Oroweat Premium Sliced Italian Bread. It is white, it is wheat and I am sure plenty glutenous. But it makes THE most incredible toast. It gets crispy, all of it, just lightly on the outside. But somehow is still steamy and soft in between the crispiness.
With just real butter. Or with the butter plus some jam.
Hot coffee. Italian bread toasted to perfection, topped with deliciousness. YUM!
An old Italian man lived alone in upstate New York. He wanted to plant his annual tomato garden, but it was very difficult work, as the ground was hard. His only son, Vincent, who used to help him, was in prison. The old man wrote a letter to his son and described his predicament:
Dear Vinnie,
I’m pretty upset. It looks like I won’t be able to plant my tomato garden this year. I’m just getting too old to be digging up a garden plot. The ground is just too hard. I know if you were here you would dig it for me. Oh well. Maybe in the future.
Love, Papa
A few days later he received a letter from his son.
Dear Pop,
Don’t dig up that garden. That’s where the bodies are buried.
Love, Vinnie
At 4 am the next morning, FBI agents and local police arrived and dug up the entire area without finding any bodies. They apologized to the old man and left. That same day the old man received another letter from his son.
Dear Pop,
You should be able to plant the tomatoes now. That’s the best I could do under the circumstances.
Love, Vinnie
Scooped from the bottom, the thickest of it. *Mmmmmmm…..
I made Walnut-Basil Pesto from Lidia’s Italy {{click here}} with fresh, bright green basil from my garden and it is sooooooooooooo good, I could practically eat it with a spoon all by itself.
But instead, I put it on some chicken tenders last night with provolone and it is still making me salivate to think about it. I also tried spreading some on corn on the cob, and guess what? YES! It was so good!
Thanks to Lidia, I now know I can freeze it for later, but then again – I am not sure I will be able to because it is so scrumptious. It is the taste of pure garlic-infused, sun-powered, tangy chlorophyll. I threw away the store-bought jar of gray-green pesto from the fridge. Because it should look as amazing as it tastes and greener than green because it is that fresh.
Just this one and Google (for searching anything you can dream up). The image above is from Amazon, of course.
Mel Bartholomew is the father of smart gardening. And how you can grow more veggies in less space with way less work and we all need to know these things!
But one day, I decided that I had had enough of grocery store tomatoes. I couldn’t quit thinking of summers at my Aunt Rosie’s. Her redwood-stained picnic table was loaded daily with her freshest picks from the garden. We ate corn on the cob, green beans cooked with bacon and juicy hamburgers. But the piece de resistance was the tomato. The tomato in her garden was the queen. She cut huge slabs of beefsteak tomatoes, red through and through and passed the platter, then the salt. And the tingling, tart-sweet explosion on your tongue – well, you had to be there.
So when my kids were all teenagers, I became a gardener. I decided to grow tomatoes and green beans and baby zucchini, plucked and grilled while tiny and delectable instead of waiting for them to become brick bats and then running out of friends and relatives to pawn them on. I decided to be a gardener.
This was Mel’s original Square Foot Gardening book
I shudder to think what my experience may have been had it not been for Mel Bartholomew. Because even though I had actually checked about 16 gardening books out at once,his message sounded truer than any of the others, logical, just made sense. It was simple and doable and I took 37.42 pages of notes on his book.
An I had THE MOST amazing garden. I had a huge yard back then and threw garden boxes in all over the place. I even had room for more than 20 tomato plants. I had harvest coming out my ears of everything I grew: okra, swiss chard, lettuces, peppers of every color, 4 or 5 types of radish, corn, mini-corn, watermelon, cucumbers, strawberries and grapes – everything you could imagine – but mostly, tomatoes.
My Aunt Rosie, right
My Aunt Rosie and I talked on the phone a lot that year and exchanged letters excitedly sharing that day’s harvest, “Well, today I got about 16 beefsteak tomatoes, a bowl full of cherry and half a basket of plum. The parsley and basil are running wild. I have a large pot of green beans on the stove for dinner.” We loved sharing the great good news of the garden.
