Independence Day

Source: july.tipjunkie.com via Angela on Pinterest

Happy Independence Day to my fellow Americans!

Do you know that I've never been to a 4th of July party where someone serves an American flag cake or pie? I feel like I'm missing out on an important tradition. Maybe I should try to make one myself.  We've been invited to a cookout/fireworks party and I was asked to bring dessert; however, they want us there at 2:00, and on a day that's supposed to get up to 95 degrees, I don't know if I want to spend that many hours under the broiling sun. Maybe if there are plenty of cocktails...

I associate the 4th of July-- and all of summer, really--with cookouts/grilling/BBQ-ing, etc. I found this interesting organization called the Southern Foodways Alliance. It's all about the food traditions of the Southern U.S., and of course, barbecue is an important focus. There's a section on the history and oral traditions of BBQ in the South, and it includes this interactive map of different restaurants where the owners talk about their association with BBQ, how their restaurants started, and how food fits into the local culture. It's a pretty cool site. I'd love to go on a BBQ restaurant road trip and visit as many of these places as possible.

If you're going to a 4th of July party, I hope there's lots of good food. And to all my friends in the northern hemisphere--stay cool today!

Local Meal Week #5

All local meatless meal

I'm having trouble focusing on writing this post because the mosquito bites on my legs are driving me nuts. Scratching isn't enough. I want to take a melon baller and scoop them out, arghhhhh!

That's probably not the best mental image to have as I'm about to describe food. For my SSFC local meal this week, I'm posting a Meatless Monday meal from a couple of weeks ago. We had a nice full plate of veggies that came from the farmers' market and our own backyard.

The cooked the new potatoes up with olive oil, salt, pepper, and rosemary from the garden. I used up the last of the asparagus for the season, steamed up with onion and squash from my own garden. We added the red and yellow hothouse tomatoes in at the end. It's nice and colorful, no?

I'm starting to see a lot more fruit at the farmers' markets and am anxious for watermelon. You can read about the Local Meal challenge here, and this link will take you to a summary of the others' meals.

June Harvests

It was too hot this weekend to do anything but stay inside and watch the Olympic trials. The streets were more crowded than usual, traffic seemed as heavy as it does during weekday rush hour. I wonder if these were all people who had lost power and were going somewhere cool? So lucky we didn't lose power from the Friday night storm.


We've harvested a fair amount of vegetables so far. The jalapeno and green bell peppers above came from the plants we overwintered. The bell peppers were small and total weight was about 10 ounces. The handful of jalapenos were about 2 ounces (they're small but mighty!)




In other pepper news, our new banana pepper plant has cranked out about 4 ounces worth of peppers. We put some on the grill last week when cooking burgers, and they had a nice mild flavor, not spicy at all.


That tiny zucchini looks like a jalapeno pepper. Sneaky!


We're in a lull right now with the squash plants. We've harvested about 2 1/2 pounds of zucchini and yellow squash so far, but the plants seem to be on break now. I've seen a lot of male flowers, and only two or three females amongst all the plants. We usually help the fruit along with some hand pollination, though I have seen quite a few bees in the garden.




Finally, we have garlic and onions. We stuck the sprouting garlic cloves in the ground last fall just to see if they'd grow into something, having never grown garlic before. The tops were brown and on the ground, and this is what popped up when I pulled them. Nothing big here, but it's nice to have some garden fresh garlic in the pantry, especially when participating in my local meal challenges. Same for the onions--these two onions weight about half a pound and smell so good! There are still a few more in the ground which look ready to harvest, so I'll be pulling them this week.


Thanks to everyone who left encouraging comments on my last post about my potatoes' death. I guess these things just happen sometimes. Hope you're staying cool, wherever you are.

Update: Forgot to mention that I'm linking up with Daphne's Dandelions to show off my harvests. Check out her site to see what other gardeners have harvested.

I'm also linking up with Two Gardens' Garden Bloggers Harvest Day. Visit their site to see their own beautiful photos and what gardeners around the world are harvesting.