The garden is in full production mode.  We’re able to harvest every couple of days.  Fresh produce goes bad so fast that we’re trying to eat and preserve our food in different ways.

A grapefruit-sized watermelon, pole beans and tomatoes

Miss Petrie was excited to eat our tiny watermelon after watching it grow all summer.

This zucchini made excellent calabacitas (I steam the zucchini, onions, tomatoes in butter then add a cup of shredded cheese at the end. SO good!)

We've been grilling the green chile and jalapenos then freezing them.

SPICY grilled jalapenos and green chile.

Salsa made from stewed tomatoes, onion, cilantro, grilled jalapenos, and lime juice.

I dehydrated this basil. It will be a welcome addition to Italian meals this winter.

Tonight I made stirfry and added the bush beans and pole beans to the veggie mix.  I was finding it difficult to figure out what to do with 15 beans, so this was a good solution.

How was your Labor Day weekend?  Casa Petrie had mechanical problems galore including a swamp cooler motor that had to be replaced and a very clogged garbage disposal.  Labor Day it was at our house!

Enjoy your day.

I love the cooking website “A Year of Slow Cooking“.  The author of the site, Stephanie O’Dea, published a cookbook, which I have been recently testing.  On a day when the house was low in food, I looked through the cupboards and found risotto rice.  I checked the cookbook and sure enough, there was a simple recipe for risotto.  If you have made risotto on the stovetop, it is a total pain.  And mine doesn’t always come out soft and flavorful.  But the crockpot risotto was easy to put together and turned out well.  The texture is softer than good restaurant risotto, but otherwise it is wonderful.  I served the risotto with grilled eggplant.  Mr. Petrie had his with a grilled jalpeno.

Speaking of jalapenos, we have harvested quite a few this season.  It’s difficult to use them in lots of dishes, because Miss Petrie and I can’t handle the heat!  Mr. Petrie grilled several of the jalapenos and we froze them for later use.

(This week we finally got a pole bean!  I was beginning to worry that we weren’t going to get any, but the more I look at the plant, the more I see little developing beans.  Very exciting.)

Have a relaxing Sunday.

Don’t these string bean plants look gorgeous?  But where the heck are my string beans??  We have not seen one!

Maybe the gargoyles are scaring them off the plants.

Enjoy your green veggies.

The garden bounty continues!  This past week we got:

basil, tomatoes, eggplant, jalapenos, a bush bean and a strawberry

and

more eggplant, basil, an Early Girl tomato and a giant zuchinni.

I used the basil, eggplant and zuchinni in a Crock Pot pasta sauce.  It was delicious!

The sunflowers were looking a little top heavy, so I decided to harvest them for the seeds.

I call the tall sunflower "the peeping tom" because it looks right into the neighbor's yard.

This guy was enormous.  I could not believe how many seeds came out of this one flower.

I need to do a little research on toasting the seeds.  The fresh seeds are meaty and almost have a sweet flavor to them.  I’m just not sure we can eat so many seeds at once.

The next few months should give us lots of fresh produce.  I cannot wait!

Have a fabulous day!

We are starting to get veggies from our garden.  This weekend we picked…

We used the jalapenos for homemade salsa

The salsa has lots of kick!  Next time I’ll take out more of the seeds.

Mr. Petrie grilled the eggplant and zucchini along with a couple of strip steaks.  SO good!

Sadly, our corn has been attacked by aphids, so we may not get corn this season.  We just released ladybugs into the garden to combat the aphids and stop them from spreading to other plants.

Miss Petrie ate the tomatoes.  They’re like candy to her.

Have a great day.

The tomatoes and basil are from the garden.  The mozzarella was purchased, although I still have hopes of making some this summer.  This appetizer was refreshing after a hot and humid day.

Have a good one!

I know I’ve been talking about showing you pictures of our backyard forever.  Well, it’s finally starting to come together enough for me to take pictures and show them to you.

We have a few guiding tenets to make decisions regarding our yard.  The first is that we need to conserve water, since we live in the desert.  We chose to forego grass in favor of mulch.  Mulch keeps the yard cool, repels many bugs and helps keep the weeds down.  And, to be quite honest, we were unlikely to take good care of grass.  The second tenet is that we invest in plants that do something for us, such as provide food.  The third tenet is that we have plants that grow easily in our high desert environment.  Our yard is a place for us to have fun.

A pole bean teepee

Miss Petrie's play area is covered by a sun shade.

We’re starting to get food from the garden, which is incredibly exciting!

More pictures to come.

That’s what Miss Petrie calls pesto.  We got a giant haul of basil leaves from the garden and I made walnut pesto.  I know it’s common practice to use pine nuts in pesto, but I’ve found that whatever nut I have on hand generally works fine (although I probably wouldn’t use peanuts).

Blend it up!

I put small portions of pesto in these little dollar store containers and freeze them.  With pesto, a little goes a long way.  Those tiny containers will get dumped into pasta sauce, soup, beans, and salads.

I don’t use a recipe for pesto anymore, but when I first started making it, I used a Food Network recipe.

Good eating, friends.

Whoa!  We had a busy month at Casa Petrie.

My parents and brother visited us. This was the first time my brother met Miss Petrie Deux.

We played in the sun.

We rearranged the living room.

Miss Petrie graduated from her preschool class.

We went to the zoo with friends.

And rode horses.

But what we spent the most time on was our backyard.  Here’s a peek at our tomato box.

Have a productive day.

I haven’t used geraniums in my yard before, but I love them!  They were cheap, they bloom profusely and they grow quickly.

I’m not sure what this bush is called but we totally ignore it and it still grows like a weed and produces the sweetest smelling flowers.

A “P” tile I found at Target a few years ago.

Here are some pics from the front yard last year.

Have a colorful day.