I checked Mel’s book out regularly for the first few years, each January. Imagine my delight when I walked in to the library annual book sale a few years down the road and there it was for 10-cents. How truly fortuitous. I have THE orginal book from which I was first inspired to garden and LOVE it!
And now Mel has made it even easier. I got his newer book just last summer. The charts, wisdom, the inspiration, the cheering on – all of it. THE only book you’ll ever really need. But I am keeping both of mine! :)
SFG! All the way. Check it out.
I caught her. This is no small feat since they look like leaves, so difficult to see. She, such a faulous shade of {dare I say it?} ‘Jeanie-green,” emerged from a potted zucchini and began to stroll up the water spout. I had a cannister nearby and swept her in while I decided what to do.
I read this online:
Katydids are members of the grasshopper family, and can be distinguished by their long “horns,” bright green color, and by the male’s loud, shrill call which sounds like “Katy did” and thus has earned them their onomatopoeic name. They do not pose any particular problem for the home gardener, but do feed on shrub and tree foliage.
Now, I think everyone knows I loathe, despise and abominate the grasshopper and it’s whole immediate family. And these katydids are apparently related – yet, seemingly less trashy. There was none of the grasshopper-tobacco-spitting-garden-chomping-cussing-taunting-and-bullying going on with her. She just seemed to be out for a morning stroll. I think we all have relatives that are utterly horrrendous and we have to admit we are related, yet we know we are nothing like them.
I released her into some front yard shubbery (which needs some pruning, anyway), where she may munch on deciduous leaves and make noises to her hearts content. But she better keep away from my veggies.
“She” may be a he. I did not spend time getting acquainted…
Should I water or shouldn’t I? A rain cloud drifts over and the gentlest, lightest drops begin to congregate on the patio…but then don’t actually cover it. I drag the hose out to make the morning rounds to pots and garden squares. Wait – what the heck, run, Sandy, run…we get to the house – sorta wet.
Then – what? The sun again?
It cannot decide what is going to happen out there. I didn’t water, but it barely rained enough, if you can call it rain, to leave sparkling drops on leaves. So, I watered. Then, a few hours later, a real, live rain begins…and ends 3.4 minutes later, but it did seem to reach the ground…maybe. Can you say amiguous?
Oh well, it gives me a reason to visit the garden and make sure all is well again.
Weather means more when you have a garden. There’s nothing like listening to a shower and thinking how it is soaking in around your green beans. ~Marcelene Cox
A couple of little grandgirls got anxious today and picked about 2-3 dozen tomatoes and tomatillos before their time. Oops. But I do understand the unbearable anticipation. I figured since this tomatilla was off the vine, we may as well take a look inside. So far…
I bet I have 200 tomatillas on my 4 plants right now. The tomatoes better get busy or their cousins will surely outshine them.
I walk without flinching through the burning cathedral of the summer. My bank of wild grass is majestic and full of music. It is a fire that solitude presses against my lips. ~Violette Leduc, Mad in Pursuit
You big, fat, self-indulgent, self-loving, arrogant, insolent, pompous, contempuous, grotesque, repungent, foul, revolting, grizzly, thick, greasy-gutless, corpulent, fleshy, pointless, asinine, gruesome, shameless, sleezeball-of-a-terd, gorging, life-sucking, hoover-jaded, pig-pack, slimeball, meaty-monkey pudged, interloping roly-poly, perverted, desacrating, profane piece of crap.
{{G R O S S }} Just stopped an 8-pound* tomato hornworm in my garden, on my cherry tomato plant. Though I was in an annual war at our last house, I had only found a couple here in 2008 prior to now…*sniff. My lovely tomato plants have been targeted by the enemy.
