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First Garden Salad

sarah — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 08:00:52 +0000

This is going to be a short post but I just wanted to share with you all that we had our first salad grown from our very own garden.

All I can say is wow. I have been used to prepackaged lettuce from the store and always thought a lettuce is a lettuce is a lettuce.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

I don’t know if it is the mental effect of knowing we grew it ourselves, but I swear it tasted so much better. You can’t get any fresher than walking out to your backyard, harvesting the leaves yourself, and taking them straight into your kitchen to wash and serve. We had 4 different kinds of lettuces mixed together that day and I’m looking forward to a summer of homegrown salads!

♥

End of the Month Recipe Roundup – May!

sarah — Mon, 31 May 2010 08:00:03 +0000

How is it the end of May already?

Even more importantly, how is it one day away from being June and we still have our heating on?

Earth shattering questions aside, here’s the May recap of all the yummy things we made this month!

Asian Lettuce Wraps

Sloppy Joes

Giant Vanilla Sugar Cookies

Garlic Lover’s Shrimp

Beefless Tips on a Bed of Asparagus Quinoa Cooked with Lemongrass & Ginger
With Lorrin

Cinnamon Rolls

Ice Cream Pizzas

Cesar Salad Dressing

Chicken Nuggets

Chicken With Mushrooms & Artichokes

Monkey Bread

Lemon, Lime & Garlic Chicken

Cottage Pie

Did you make any of these recipes this month? I’d love to hear what you thought of them!

♥

Vegetable Garden Update

sarah — Tue, 25 May 2010 08:00:06 +0000

First, a little recap…

Our vegetable garden before:

After the first planting on April 7th:

Then on May 19th they came back for a second round of plantings and my 2 year old, Josh, would not leave Brad alone while he was trying to work. Brad was great with him though, letting him “help” as much as he could and Josh was so thoroughly pleased with himself! Josh kept calling Brad “digger man” which I thought was hilarious and he now tells me that when he “grows up big” he wants to be a digger man.

Whatcha doing there “digger man”?

I want to help too!

Josh fertilizing…

Put a little more over there please Josh…

Time to water everything…

Things have grown so much since April 7th!

We now have growing:

Beans (including a bean plant my 4 year old, Adam, grew from seed at preschool!)
Broccoli
4 different types of lettuce/salad greens
Spinach
Onions
Scallions
Carrots
Beets
Strawberries
Potatoes
Corn
Cucumbers
Pumpkins

Brad will be back in a week or two to plant tomatoes in the space we have left.

I’ve said it before and will say it again – the guys from Seattle Urban Farm Co are awesome and I highly recommend them to anyone living in the Seattle area!

♥

Our First Vegetable Garden Planting

sarah — Tue, 11 May 2010 08:00:47 +0000

Remember back in February when we broke ground on our new garden? Well, I’m excited to tell you guys that planting of our organic vegetable garden has started. Our first round of plantings went in on April 7th (our 9th wedding anniversary!) when the wonderful people from Seattle Urban Farm Co came back to get things going.

All you vegetable garden veterans probably think it is extremely lazy of us to get someone else to do it, but you have to understand one thing – I don’t have green thumbs, I have black thumbs. If there is a plant in a ten mile radius then I can undoubtedly kill it without even trying. We really want our garden to get off to the best start possible, so we got professionals in to do it. Not only so it would be started right, but also to learn from them for future plantings.

So they arrived on a cloudy Wednesday morning and got to work!

Sorry for the butt shot but I didn’t want to interrupt them!

We got quite a few things planted, including broccoli, green leaf lettuce, red leaf lettuce, green onions, strawberries, and potatoes.

We are so excited to see how things turn out and my two boys are already asking when the strawberries will be ready. They want to know how many sleeps and I feel bad when I have to tell them it is too many sleeps to count right now.

They will be coming back in the next week or two to plant corn and tomatoes for us. We are not huge corn eaters, but after watching The Berenstain Bears a couple of weeks ago my 4 year old asked if we could grow corn like they did on the show. How could I say no?

I will take some more photos soon to show you how much things have grown in the past month. We can probably harvest some lettuce leaves soon and have our first official home grown salad!

