Ideas for a Fourth of July Cookout
The Fourth of July is one of my favorite holidays, as mentioned in my recent article at FoodieView.com, and the fireworks, cookouts, and time with family and friends are my favorite parts of the holiday. This year we will spend the holiday with our family in the Adirondacks and will enjoy some great cooking from Michael’s mom and of course evenings by the campfire making s’mores (unless the bugs are eating me).
Here are a few of our favorite summer cookout foods to help you plan your holiday menu. Have a safe and happy Fourth of July!
Grow Your Own #31
July 1, 2009 by Andrea
Filed under Announcements, Grow Your Own
Our summer garden is off and running with zucchini blossoming, beans growing, tomatoes hanging on the vines, peppers sprouting, little eggplants budding, herbs getting taller, as well as bunnies, squirrels, and chipmunks trying trying to eat it all before we do. While we only have herbs to cook with so far, the rest of it is doing well and we’re getting excited about the coming harvest.
It’s time for the next round of Grow Your Own, the blogging event that celebrates the foods we grow or raise ourselves and the dishes we make using our homegrown products. Many thanks to Graziana of Erbe in Cucina for hosting our last round, Grow Your Own #30. Read more
Swabian Potato Salad (Schwäbischer Kartoffelsalat)
We had traditional Swabian potato salad (Schwäbischer kartoffelsalat), a salad which has yellow potatoes and a very simple oil and vinegar dressing, a few times while in Stuttgart. It is often used as a base for salad greens such as arugula or lettuces, and in fact it was served beneath the green salad at every restaurant we visited, a warm golden surprise waiting at the bottom of the plate.
It didn’t taste anything like the German potato salads we’ve had in the U.S. and we initially thought the difference was in the type of vinegar used, and it turns out we were right. Read more
Weekend Gardening: An Unexpected Visitor
This weekend our gardening chores included some weeding, routing the beans and peas so they would climb properly, adding more tomato cages, and transplanting the volunteer tomatoes and tomatillos to a spot where they would have more room. Some of our tomato plants are now two meters tall and it’s not even July yet, and all have set fruit, both hopeful signs of a good harvest to come.
The cages were three and five feet tall, and several plants have already gone a foot or more above, so Michael made some more cages and stacked them on top.
He used some binder clips to hold the layers of tomato cages together. We tend to Macgyver things a bit. Read more
Tatsoi with Garam Masala
June 23, 2009 by Andrea
Filed under Asian, Grow Your Own, Vegetables
When we planted tatsoi last October, I didn’t realize that it wouldn’t sprout until spring. I had heard it would even grow in the snow, so I impatiently drummed my fingers while checking the garden daily, waiting for signs of life. I had planted the seeds under a cold frame and thought for sure we would have greens in December. When the seeds finally sprouted in March, they grew slowly at first, then as spring went on the leaves suddenly jumped from just four or five centimeters long to as much as 15 centimeters. We will continue to plant tatsoi as a cool weather green because we like the flavor and it grew very well in our garden, much better than the spinach which never grew any taller than a few centimeters. Read more
Weekend Gardening: Successes and Challenges
In spite of all the rain this year that has drowned parts of our garden, the tomatoes and peppers have continued grow. The tomatoes and peppers do well in their location on the south side of the house, the same spot we had them in last summer, and we already have lots of blossoms on the plants. I found four more volunteer plants, some tomatoes and tomatillos, bringing the total number of volunteers to eleven. There’s no room for them here, so we’re going to move them to another part of the yard to see how they do.
