ecoyear

Sorry no photo as many vegies have already been eaten...
On Wednesday, roasted vegetables with goat cheese included potatoes I found at Whole Foods and asparagus from the Farmer's Market, as well as broccoli and onions from Cure Farms. I also stir fried snap peas in butter and added mint at the end. We gorged on strawberries from my community garden plot.

Yesterday, I made pea soup from my garden. For full disclosure, the English, or shelling peas I grow bear no resemblance to what you can find at Whole Foods. The recipe I used for the soup, from Alice Waters "The Art of Simple Cooking", called for water (not broth) and onions, and "very fresh" peas boiled for just five minutes (after you've softened the onions in butter for a while and added water). Maybe you can discuss this with a farmer when shelling peas appear at the market. The Longmont peas at the store just are not that sweet. Not awful, we enjoyed them, but mine ("canoe peas" from Territorial Seeds) are better. I don't know yet how long they will produce - they look suspiciously shorter than my garden neighbor's pea plants - or how well they will do with the 90 degree temperatures, but they are worth it for the taste.

To round out yesterday's meal, I boiled some beets and made a salad with greens, feta cheese and California ingredients (oranges and pecans). This is a salad we used to eat every week in winter when I was with a CSA near San Francisco. It is so my favorite way to eat beets I could not resist the non-local touches. The salad would be fine also with strawberries and local nuts, I'm sure. The dressing consists of one part tamari sauce, to two parts olive oil, to three parts balsamic vinegar. The nuts get toasted and then doused with tamari and maple syrup. I promise I'll tinker with it to make it local, since I think the beets will keep coming a good part of the year.

In case you think my kids are saints for putting up with this, so far they mainly have been eating peanut butter sandwiches, breaded chicken cutlets (maybe a step up from the nuggets...), and omelets. However, 2 out of three were happy with the roasted vegetables, and all have been snacking on peas of all sorts and strawberries from the garden. So it continues to be a (not entirely hopeless) work in progress.

Tonight, I would like to make pasta with beet greens, since we have so many. Tomorrow, I will visit the market for more food. We'll still have onions, beets, braising greens and snap peas from the CSA, but some carrots, turnips perhaps, cheese of course, and cherries I hope will round out our local eating week.