What's Growing On...

Okay, I'm borrowing this title from my new favorite-est gardening blog (okay, my first and only gardening blog so far..but it's really inspiring!) called In My Kitchen Garden. It's admirable and amazing and inspiring. I love her blog name (she's also the author of Farmgirl Fare). Kitchen Garden is so what we're going for. Everything we've put into the ground is going directly into our bellies.

We've got so much exciting stuff going on in the garden now. After a lot of weed pulling and dirt turning, we've gone through several huge salads with our greens, we've eaten our first handful of cherry tomatoes (when will those bastards turn red????), and made a batch of salsa verde with our first baby tomatillos, baby onions, and cilantro. Here's a before and after:

Seriously, I tried to take a picture, and I tried to get a bag of tortilla chips, but I simply couldn't tear myself away from the spoon!


So amazing... we also had our first cucumber too! It was delicious. Sweet and juicy and not bitter at all!I can't wait until I can make tabouleh from garden ingredients too~!

Here's our first watermelon (sweet crimson or sugar baby)!!! Can you believe it? It's about the size of a softball now. It's grown exponentially.

And this evening our neighbors in the garden next door gave us four gigantic chinese vegetables that we identified by typing "chinese vegetable pointy leaf root"-- and discovered Celtuce or "woju." (I guess "cel-tuce" like half celery, half lettuce?)You can eat the leaves like lettuce, but the main deal is the stalk, which you peel and eat the translucent green fleshy part. It's kind of juicy, watery and cucumber-y.

While I'm at it, the csa share this week included another bunch of carrots, another little bag of garlic scapes (enough already!), a big bag of snow peas (mmmm), a handful of cherry tomatoes (not enough!!), a yellow squash, a gargantuan zucchini (that looked oddly like a bottlenose dolphin-- it's not visible in the photo, but you'll have to believe me), and bean sprouts!
Breakfast: ridiculously easy homemade doughnuts (a better title than fried pizza dough, innit?)

Lunch: Garden Veggie Couscous (snow peas, cherry tomatoes, carrots, green onions, cilantro, zucchini and yellow squash, and pine nuts from Mom)And Dinner was veggie yakisoba with the snow peas, carrots, cilantro, onions, and some celery. Sorry. No photo. Too. Busy. Eating.

Oh! AND I tried the no-bake cheesecake without the chocolate swirl.. Just tried to improvise a classic cheesecake with the same silken tofu/tofutti cream cheese/soy milk/agar agar base, it TOTALLY WORKS! I just added more lemon juice and the zest of a medium lemon. I used a graham cracker/sugar/cinnamon crust (mix with melted margarine and press into your pans and bake for about 8 minutes. I know, I know, this step technically means I can't call this "no-bake"), poured in the pie mix, and after it set up, I topped them with strawberry and blackberry preserves. Here's Mini checking them out.I'll definitely make this again, and I'd do it before the chocolate swirl recipe. That's how good it is.