I sometimes buy a tub of orzo salad from the Market of Choice deli, but I like it so much that I can’t afford to buy as much as I want. Tonight I mixed up what I think is a pretty good reproduction of what I like about this dish, and I’m recording it, so I can do it again next time. I made a triple recipe and did not regret it.

Pasta:
1 1/2 cups orzo pasta
4 cups water
1/2 cup chicken stock or stock of your choice

Mix-ins:
2/3 cup sliced green olives plus a little olive brine
handful golden raisins
handful raisins
1/4 cup almond slivers

Vinaigrette dressing:
1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil
1/3 cup red wine vinegar
1 tsp honey
2 tsp course salt
1 tsp ground black pepper
1 tsp dried oregano flakes

Boil water in a stock pot then pour in orzo. Cook for about 10 minutes, until just approaching desired texture. Drain and pour into large mixing bowl. As orzo cools, keep it from sticking together by mixing in stock in several splashes. You can assist cooling by putting the mixing bowl in a sink of cold water.

Shake dressing ingredients together in a mason jar with lid.

Mix dressing into pasta and add mix-ins. Add olive brine, pepper, salt, or more red wine vinegar to taste. Once you can’t stop tasting it, it’s done, and it should be put away in a sealed airtight container and buried deep in a refrigerator so you have a chance of forgetting about it for longer than ten minutes.

In other news, I’ve started graduate school to become a librarian so my already sparse updates will probably become even sparser.  Oh, the things we give up in order to pursue higher education!

One of my goals recently has been to skip breakfast less.  Since I’m not a fan of the all-American breakfast-on-the-go thing, it’s been necessary to take a more unusual approach to breakfast. 

One of the things I’ve most enjoyed about having a garden this year is the ability to pluck something off the vine each morning and put it straight into my breakfast.  Earlier in the year we regularly feasted on sauted kale with garlic or Southern style collard greens, topped with a fried egg each.  Now that the kale has bolted and the collards have about run their course, we’re moving on to some classic summer vegetables.  Today’s breakfast was a saute of fresh zucchini, green bell pepper and these beautiful All-Blue potatoes, all of which were straight from our own backyard.  Add a mug of french press coffee, a glass of orange juice, toast and an egg over easy and you might as well be in heaven.  When breakfast is this good, it’s easy to believe that it’s the most important meal of the day.  Making a veggie-laden, hearty breakfast with ingredients from your own garden is probably the true breakfast of champions.

These blossoms will soon become miniature eggplant.  I think they’re so pretty.  Initially, I was surprised that the blooms are purple but I guess it makes sense, being eggplant and all. 

I planted a number of watermelon seeds a while back but didn’t really expect anything to come from them.  Yesterday, Nate pointed out this little guy. So cute!

This is a cocozelle zucchini, which we picked out because we liked the name.  It is nearly big enough to eat; we’ll probably be eating zucchini in a stir fry tomorrow night.  The first of the sun-gold tomatoes are almost ready to get eaten!

Jihyun Ryou, graduate of Design Academy Eindhoven, did his master’s thesis on alternative preservation methods to the high-tech gadgetry that is common today.  He focused on researching traditional types of preservation and storage and designed a number of shelves that make use of his findings.  I recommend that you check out the project (with photos) here.  I really like the root storage shelf but I find the combination apple/potato shelf the most fascinating.  It’s really unfortunate that we’ve mostly lost our knowledge of these kinds of symbiotic relationships (in the kitchen and other places) but I give thanks that Ryou and others are researching and implementing them again.

Today we harvested the our first row of carrots that were planted on April 14th.  I was surprised to see that they are actually of decent size; most are approximately five to six inches long.  This picture is of the best of the bunch.

I’ve been trying to do successive plantings even though it’s somewhat counter-intuitive to me.  When I’m working on a project in the garden, I always just want to finish it as soon as possible so planting just one row at a time has been hard.   Hopefully when we reap the rewards of fresh carrots throughout the summer it’ll make it all worthwhile.

Also, I have to say that the taste of homegrown carrots is much more complex than that of store-bought ones.  I hate to sound like a weirdo wine snob, but the carrots really had an interesting and complicated floral taste that I can only describe as a “bouquet”, while still having the sweetness of your average carrot.

Initially, my homemade bags worked wonders: water drainage was good and the plants looked quite healthy.  When planting potatoes, you’re supposed to periodically cover the leafy plant with additional amounts of dirt.  (I’m sure there is a good explanation on why potatoes should be tended this way but I’m not sure of what it is.)  I was worried the burlap bags would be difficult to unfold and unstable when fresh dirt was added.  And of course there was always the looming threat that one of the bags would just split apart. 

