delishytown:

Edible Landscape Update

Blueberries started ripening this week! We harvest a bowl full every day. I highly reccommend growing blueberries. The shrub is pretty in the landscape, and it gives you an organic food that can be pricey at the store. Grow 2 or more plants (they need to grow near each other to pollinate)  in full sun in rich, well drained soil. 

We have more Chard growing than we can use. I’m going to give some to friends & neighbors. Chard looks really pretty in the garden, and it’s delicious in  so many dishes. Any recipe you can think of where you might use spinach, you can use chard instead. I’m going to make a Chard Lasagna later today with homemade ricotta cheese.

The lettuces are all getting big and I harvest from them every day. I have lettuces growing here there and everywhere, in all shapes and colors. The red ones are amazingly beautiful in the garden!. When it gets hot they’ll start to wilt and die away, so I’m enjoying salad from the garden while I have it.

The purple beans are from a dried purple bean pod that dropped last fall. I love volunteer plants. Beans like warm temps, but these are in a protected spot so they think it’s summer.

Beets are another crop I will always grow from now on. This is my first year growing beets successfully. Give them plenty of room to grow, loose loamy soil, water well, and fertilize when needed. The leaves are delicious in a salad when they’re small, and sautéed when they get a little bigger.  I can’t wait to pull beets out of the ground!

delishytown:

Here are some shots I took this morning of fruits and veggies in the front garden. The chard is so beautiful as a landscape plant and we cook with it a lot. The slugs and snails find it quite delicious. One of these nights I’ll have to go out there with a flashlight and catch them in the act. I promise not to make escargot. 

delishytown:

Here are some shots I took this week of our edible landscape in the back yard. We have peas, carrots, artichokes, beets, various lettuces, red kale, blueberries, fennel, herbs, grapes, and strawberries growing. Soon to go in: tomatoes, eggplant, basil and other warm season crops. 

americastestkitchen:

How To Make Homemade Nutella

Get the full, step-by-step recipe here.

Theobroma cacao and Corylus are plants so… sure, this is related.

murrayscheese:

A non-cheese producer we love all the time, but ESPECIALLY on International Women’s Day: Grove 45’s Bonnie Storm and Nena Talcott. They make amazing olive oil with their own hands. They even put the Grove 45 label on every beautiful bottle. The 2011 vintage just came in and it is superb. Ladies, we love you.

dishmeetsspoon:

Life expectancy would grow by leaps and bounds if green vegetables smelled as good as bacon.  ~Doug Larson

I’m cleaning out my pantry and my freezer, because the first thing I got when I moved in was baking stuff and I’ll be darned if I’m not going to use every last bit of flour and sugar before I go.

Last night I broke a food blogger commandment (“Thou Shalt Not Cook or Bake in Low Light Without a Lightbox Setup and a DSLR”- hard when I have one window and if faces north and no lightbox or DSLR) and whipped out my P&S and made a batch of cookies: wood-smoked bacon from the freezer, dark chocolate chips and pecans from the stash, fine coffee grounds from Morning View in Nags Head.

I used a recipe that I can no longer find on the internet (weird.), but I used inexpensive syrup and less than the called-for 1/4 cup bacon drippings. Bacon could have been crispier, but for a first go it turned out well, I think. If I could find a way to get either chili or orange in there, I would.

On the other hand, best not to eat too many of these. Bacon drippings, seriously.

Someone gets to eat these for breakfast. I wish it were me.