Tonight's Sumptuous Repast

My Darling B began to bring in the bean crop about a week and a half ago, and the damned plants just won't stop producing beans.

Since it looks as though we'll be eating beans for a while yet, B's always on the lookout for new ways to prepare them, and this is what she came up with tonight: chicken, potatoes and beans in a lemon sauce.

There's no recipe, sorry. Or, rather, there were several recipes, from which B took what she needed and relied in inspiration to supply the rest. There's a little basil and garlic in there ("Not enough garlic," My Darling B mused as she ate) and I don't know what else.

And there was plenty left over for lunch!

This just in ...

My Darling B planted an eggplant plant just because she liked the way the fruit looks. When she brought this fruit in today, though, she had big plans for it.

First, she marinaded it in a honey sauce, and then she cooked it on the Weber grill while I was flipping burgers.

It turned out to be very tasty, really. Grilled eggplant. Who would've thunk it?

Dedication

She will brave swarms of mosquitoes to make sure her tomato plants are properly cared for.

This just in ...

We're coming to the end of this year's pea crop, sad to say. It's been a very good year.

B steamed this batch and we ate them on a bed of rice with spicy sauce.

This just in ...

We have a tree in our back yard that is heavy with mulberries ... which makes it a mulberry tree, I guess. I always thought mulberries came from bushes, but ours is very unequivocally a tree.

For the past two years we have let the squirrels and birds hog the mulberries all to themselves, but this year we made up our minds to harvest some of them and make a jam or jelly or wine or something, we haven't yet decided.

Tonight's pickings amounted to a little over two pounds, much more than I thought it might be. A couple more nights of this and we'll have plenty of mulberry jelly to spread on morning toast.

Lend me your ears

Someone I know once told me that just one ear of corn grows on each stalk. Well, here's a stalk on which two ears are very clearly growing, and there might even be a third at the bottom.

Hmmmm...

Tonight's Sumptuous Repast

Buffalo sirloin, new potatoes, patty-pan squash & zucchini, all fresh off the grill and chased with a pint of home-brewed beer. Does life get any better than this? I don't think so.

It's Time for Toms

Here's one more sign I'm turning into my dad: I'm looking forward to fresh tomatoes. I haven't advanced far enough into the transformation to slice them up and eat them in chunks the way he did, but I do love me some fresh tomatoes on my sandwich, and My Darling B makes tomato soup that I would sit up and beg for.

This just in ...

My Darling B tells me (and I believe everything she tells me) that carrots were not always orange. Once upon a time most of them were white and purple, until at some time in the distant past the Dutch bred them to be orange, and that's the color most have been ever since.

But she's not into conventional veggies. B loves "heritage" varieties and plants them whenever she can get them. Here is a selection of the carrots she harvested yesterday from the garden and prepared for dinner. I have to admit I was more than a little surprised when I stuck a chunk of the white one in my mouth and it tasted just like any orange carrot.

Plump, fresh pots

We had potatoes with our dinner last Thursday, and here's where we got them: The garden plot in our back yard, so lovingly tended by My Darling B.

Potatoes grow like weeds; there's one literally growing like a weed in our compost heap. But you have to tend to them by heaping dirt or, in our case, straw up around the base of the stalk if you want to eat the potatoes.

Then, when you want to bring some in to eat, all you have to do is root around in the straw at the base of the stalk until you find a couple nice, big ones, pluck them out, as B has done in the photo, and cover the plant up with straw again so the little ones can grow up to be dinner!