of our dinner. The paparazzi were slacking this evening.  I will likely make this dinner again and promise to post a picture.  

Dinner was gluten-free and vegetarian. A quick swap of EVOO for the ghee would make this dinner vegan. 

Snacks!?! Why not!

So, I had a plethora of kale in my garden this year. Yes, a ton of it. It's still growing and was one of my most successful crops from the raised beds. I even planted more for the cooler fall temps.  

My go-to kale dish usually involves garlic and EVOO and is sautéed . It's not too inventive, but I know what I like. 

This weekend, we had some more fall-like temps and my Instagram and Facebook feeds were filled with images of fall-inspired creations.  One I hadn't tried before were kale chips!  

So, on the first day of fall, I grabbed that excellent kale and got to work.  Here's what happened:

Preheat the oven to 300°. While the oven is warming, grab some cookie sheets and cover with parchment paper.  

I had a 1 gallon Ziploc bag stuffed with pre-washed and de-stemmed kale, so I was already ahead of the game.  I put about half the bag in a large bowl and drizzled with olive oil. From there, I added some garlic sea salt and make sure to get all of the leaves coated with the olive oil.   

With the other half of the kale, I dusted it with Chipotle Chili Powder.

Both sheets went into the oven for about 20 minutes.  They weren't quite done, so I let them cook for another 5 minutes and then swapped the locations of the cookie sheets in the ovens for another 5 minutes (total of 30 minutes in the oven). I removed the cookie sheets and then let the kale chips cool for a few minutes. 

The house smelled so good and I was looking forward to trying these chips as soon as they cooled. I was so looking forward to trying these that I ended up hovering over the stove as I "sampled" several chips...over and over again until there were just a few servings left for storing!  

Lessons learned: try turning up the heat to 325° to reduce cooking time; do NOT overcoat the kale, as it will take longer to cook (I think I used a little bit too much and will reduce my EVOO next time); get creative with the spices/herbs that you use! 

I tried my hand at growing vegetables this year. Part III

There have been great successes this summer with our garden and here's a snapshot of some of what I've been able to harvest:

Eggplant (dogs didn't come from the garden)

Cherry tomatoes

Beefsteak tomatoes. I have probably harvested at least 5 - 7 lbs and there's more to be had.

Countless caprese salads

The garden is rockin'

I will re-evaluate planting zucchini next year, as they took up an incredible amount of space and only one veggie came to fruition before rotting on the vine.  I have already planted new seeds for the fall; including two types of lettuce, red Russian kale, and Swiss Chard. 

I tried my hand at growing this year. Part II

As I said in my earlier post, there were successes and failures in my endeavor to grow veggies this year.  The mister and I played is safe and continued with our CSA membership, but decided to opt for the half share in lieu of the full share.

Some of the seeds I started inside were looking great, like the broccoli, pictured below:

Some of the other seeds (kale, cucumber, zucchini) called for a direct planting in the soil.  So, around Mother's Day I got the seeds in the dirt and within  three weeks, I already had some success.  I decided to also look for some plants at the farmer's market and picked up some eggplant plants from an organic farmer.  So, by memorial day, my garden looked like this:

Lettuce (up front), broccoli (middle), sunflower and eggplants (left and top), hints of kale (top right)

We were able to set up a watering system by running the hose from the house (some 50') along the top of our fence line and connecting it to a diverter connected to two soaker hoses.  Once in the AM and PM we watered the beds for 10 minutes.

Top row are cucumbers; bottom two rows are zucchini

Carrots in the foreground

As I said before, I had some failures in this process.  My tomatoes that I started from seed did not transplant well and died, so I bought 5 tomato plants from a farmer at the Phoenixville Farmer's Market.  My broccoli transplanted well, gave me lots of green leaves, but never delivered on the florets. 

Within a few weeks I was harvesting food and the garden was thriving. 

Before (upper) and after (lower)

In my next post, I'll give you the rundown of everything we harvested this year. 

I tried my hand at growing food this year

And I think I succeeded.

The discussion began in late winter.  I don't know if you could even call November 2012 - March 2013 winter-like this year, as we had unseasonable warm temps and little to no snow precipitation.  I mentioned to the mister that I'd like to try growing food this year in addition to our CSA.  I've grown some herbs and cherry tomatoes in containers before, but with limited success.  I don't know what gave me the confidence to try growing food on a bigger scale. 

The mister and I began researching raised bed plans and seed sellers online. We decided upon a 4' x 8' dimension for our beds, but since we have a large male dog it needed to be at least 24" high, lest he try to raise his leg. (Most raised bed plans call for no more than 6" height.) And, given the amount of food I planned to grow, we decided that two would be sufficient this year.  We also decided upon a location that would allow us to build a third one if this year's "experiment" was a success.

The mister downloaded plans from the internet and began planning his supply list -- which seemed to go on forever, but I'm sure he views my ingredient lists the same way.  The mister and I agreed that we were going to use cedar instead of pressure-treated wood for the beds since they treat pressure treated wood with chemicals.  So, one very expensive trip to Lowe's for lumber (it was $200+), we had a pile of wood in the backyard and the mister got building.  Two beds were built in a day, and resemble the same size of a single (sleeping) bed you'd have in your home. 

In the meantime, I got to seed shopping. I'm very interested in eating/growing/buying food that are not GMO.  So, I found Botanical Interests online.  They sell both non-GMO and organic seeds and I bought a bunch of them--different types of lettuce, kale, tomatoes, broccoli, herbs, sunflowers, zinnias, chard, zucchini, cucumber, and watermelon.

I plotted out my planting schedule on a spreadsheet and purchased some seed starting kits to begin the garden.  I put the kits in a sunny spot, on our heater, so that the seeds would germinate easily despite the shorter days.   After a week, I had success with my lettuce seeds sprouting through.

It was working!  The picture above is of lettuce sprouts.  In order to get these sprouts into the raised beds, we needed dirt. So, the mister went over to our local landscape supply company to talk dirt with them.  They recommended a mix of screened topsoil along with aged mushroom compost to provide nutrients to the beds.  So, a few days later, we had 5 tons of dirt delivered to our house and the mister got to moving.  It was a terribly rainy day, but he was able to fill both beds and cleared all dirt from the drop zone.  He's the best.

Now that the beds were filled with good dirt, I started to evaluate my planting schedule and started to get some seeds in the ground. There are many that call for planting after the threat of frost (which is usually after Mother's Day in the mid-Atlantic); however, some hearty greens like kale and lettuces can handle a frost and keep on growing. I made sure to transplant some around mid-April and by the end of April I was already seeing success with the red leaf lettuce.

It wasn't all successful, but since I'm getting pretty long-winded, I'm going to continue this in a second post. To be continued...