*8 pounds may or may not have been an exageration. But it would have been 8 pounds if we hadn’t spotted it and beat it to bits with a shovel – as it bled MY tomato leaves onto the ground.
I heard Joyce Meyer say this 20 years ago:
Jesus said if you don’t bear fruit, you’ll be pruned. And He said if you do bear fruit, you’ll be pruned so you’ll bear more fruit. So, I figure, you’re pruned if you do and pruned if you don’t – so you may as well let the Lord prune you.
It looks almost cruel. And I am not even done yet. Every year in July I have to do it. I don’t want to do it and I think of every possible excuse.
For two weeks now I have known I needed to cut back the petunias and some of the other annuals. Each day I’d think: I just can’t right now because they are so beautiful and flowering like crazy. I will wait until they aren’t flowering so much.
But during this time of the summer, they are in their glory. They are fruitful, they are going to flower. They are flowering like crazy and they are going to keep up the pace until suddenly – they can’t anymore. Because it is what they do. It is what they were created to do. It makes them happy.
But if they don’t get pruned, a month from now they’ll be long and leggy and weak and start to go to seed. Their leaves will yellow, tired out from the heat and from producing so quickly, so profusely. They won’t go into the next season healthier and fuller and stronger because they will have spread themselves completely thin just being their beautiful selves.
I finally just have to be courageous and pick up the flower-heavy handfuls of leaves and stems and soft petals and lop them off quickly, no looking back. Pruning has to happen. Pruning has to happen. I meant to say that twice.
By pruning them now, in the height of their glory, I am actually securing a future for them with more leaves to take in more sunshine, roots that plunge more deeply for the trauma. I am making sure that a month from now, there will be twice as much flowering, healthier, stronger plants filling my pots. The fragrance will be deeper and sweeter, rather than barely perceptible from an over-expenditure of energy now.
The pruning is necessary for the good of the flower. It isn’t cruel. It is my love for these spicy, ambrosial, purple petunias (and the others) that causes me to finally take the cutting edge to them. It is my care and because I know the future for them. Four weeks from now, 3 maybe, they will not only have recovered, they will be amazing.
I cannot help but see the application. I have been pruned and I struggle to believe it is not a punishment for doing the very thing I was created to be and to do. It stinks. I never like it. But…It is strengenthing me for what is next. Dang it feels cruel and unneeded and what the heck – so many things, beautiful offerings, are in the garbage can. I probably will never like it as it comes around seasonally, again and again in life.
But I caught a glimpse as I threw a handful of my treasured, silly little annuals in the trash today: This is for you, this will make everything better.
My dear child, don’t shrug off God’s discipline,
but don’t be crushed by it either.
It’s the child he loves that he disciplines;
the child he embraces, he also corrects. Hebrews 12.5-6
Prune away, Lord, prune away.
“Save the Bees” may sound very silly, but they are important in pollinating crops and if they are gone, 1/3 of our food supply is gone. We already rely too much on other nations for what we should be able to supply ourselves. I want to see America working toward sustainable food. I have grandchildren. So, please consider signing {here}?
Well, OK – I didn’t actually discover it. It had already been discovered, but I had never heard of it. So I was surprised to hear that some one got there before me. 
No, not the leaves of the miniature-cabbage-looking, tiny, little sprouts. Not the actual sprouts themselves – the leaves that shield the growing plant. These are the great, big brassica leaves that suck up all the sunshine and nutrients to feed the tiny little sprouts – which {btw} should never, ever, for any reason known to mankind be boiled into mushy, gray yuckiness again. Too many children have been harmed by lifelong nightmares over this. Please stop the insanity and get some good Brussels Sprouts recipes for the love of Pete and your own offspring!!!
I picked up a 4-pack of Brussels Sprouts seedlings at the farm store on a whim in mid-May. I figure if a garden center is selling them in my zone at that time, they know I have time to get a harvest. WRONG! Even the Bonnie Plants website says this is better grown as a fall crop because they like it cold {brrrrrrr}. I knew it in my heart, but wished otherwise.
