Happy Garden

We ate our first chard crop today, and it was YUMMY! Here's what our garden looks like now:

It's just so happy! So nice to stop by our little plots on my way home from work :).

Here, have a pepper!

Mike made us yummy stuffed peppers tonight: red bell peppers stuffed with rice, ground beef, tomato paste, green onion, garbanzo beans, worcester sauce, mustard, salt, and pepper. Baked in 350F oven for 17minutes. Garnished with sour cream!

Heirloom grape tomato

Look at this beauty! I didn't think it was ripe but it fell into my hand when I barely touched it. I love this garden.

Community Garden!

A big positive of moving to our new apartment is that there is a Community Garden (pay $30 in mulch and work to fix up the neglect from previous years and get a couple plots to ourselves) very close to it.  Since sustainable agriculture is a passion of Mike's, and I grew up gardening flowers with my Mom during the periods where we had a yard, this was pretty much a no-brainer.  We were so excited!

These are the seeds we purchased.  In the end it was too late to plant a few, so we only planted the Swiss Chard, Spinach, Mesclun, Peas, Peppers, Beans, Cucumbers, Carrots, Beets, and Tomatoes.

Some new plant babies sprouted in our little window starter!  The tomatoes never looked very good, but we transplanted the peas and peppers.  Unfortunately the peppers and peas scorched in the sun after transplant and died.

Here are our two plots.  Mike made a little bamboo scaffold to divide the 4x4 plots into 16 1x1 foot plots in preparation to try out the Square-Foot Gardening technique he discovered online.  Essentially this makes it easy to arrange plants according to how far apart they are supposed to grow, and you grow them as vertically as possible.  We also turned the soil around, added organic garden soil and organic composted manure (thank you Home Depot), and finally lined the sides with black plastic bags to retain moisture.

We rented a Zipcar and headed over to a local nursery to get some nice butterfly/bee-attracting flowers and some other plant babies to supplement our seed stock.  We ended up with Echinacea (the nice pink flower), a stonecrop, the leaves almost look like a succulent), ice ballet butterfly weed (yellow blossoms), and yarrow (with the yellow blossoms).

Here's the Echinacea with two doting bumble bees :).

We planted beets, carrots, mesclun, cucumber, and beans straight into the ground.  They all came up!  The beans didn't do so well and looked a little stunted like the peppers -- boo, heat waves!  Mike went over to the nursery again to buy some new plant babies a little further along: peas (which all died again in the sun after producing two delicious pods), a cherry tomato, and two bell pepper plants.  He also planted some more beans, and they all grew with fervor!

Here is the garden when we came back from the Cincinnati reunion.  Notice the Thai basil and nice healthy looking weeds next to our pretty lettuces :P.  They didn't taste like much, so we pulled all the intruders out.  Can you name all of the plants?

This head was ready for harvesting!  It was tasty :).

Ravioli is for Roussette

This post started some time in February, but I never completed it.  I am thinking this was a Friday night that we decided to stay in and make ravioli.  I distinctly remember helping "fork" the seal (and design) around the edges, if nothing else (but I'm generally pretty helpful when we're making delicious raviolis).  

I was searching dictionary.com for a noun that started with R and this was the first noun in the list that did not offensively describe a group of people:

Roussette, n.
1 a fruit bat, especially the large species inhabiting the islands of the Indian ocean.
2 any small shark of the genus Scyllium, see Dogfish.

This has nothing to do with ravioli, but now I have your attention :).

Here was the lovely side dish, those are pieces of garlic yummmmm with asparagus and red bell pepper.  Tides you over while you're waiting for the ravioli dough to chill...

Pretty sure this was mushroom ravioli with some deliciously expensive soft mascarpone cheese :).  Just add salted boiling water, a pan of butter and sage, and a nice block of parmesan to grate over top.  You have yourself a little plate of happiness.

They were good even before the butter :).

Leftover ricotta? No problem!

Just slap it on top of a buckwheat pancake and drizzle (or dollop!) with honey and pretend there's no such thing as needing to go outside when it's cold.

Slowly posting pics I have had on my phone for a couple of months...

Sweet balls of gnocchi!

Homemade sweet potato gnocchi = win. Another one of my husband's concoctions that I will claim credit for inspiring and enjoying :-P, but I claim none for execution.

Boil 2 yams, remove skins. Place in kitchen aid mixer with paddle mix element. Mix until broken down. Add ~ 4 C flour until not sticky to touch with a bare finger. Nead slightly with floured hands, grab a softball-sized section and roll into rope ~1" diameter. Cut off .5-1" sections and toss into boiling pot of salted water for ~8 minutes.

Makes ~70 gnocchi (enough for 2 meals for 2 people!)

Sauce options:

Savory:
butter, juice from lemon, capers, milk, salt. We shaved Parmesan cheese over it. This first batch had the traditional fork impressions as well. Some turned out to be heart-shaped! 2/13

Sweet:
1 stick of butter, 1.5 Tbsp honey, dash in nutmeg and cinnamon to taste. Sage would be a great addition - we were out :).
This batch was literally scooped out of the leftover container, so it's a little lumpy :). Feta cheese brought it together.

We ate both meals without any sides, but these gorgeous orange dumplings are screaming for a little splash of green. Points to whoever can think of the right pairing...