My black thumbs may be taking on a slight dark green tinge afterall.

♥

The OBC Test Kitchen – An Open Call

sarah — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 09:00:06 +0000

Got a recipe you’ve always wanted to try but think you don’t have the know how?

Got a recipe you’ve always wanted to try but are unsure if it is any good and want someone else to cook it first and give you an honest opinion?

Well look no further!

Why do I sound like an infomercial all of a sudden?

I’m launching a new feature here at OBC where readers can submit a recipe they want me to cook and I’ll give you my honest opinion on whether you should cook it yourself or throw it in the trash. I’m up for almost anything but I draw the line at things that make me nauseous just to read about them and/or have hideously expensive ingredients. And at roasting a chicken – roast chickens and I just don’t get along.

I can’t guarantee I will cook everyone’s recipe, but I’d like to do this on a regular basis and try new recipes I would not have otherwise found. Sound good to you? If so, email me the following information:

Your Name
Your website if you want it linked
Recipe Name
Recipe details including ingredients with precise measurements and directions
Where you got the recipe from so I can credit appropriately (if you invented it yourself, then that’s fine, just let me know!)
Do I have permission to tweak it as I see fit or do you want it cooked exactly as written?
Any other important info I should know about the recipe.

I’m excited to hear from you all!

♥

Our New Organic Vegetable Garden

sarah — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 09:00:58 +0000

Ok, maybe that title is a little premature because we haven’t planted anything yet, but that’s what it will be when we’re done!

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, we finally decided to bite the bullet and have the garden installed after seeing the movie Food, Inc. We decided to hire Seattle Urban Farm Co who are really knowledgeable and experienced with all things vegetable garden. They will even build a chicken coop for you, which is something we are thinking about for the future.

We have done a complete transformation of our backyard over the past few years since we bought our house but we have had this one area left that we could just never make a definitive decision on what to do with. It turns out though, that it is the perfect spot for a vegetable garden because it gets a lot of sunlight and has quite good soil.

As you can see, it was quite a mess of weeds and such…

They started out by transplanting the small tree to another part of our yard and removing the top layer of weeds and soil so that we had a clean slate.

Then they used these little flags to layout where the two big beds and surrounding walkways would be.

Followed by the installation of the drip irrigation system which is hooked up to a timer and will be invaluable during the summer!

Here is the result of their hard work all day. A definite improvement over the weed and gravel patch from the morning! They also took some soil samples so they can send it to a lab for testing to make sure we have all the right soil nutrients we need to have a successful garden.

Now we just need to decide what to plant. A few of the things we have in mind so far are:

tomatoes
strawberries
lettuces of varying kinds
broccoli
potatoes
onions
corn

While they were here I also had them install the compost bin that has been gathering dust in the garage for 3 years. I’m so excited to finally have it in place and ready to use!

Needless to say, they worked hard to give us an awesome start to our dream of an organic vegetable garden and they certainly earned every one of the banana nut muffins I baked them that day! They will be back towards the end of the month to start the spring planting cycle and we will go from there with year round seasonal plantings.

I’ll keep you posted!

♥

A Very Culinary Christmas!

sarah — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 23:39:06 +0000

Cookbooks and cookware and a food processor, oh my!

This is probably in poor taste to show off what I got for Christmas, but I thought that if anyone would be excited along with me it would be the readers of this blog since you’re (I assume) into cooking as well!

Santa was extremely generous this year and I got many cool kitchen things I have been wanting/needing. I’m so excited to use everything and I find it highly amusing that my husband bought me those gorgeous colourful pouring bowls with the thought that they’d look great in photos for this blog! Is he a keeper or what?

So what did Santa bring you this year?

♥

Let’s give a hearty welcome to…

sarah — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 17:23:55 +0000

…Stephanie!

Stephanie has decided to join our little blog here and I’m so excited to have her on board! I have known her for several years now as part of a mommy group we both belong to and she is an awesome cook. She was the person I “borrowed” the Creamy Crab Soup recipe from and if you haven’t tried it yet, do so pronto – it will change your life!

You can read more about Stephanie on the About Us section linked at the very top of the page. You’re going to love her!

♥