It has just gotten too hot. So the plant was about to bolt and have to be trashed. I knew I needed to remove them and maybe try late-summer planting for the fall…oh, but wait, I betcha a thousand bucks none of our garden centers will have any in the fall because “fall gardening” in Colorado is mostly mums – that is all anyone offers us. Seriously? People, I implore you—!
Anyway, as I went to remove the big leaves, it just seemed like maybe they’d be edible. They are like the very heavy outer leaves of their cabbage-cousins that are homegrown and you may have never even seen those if you buy only at a regular market – except on the box/logo of a Cabbage-Patch Kid doll, but it’s true. Cabbage starts with beautiful, dark green, outer leaves – which are thrown away so we’ll buy the pale, celerey-colored version it. TSK! And I really mean that in a gardening-cuss-word sort of way.
I just decided to save all the leaves to see what I could find out. And it turns out, they are indeed very edible, but rarely sold or seen anywhere and mostly thrown away or composted. European Farmer’s Markets have them piled at the back of their stands for a dollar a pound for those who’d ask. But finding them for sale in the US is much more surprising at this time.
But I read that you can treat them like kale. Or like collard greens (which I shamefully admit I have never tried, not once in my lifetime – but upon learning they are wonderful fried in bacon grease – I just know I shall like them). The writers on the food sites say they are slightly tougher than collards and more pungent that kale.
I gathered the leaves and tossed them into a big bowl in the fridge while I pondered what I should do with them. I have collected a few recipes to try.
I love kale chips, they are mellow and you feel so superior eating them. I mean – I still eat store-bought potato chips, but eating the healthier kale chips, well, it carries clout where I live. I even made spinach chips once, from bagged baby spinach and while they were delish, they were like eating a vapor – much too lightweight to have been worth the effort. Dave said it was like he was eating communion wafers when they dissolved on his tongue (although he is not Catholic and I don’t think he really knows) and I couldn’t put my finger on it…what were they like??? Oh, I know: that super-thin fish food you pinch out into your goldfish bowl (white, orange and green, itty bitty wafers?) – yes, that is what the baby spinach chips turned out like, tasty, but just not there. But I figured I’d try the Brussels Sprouts leaves as chips…du-dum-dum…(queu scary music).
I washed and dried enough of the large leaves to cover and slightly over-lap on 2 baking sheets. I cut the middle rib from each leaf with my handy-dandy grapefruit knife. I tossed the leaves in about 2 teaspoons of extra-virgin olive oil (which was too much) and placed them on the baking sheets. They were crowded, but it is ok – they’ll shrink as they dry out. I sprinkled the leaves with Kosher salt and the teeniest, nearly imperceptible dusting of garlic powder. 300° oven for 10-15 minutes.
Here is my verdict: They are crispy and hold up well as chips. Sandy-the-dog is quite taken with them (I only recently learned how much she enjoys garden vegetables) and they taste stronger than kale, for sure. They taste like their cultivar, brassica oleracea implies: kinda brassy. I will…eat them. They are a lightly-salted crispy snack. Guilt-free good. And I will give them to Sandy as treats.
I made two batches and still had a bowl full of leaves left.
I found a site that deals with what is called “cast-off cooking,” in which their interest in sustainable foods has brought a series of recipes using parts of foods we usually waste. No surprise that they had ideas for these large Brussels Sprouts leaves.
Highly nutritional, high in vitamin C and K, anti-cancerous, aids in DNA cell repair…I mean they are good to eat. So I may try try some of their recipes, but for sure I will just find some kale-type recipes and substitute.
Here are some good kale recipes. And honestly, if it weren’t so hot, I’d have made this Kale and Cannellini Soup with the rest of the leaves yesterday. Only I’d change it of course. The recipe and the title: Brussels Leaves and Cannellini Soup.
