I’ve got spinach on my mind

My winter garden is doing alright this winter. It is missing a few things that did well last year, mainly turnips, but all in all I am happy with what is growing out there.

Parsnips and salsify are the two new things growing out there. Neither are growing in abundance, but they are growing. After reading the seed package, I decided to start the salsify seeds inside. They can take up to 3 weeks to germinate so I wanted to give them all the help I could by starting them inside. The parsnips and the turnips I started outside. With the combination of heat and bugs. and then an early hard freeze the turnips gave up and only a few parsnips survived.  I will give them a better chance of survival next fall and start them inside too (and a bit earlier)

I didn’t plant as much lettuce as I did last year. Last year we were rolling in it and I was giving it away, so I cut back this year. Now I don’t have enough so I have new lettuce started. It is growing slow slow slow, but it is growing and we will be eating it before too long.

This year the big producer is spinach. I have struggled to get spinach growing really well the past few years. I have tried starting the seeds indoor, direct sowing them and even transplants. This year, I put in transplants again and they have grown great. So the spinach is filling in were the lettuce left off. Along with the chard and kale, the greens are great.

I am still dealing with limitations since my surgery and I am unable to harvest anything in the garden, so I rely on my husband. A few days ago we headed out there. The spinach was in desperate need of a hair cut and I told him that if he wasn’t going to be home during any daylight hours anytime soon that I would be out there holding the flashlight for him. That spinach really needed to be picked!

The spinach was finally picked. There was a lot of spinach out there. After I had washed it I needed to figure out how I was going to get it all in the refrigerator. I turned to the plastic grocery bags saved from days gone by and collected for friends (we use them when we scoop out the litter boxes.) It took four Target bags in the end – stuffed full of spinach. After a few days of eating spinach I finally took a photo of the refrigerator for my step-dad.  He will be planting his greens before long (up in Minnesota) but until then he is drooling over my greens (I do the same when he has a flourishing garden in the summer and I have no greens growing!)

As you can see, spinach has been on my mind (and in our tummies.) It gets chopped and thrown on top of pizza. It goes into every fresh salad. It get steamed. It goes into quiches.  Every meal seems to have spinach (or another green) it it one way or another. In fact, I am going to try to extend the harvest by making up some spinach pesto to stash in the freezer for the dead of summer when it won’t be growing here. I will be making Green Linguini – the reversed version. Using spinach pesto and fresh chopped basil instead of the other way around.

Have you made pesto out of green thing other than basil?

Sincerely, Emily

You can see what else I am up to over at Sincerely, Emily. The topics are varied, as I jump around from gardening to sewing to making bread or lotion and many things in between.

 

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Enjoying the Fresh Taste of Summer

Here at Chiot’s Run we make sure we’re enjoying all the fresh tastes of summer. Since we’ve been trying to eat more seasonally and not spend as much time canning & preserving, I’ve been making sure to enjoy things as they’re at their peak. That means we’ve been eating sliced fresh tomatoes with every meal.

One of our other favorite fresh summer tastes is pesto. I usually make a batch and we enjoy it on; homemade pasta, pizza, toast, vegetables, etc. My pesto recipe is very simple, I use walnuts or pecans instead of pine nuts because I always have some in the freezer.

FRESH SUMMER PESTO
1/4 cup of walnuts
2 cloves of garlic, sliced
1 1/2 cups of fresh basil leaves
1/3 cup good olive oil
3 T. butter
1/4 cup romano cheese
salt & pepper to taste

Add walnuts, garlic and basil to food processor and process until finely chopped. Drizzle with 1/3 cup of good olive oil and process until combined, add 3 Tablespoons of butter and pulse until blended. Empty contents into bowl and stir in cheese and salt and pepper to taste. Allow to rest for a few hours before serving.

This particular batch of pesto was enjoyed over some fresh linguine that I made last night. There’s enough left over for something else, I’m thinking make a white lasagne with cheese and pesto and no marinara.

What are you enjoying at the peak of it’s fresh flavor?

I can also be found at Chiot’s Run where I blog daily about gardening, cooking, local eating, beekeeping and more; I also blog at Eat Outside the Bag blogging about all things food & cooking. You can also find me on the Your Day Blog and you can follow me on Twitter and find me on Facebook.

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