A Pot of Gold...Peeled and Seeded

When we were in Sioux Falls I picked up a new cookbook, Alice Waters's In the Green Kitchen. It's a collection of techniques shared by a number of different chefs rather than a collection of recipes, but there are also a few recipes that go along with each technique.

Our garden is starting to kick into overdrive. In the last ten days, we've harvested around 20 pounds of tomatoes. Last night, we started doing something with all of that glorious red fruit.

Charlie Trotter's contribution to the book is peeling and seeding tomatoes. We took his simple tomato sauce recipe and converted it into a soup. Now that school is starting, we're trying to get back into the routine, and a few quarts of soup in the freezer is a step in that direction.

This weekend, marinara sauce.

Garden Renaissance

The garden survived! The grasshoppers did their damage, and we haven't gotten rid of them, but so far (fingers crossed) they haven't developed a taste for tomatoes, zucchini, or our ripening winter squash. They're even leaving the basil alone!

Katey and I spent a week traveling to Michigan to have our second reception. Along the way, we saw some beautiful things: we made stops in Duluth, Amnicon Falls State Park, Camp Baldy, Palms Book State Park (home of the largest natural spring in Michigan), Petoskey, and Sleeping Bear National Lakeshore. It was a fantastic trip.

We ate out at almost every meal - and we're feeling it now. Getting back to our simple, garden-based diet is a welcome change. When we got home, we were greeted with about 40 ripe tomatoes, several LARGE zucchinis, and a couple of ripe potimarron squash. We also harvested our potatoes and onions.

Last night, we had a vegetarian meal with a few friends. We had white beans with garlic, pureed and served on a crispy flatbread, fried zucchini pancakes with diced tomatoes, peppers, and onions on top, spaghetti alla carbonara (minus the pancetta), and a salad with homemade buttermilk ranch dressing. All in all, pretty good.

On a side note, we're now making our own butter. If we only had a cow...

A Plague of Locusts

First things first: the wedding was amazing. Katey and I were so pleased to be surrounded by friends and family on our big day. The outpouring of support and love was humbling, and it is truly a day that we'll never forget.

Now, on to other news: the garden is in trouble, and I don't think there's much we can do about it. We knew we had a grasshopper problem, but we thought we had it under control.

We were SO wrong.

We pulled into the driveway and, before unloading a thing, went straight out to the garden, expecting to see zucchini and winter squash growing like wildfire, lettuce ready to be cut, onions and peppers progressing nicely towards a fall breakfast, and big, ripe tomatoes. Instead, we found what amounts to an agricultural slaughter: onions consumed right down to the dirt, no potato plants at all, barren butternut squash stalks devoid of all leaves, half-eaten green peppers, no lettuce to speak of, and evidence that the six-legged culprits were starting in on the tomatoes. Miraculously, it seems they've tired of our basil.

We don't know what to do. We're about 3 weeks away from harvesting the potimarron squash (lets hope they make it) and a month from the butternut squash - we might still get 3 or 4 if we're lucky.

I'll be frantically searching for organic cures (so far, chickens seem to be the best option - alas, we are two weeks away from 50 to 75 chicks arriving here at the homestead).

Updates about the rescue effort will be forthcoming.