So for the future, I blanched the leaves and plunged them into ice-water to green them up really well, drained them and stuck them in a freezer with the note: make soup! We’ll see.
From The Salt recently: http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/ posted July 9
The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization has lately been talking about micro-gardens as critical way to help the urban poor get more food on the table. The FAO defines micro-gardens as intensively cultivated small spaces — such as balconies, small yards, patios and rooftops. Many rely on containers such as plastic-lined wooden boxes, trash cans and even old car tires.
While it’s probably tough to sustain a family on a micro-garden, FAO research shows that a well-tended micro-garden of 11 square feet can produce as much as 200 tomatoes a year, 36 heads of lettuce every 60 days, 10 cabbages every 90 days, and 100 onions every 120 days.
With the banned water-crisis in Brighton recently to the cases of cyclospora infections (food-borne sickness) popping up in Iowa, Texas and other states (caused by “store-fresh” produce/veggies), I am thinking about this more than usual.
During WWII, Americans planted Victory Gardens to be able to provide their own food and supplies during a time when our national resources and reserves were going toward the cause. I am still amazed when I read about the unity in which most Americans participated in this. I don’t think it could or would happen that way at all these days, as self-focus reigns. But I sure think you better know how to plant a garden to get your own fresh food in case something unthinkable happens where you live – because we have been seeing that happen all over in very recent history!
What if the crazy weather our nation has had the past few years that took out power grids in whole cities and towns for several days became even more commonplace? What if you couldn’t run to WalMart or the grocery store and get what you needed when you needed it? I have friends who had no power in their homes for a week last fall due to extreme weather. And guess what: the stores didn’t have power, either. So that didn’t help. Our nation no longers gives the farmers the support they need to provide our food on the scale in which we need it. Major droughts and dwindling farmlands have us going to nations with lower food safety standards for the “pretty” produce we see lining the aisles in our big, air-conditioned stores.
He taught us THIS using the square-foot-gardening system (and he is an engineer and has the data to prove this stuff)
As compared to a traditional row garden, a SFG produces 100% of the harvest:
~With only 40% of the cost That’s a 60% savings
~In only 20% of the space That’s an 80% savings
~With only 10% of the water That’s a 90% savings (I did that bold because that is just plain amazing!)
~Just using 5% of the seeds That’s a 95% savings
~And With 2% of the work That’s a 98% savings
Mel Bartholomew, the father of the square-foot-gardening method (which uses far less work and resources and is uncommonly sensible) even created a foundation that goes in to developing nations and teaches the poorest how to feed themselves through gardening in small spaces. That is good work. That really is “fighting world hunger!”
Mel’s mission is simple:
1. Get everyone in the world to eat one meal per day of fresh vegetables.
2. To grow those vegetables in their own garden.
3. To use the SFG method for that garden.
But seriously? If a major crisis happened, I worry that most people in the United States would be sunk – never having had to learn how to produce the food they need to survive, never having planted a simple seed…
Be not afraid of sudden terror and panic, nor of the stormy blast or the storm and ruin of the wicked when it comes…Prov. 3.25 Amp
This truly is NOT about living in fear. It isn’t. We have a God who sees us and attends to us. He provides.
BUT – I am SO committed to teaching my grandchildren how to plant a seed and nurture it and work for the food they eat. That is wisdom. Look at the rest of the world and the difficulties faced daily in so many nations and be smart. Be wise. And be a blessing to others, too!
Start small, but start. Plant something (a seed in a windowsill, even) and attend to it and eat of the fruit of it. Be ready in case, because my garden is too small to feed everyone I know.
Jovan snapped this shot of Amelie’s breakfast this morning and said this:
Amelie picked out everything she wanted for breakfast! Waffle with honey and cinnamon, cherry tomatoes (she calls potatoes), pop corn, and cashews!
Pretty good job baby girl!
She loves her tomatoes. Could that be any sweeter???