Harvesting Peas

Our sugar snap peas are ready for harvesting.  I found these peas hard to judge when I thought they were ready to pick.  Everything I read told me to pick them before the pod filled all the way out because they would be sweeter that way.  

I asked a fellow gardener what he thought of the peas.  He assured me that they were ready to pick and that if I didn't believe him that I should just pick one and try it myself.  I did.  It was my first experience of picking something right off the vine and eating it.  Yes, I'd been harvesting kale and romaine, but I've been going home and washing it and preparing it before I eat it.  Oh and the peas were wonderful!

Jeff and I haven't been too inventive with eating peas.  We have been putting them in salads and I froze my first batch this morning.  More on that later.

Any recipes that you are trying out with your pea harvest?

Harvesting Romaine

Our Romaine lettuce is beautiful!  It's a pretty green with reddish-brown speckles on it.  I never splurge and buy romaine at the grocery store because iceberg lettuce is always a little cheaper.  I've gotten so use to the taste of plain old iceberg lettuce that it was hard for me to want to eat this romaine.  Now after a couple of harvests, I'm completely obsessed.

Harvesting greens was a hard concept for me to get.  If you talk to people or google how to harvest romaine or kale (or any kind of lettuce really) you get different answers.  Some say that you can cut off the tops of the green, others recommend to harvest a couple of whole leaves off of each plant and some tell you to just pull up the whole plant.

Victoria and I decided to go the route where you pull off the whole outer leaves and leave behind the smaller ones.  It's been working great because I pull off enough greens for a day or so and then I come back and the smaller leaves are ready to eat.  This has really made our romaine go far for the both of us.  Jeff and I enjoy salads every evening with dinner and we are always looking for other ways to eat romaine.    

Watering: An Observation

I am just now getting to the point where I am feeling more confident about watering our garden.  I use to slink in to the community garden and hope that no one was there to witness how little I truly knew about gardening.  I did know that I was suppose to water during the morning or in the evening and to water the roots and not just the green leafy parts.  I was never sure how long to water and I didn't want someone to think that I was drenching my plants or dehydrating them.  I would just turn the hose on the plants to get them a small drink and that was it.

Then, I started watching experienced gardeners water and I was amazed at how much water they would put on their plants.  I'm now more sure of watering my garden and I think my plants are thankful to have more water than they use to. 

Any watering rules that you have heard or practice with your own garden?

Menu Monday: Kale, Red Onion, Pistachio Pizza

If you are growing kale in your garden, I promise you, you will want to try this recipe.  Although, this combination is not one I would have put together myself, I'm so glad I made this for dinner last week.  I found this recipe on yet another wonderful food blog.  This pizza was easy to make and I had all the ingredients on hand.

Kale, Red Onion & Pistachio Pizza
This recipe is from this blog

Pizza Dough (I used this recipe)
1/2 cup crushed tomatoes
3 cloves of garlic, minced
A couple handfuls shredded cheeses (I used mozzarella, colby jack and cheddar)
8 leaves of kale
1/2 red onion
Handful of pistachio nuts
salt
olive oil

Prepare pizza dough according to instructions.  Pre-heat oven to 500 degrees and place pizza stone in oven while pre-heating.

Mince garlic. Chop red onion.  Wash kale leaves and remove stems from leaves.  Roughly chop the leaves.  In a small skillet, put in a some olive oil and the kale leaves.  Cook over med-heat until kale leaves are wilted.  Crush pistachio nuts with a rolling pin.

When oven is ready and pizza stone has been heated for a half an hour, place dough on pizza stone and quickly assemble pizza.

Spread crushed tomatoes over dough and add minced garlic on top of that.  Sprinkle the shredded cheese over the top and top with kale, red onion and pistachio nuts.

Bake until until crust is a golden brown.  About 8-12 minutes.  Enjoy!

An Ode to Kale

Happy Friday!

Growing up  (and well into college even) I was notorious for being a picky eater.  I'm not just talking about being a picky eater about the weird stuff, but everything.  I hardly ate anything that had meat, vegetables or fruit on it.  The only vegetables I ate were potatoes and corn and the only fruit I would eat were bananas.

I'm pretty sure that 15 year old me or even 19 year old me would not believe that I eat half of the things that I eat now.  Fruit smoothies, salads, onions, garlic, peas, peppers, strawberries, raspberries, sweet potatoes... all things that I never thought I would eat.

This summer is the first time that I've ever tried kale.  I didn't think I was going to do a lot with kale when I planted it in April.  I thought I'd try a dish here and there, but not be crazy about it.  Well, let me tell you I have to say I've grown quite fond of this leafy green.  And to say that it's doing well in our garden would be an understatement.  It's thriving and we have so much of it that I have to keep finding things to make with it.  I even got a compliment from a veteran gardener about how lovely my kale looked.

I've made some delicious things with kale that I can't wait to share with you.  I'm trying to come up with lots of ways to use it because I'm not sure how well it will hold up if I just blanch and freeze it.  Do you have any must try recipes that incorporate kale?  

A Heart That Can Break

I lead a Bible study with some high school senior girls and this past week we met and walked through some verses from Nehemiah together.  I had gotten some of the questions from the Nehemiah study from Kelly Minter.  One of the questions we asked was what breaks your heart?  Each girl shared things that broke her heart and although we had a lot of the same things that our hearts hurt for, it was really cool to see that we also had different things on our lists too.  And those differences revealed so much of who each girl is and what her passions and callings in life are.

One of the things on my list was the mistreatment of land.  It's always been something that weighs on my heart and something that I'm passionate about helping.  I'm not sure if it was early exposure to the book The Lorax or watching Ferngully too many times or learning about the Tropical Rain Forest in 3rd grade, but either way my heart breaks for injustices done to the earth.  I recently watched this video about urban gardening and the cool thing that is going on in Philadelphia where an organization is partnering up with a lab and giving people free soil testing around the city to see if they can reclaim the land and safely grow a garden.     I was crying by the end of this video because it all seems so hopeless.  There is so much work to be done and it feels like very few people care about it.  As Christians, we should be leading the charge to restore our land.

I had stopped blogging because I just didn't think gardening mattered to a lot of people or to anyone.  Who cares if some girl in a small city in Indiana has a plot of land that she gardens?  But I was reminded that I can do my part to keep working toward a better future for the world; even if my garden plot isn't big.  I can advocate local food by eating my food and I can buy plants from my local Farmer's Market.  None of these things are revolutionary acts, but small deeds that just might get other people's attention.

Stay tuned summer is just beginning and there are so many fun adventures ahead.