My garden's bounty!

Here are some beautiful things that came out of my garden:

Aren't they pretty?

Zucchini Sticks and Pasta with Herb Sauce

Here we have a lovely zucchini straight from ChezVCK garden! Those snap peas are also from the garden!

Watch out, zucchini. I'm gonna eat you!

Here is the zucchini stick-making assembly line. Fried zucchini is a very delicious food that I would love to consume. However, eating fried food makes my pants very angry. In protest, they refuse to fit me anymore. So, I have adapted fried zucchini in a different way, making it taste like fried zucchini without actually frying it. (Ssshh... don't tell my pants.)

Instead of dredging the zuke slices in egg, as is typical, I just used a bit of vegetable stock to make sure the breading adhered. This saves some calories too!

After I dredged the zuke sticks in the veggie stock, I dipped them in a mixture of Italian bread crumbs and grated parmesan cheese.

See?
Then I put them all into neat little rows on a cookie sheet sprayed with a little cooking spray, so they won't stick.

And this is how they turned out after a short stint in a hot oven. I think it was about 15 minutes at 400 or so.
I served the zucchini sticks alongside some whole wheat pasta and a tofurkey dog. For the pasta, I made a simple pesto-like sauce. I grabbed some fresh herbs from my garden--chives, basil and oregano--and buzzed it all together in the food processor with some olive oil, veggie stock and good ol' S&P. It was really simple and really tasty. Finished with more parmesan cheese, it was done!

De-lish!

Zucchini & Potato Cakes (& a salad too)

I got a lovely zucchini from my garden! Finally! It was a pretty decent-sized zuke, too, because it was ready to pick, but we left it on the vine while we were gone for four days. So it was rarin' to go when we got back!

I was looking for a different way to prepare zucchini since it's so versatile, and found this recipe, courtesy of the Pioneer Woman.Thanks, Ree!

I started off by grating about half my zucchini (it was big, people) and three baby purple potatoes into a bowl. Then I made cookie monster squeeze out all the liquid so the cakes would not be watery. I know this looks like coleslaw, but trust me, it's not.

Meanwhile, I started one of my favoritist summer salads: warm tomato salad. I concocted this recipe last summer when my mom had enough cherry tomatoes to make tomato sauce that could satiate Italy. Seeing as how shipping costs for tomato sauce to the entire country of Italy were a tad astronomical, I opted instead to use the bounty of tomatoes in a new way. Thus, this salad was born. I always start off by sauteeing the vegetables we have on-hand at the time. This time, it was zucchini (surprise!) and some delicious sugar snap peas, also from our garden. Since I also had some tempeh that needed to be used up (really. Have you ever smelled rotten tempeh? Blech!) and to add some protein, I cut that into chunks and sauteed it up too. Then I added the tomatoes, halved if they were big, and let it cook away.

Meanwhile, back at Zucchini Potato Central, the lovely crimson Lady Purple Potato and Lord Zucchini were introduced to good ol' predictable Ms. Salt and Ms. Pepper, the sturdy and versatile Mr. Egg and his son, Mr. Egg II, Fru Danish hard yellow cheese and the unpredictable addition of Rabbi Matzo Meal, since I forgot Signore Breadcrumb Italiano's invitation in the mail. It was a quite the rockin' (and diverse!) party!

...And back to the salad! It's like a TV show focusing on two different plot lines. How will they intersect? [Cue suspenseful music]
After all the veggies were sufficiently cooked through, I added a clove of chopped garlic, wilted in some spinach and basil (guess from where?!) and added a handful of bleu cheese.

Here, our cast have joined into a flavorful ensemble and are cooking away a small amount of olive oil. Sorry, P-Dub, just can't use the amounts of butter you do in your kitchen. My thighs cling to it like they may never see butter again.

Everyone outta the pool!

Oh yeah! I made garlic toast too! I spread some sundried tomato and basil Alouette cheese onto some bread and topped with a little parmesan, then toasted 'til it looked like this.

Wow, my whole mouth just filled with saliva.

And here we have our dinner!

The zucchini cakes were frickin' awesome! They were starchy from the potato but still very light, with just the right amount of cheesiness (from the cheese I think was Danish fontina, but can't remember) and they had a very mild zucchini flavor. Cookie Monster even liked them, and he hates squash! Ding ding ding! We have a winner!

ChezVCK Garden Explosion!

Ok, so remember how ChezVCK garden began? It was just a few short months ago that Cookie Monster and I shoveled dirt, decomposed kitchen scraps and poop (yep! Poop! Poop from really big cows) into some square wooden buckets and threw in some plants. And now? Look what we got! Mother Nature must really be smiling on us, because we really haven't put much effort at all into the garden. Those plants must really like the dirt and poop combination; they've been growing like weeds. Except edible, good, delicious weeds. Plants, really.

Here are our sugar snap peas. We have gotten three good batches of peas from these babies, and I think they're nearing done now. They were SO. F'IN. GOOD. Some were eaten raw, and others were stir-fried in olive oil with S&P.

Here we have the tomatoes. Lots of flowers, and some tiny fruit beginning.


See? Baby 'mater! Aren't they cute?

And I will love you, and hug you, and call you my squishy!
Can you find the baby zucchini? And look at those beautiful blossoms.

Tiny bell pepper...I see you!


Strawberries!See our cilantro tree? It has tipped over because it's gotten so tall and it can't hold its weight anymore. We still have lots of yummy cilantro, and soon we'll have lots of coriander.


The pole beans don't have any beans yet, but it won't be long now! With the recent bouts of sunlight (hooray! Vitamin D! Oh how I missed you!), the basil perked up and is doing much better. The only thing I'm slightly disappointed with is the rosemary. I thought it would really grow into a bush, like the cilantro surprisingly did, but it has remained pretty stagnant. But we've still got a lot more growin' season to go. There may be hope yet!


Woo Hoo for gardening!

ChezVCK Garden!

Here is our little vegetable garden. These photos were taken Sunday, May 25. It is now Sunday, June 8 and everything you see here has doubled in size. Everything is now enormous! I think it has to do with the copious amounts of rain we have been enduring. Now, I am a true Oregonian and I love the rain. But I am ALL DONE with it. I am so ready for spring and sunshine!


In this bed there is (clockwise from top left corner): rosemary, pole beans, green pepper, basil, chives, oregano, cilantro, snap peas, hot pepper and another bell pepper. The cilantro is no longer a plant; it is instead a cilantro BUSH!

Here are four varieties of tomatoes and four varieties of squash.

Chives and snap peas in the foreground. (Droopy basil behind the chives. Basil needs warm weather, and this is Oregon in June. A normal person would think that it would be at least warm-ish in June. Mwah ha ha ha! You would be sorely mistaken! It has been colder than Siberia this June--really, that was a headline in a Seattle newspaper. But I'm not bitter about it. No sirree. Bring on the parkas and wool mittens! It's June in Oregon!)

Strawberries and mint in the bucket.

A little strawberry! So far we have harvested one. We split it and put it over vanilla gelato.

Mint for Cookie Monster's mojitos!