Salad People

Best cooky lunch ever! Ingredients: pickle legs, pear body, pea buttons, cheese arms (blueberry hands were already eaten by the time I got the camera out), cucumber face, raisin eyes, cottage cheese hair, carrot ears, tomato smile.

More Garden goodness (and gnome apron)

The tomatoes are going crazy (yay!) in this hot weather (boo.). Bennett helped me pick a second round while wearing his gnome apron.
For a little while. I tried getting a couple shots to show it off, but this is what you get with a three year old. I got the awesome pattern here, and let me tell you what a fun and quick project it was! The pattern is well drafted and came together easily. The best part: Bennett can put it on and take it off by himself, no fiddly strings. Genius!
He is great at sorting them after we picked them, keeping all the Yellow Boys in one basket, and all the red Campari, Roma, Better Boys and a couple Beefsteaks in another.
Guess what we did last weekend?

Cupcakes

It's been freezing cold around here, too cold to play outside or horse around much. What to do but turn on the oven and make some delicious cupcakes? These are strawberry banana chip cupcakes with pink buttercream icing. Yum!


I even had a volunteer helper. Think he likes frosting?

Pickling a Peck of Peppers

Peppers soaking in their briny/vinegar goodness



More garlic!
Finishing the hot bath...
Done!

Picking Peppers to Pickle

Summer evening, no shoes. Wicker baskets, ripe peppers.

Into the garden we go.








Filling up the wheelbarrow to take them up to the house.


Next: pickling!

What to do with crap?

Once your family is sick of zucchini bread, cupcakes, risotto, Barbara Kingsolver's Disappearing Zucchini Orzo, fried zucchini, sauteed zucchini, zucchini in fajitas/quesadillas, you shred that mountain of zucchinis into manageable amounts and freeze them. 22 cups worth to be precise.

And there are still more setting on.

In other news, our neighborhood deer has been spotted sleeping in a backyard across the street. Awesome. No wonder he's visited several times, tearing up more tomatoes, nibbling more cukes, and razing the peppers back to the stems YET AGAIN.


Let's hope eating hot peppers gave him some indigestion. Grumble.Last weekend we finally took some heavy-handed measures and installed a mesh fence around the entire garden.


You can barely see it, but there it is in all it's 8 foot glory. Just try it again mister deer.

Oh, crap.

We are going to end up with WAAAY more zucchini than we will ever be able to handle. We already got about 12 large ones off the 4 plants we planted. What were we thinking??? Last year we planted 2 plants and I just used the last batch of frozen shredded zucchini last month.



At least we have something coming in! Our garden has been ravaged by what we thought were rabbits. Between owning a greyhound and a cat that will take out anything with feathers or fur (including bats, moles, voles, squirrels, blue jays and anything else that dares to enter his territory) we have never had problems.

Come to find out it wasn't a rabbit that decimated the chard, ate the tops of ALL of the pepper plants, bit into the cucumbers and nibbled down the tomatoes.

The cat is forgiven.

Alphabet Mush

Bennett is increasingly becoming better at identifying letters of the alphabet. V, T, B and S are favorites and are usually covered in jelly/mush/avocado by the end of the meal.

Baked Sweet Potato "fries"

We tried something different last week, using cookie cutters to make sweet potato shapes and baked them with a bit of cumin, salt and pepper.







Yummy!!!

If You Give a Moose a Muffin

Bennett has been in love with Laura Numeroff's book If You Give a Moose a Muffin. So, this morning we made muffins for his moose.






Needless to say, it was an awesome morning!