We hadn’t seemed to have any problems until one fateful day when Nate decided that one of the bags looked off-kilter and decided to straighten it.  The seam ripped and dirt spilled out everywhere.  I have to say that I’d be lying if I said that things weren’t tense between us for a few minutes there!  He rigged something up so that hopefully the plant can continue growing and so far it looks like it may make it through.  We’ve also noticed that the bottoms of the burlap bags have deteriorated significantly.  If we were to move them, all the dirt (and potatoes) would fall out the bottom.  Thankfully, they are just fine where they are!

That hasn’t been the end of our potato problems, unfortunately.  The past few days have been unusually hot around here, pushing 100 degrees F.  The excellent drainage that was such a bonus in the Spring has not been doing a great service to the potatoes in this weather.  The plants are visibly dry and wilted but, short of watering them constantly, not much can be done.  One plant died out completely; we checked the soil to find a handful of little Russian banana potatoes, so things are going as planned in that direction!

This is about half of “Tomato Town,” as we’ve dubbed it. The majority of these plants are ones that I started from seed (the Sun-golds and Purple Cherokees).  We traded a few extra plants to our gardening friends and mentors and received a Mortgage Lifter, Red Brandywine, Legend and Early Girl in exchange.  I’m hoping to be able to do more plant trading next year as it was a relatively easy (and fun) way to increase variety.  If anyone would be interested in trading in the future, let me know! 

These are the sun-gold tomatoes that I’ve bragged about before (a long, long time ago in the garden’s timeline). They were so tiny then!  When I look back on the pictures of the tomato plants (and the other plants) it really boggles my mind to see the amount that they’ve grown.

These are heirloom Purple Cherokees that haven’t yet turned purple.  They already look beautiful though.  I can’t wait to eat ‘em!

And just for good measure, here is a picture of some tomatillos.  I wasn’t planning on planting tomatillos but Cullen requested them specifically so I started a few plants from seed.  I kind of ignored them as I didn’t expect them to do well in Oregon’s wet Spring and unpredictable Summer but they have really flourished.  We planted them in front of some store-bought hot pepper plants, thinking that they would all grow at the same rate and everything would get plenty of sun.  As my mom would say, the tomatillos took off like “a bat outta hell” and are blocking the peppers from getting any sun.  While this is a little bit of an annoyance, I have to say that it’s pretty rewarding to have your organic homegrown plants give the conventional store-bought ones a serious run for their money!

In other news, we’re going to have a butt-load (technical term) of tomatillos so if you have a recipe you’d recommend, let me know!

In the meantime, NPR ran a story about an old-fashioned form of natural weed whackers that’s being used by the city of LA.  Check it out here.  I hope to see this sort of thing utilized more in the future!

The only problem with the recipe is that the high heat can tend to set off your kitchen smoke alarm.  However, there’s an easy solution so that you can make this recipe without having to place a call to the fire department.  Line the bottom of your broiler pan with aluminum foil, cover it with non-stick spray, and then add in four or five medium red potatoes that have been cut into wedges.  Replace the top piece of the broiler pan, put the trussed chicken on top and cook.  The potatoes absorb the juices from the chicken, which not only keeps the juices from burning and setting off your smoke detector, but they make the potatoes absolutely delectable.  Thomas Keller recommends serving the roast chicken with a simple green salad, but I like mine with a little quinoa and vegetables sauted with garlic (in this case, broccolini).

Anyway, May is almost here and the garden is looking lush!  I just want to make a quick post with some photos from today.

Above is a close up of one head of butterhead lettuce.  The specific variety is called “Tom Thumb”.  I planted the lettuce seed in some biodegradable pots but as you can see it’s still relatively intact!  Hopefully it doesn’t restrict those little lettuce roots.

The mesclun mix lettuce is flourishing in the garden and we’ve also planted a variety of romaine that is called “Freckles” which is light green with red speckles which is especially adorable.  I think we can all agree that baby lettuce is undeniably cute!

We have two varieties of kale in the garden right now.  This red Russian kale is in the front yard; there is also blue curly dwarf kale that I started from seed in our garden beds.  I find it funny that both varieties have colors in their names, because they both look green to me!  I picked up these red Russian starts from a local nursery and transplanted them in March but they have only just started shooting up in the past few weeks.  I’m hoping to give them a good dose of fertilizer tomorrow to keep the rapid growth going.  This photo is of the biggest and it stands at about eight inches tall right now.  Kale is one of my favorite vegetables, but I almost always prepare it the same way (sauted with garlic and red pepper flakes).  If you have a good kale recipe, do share!

I was completely shocked to see that little potato sprouts are already poking up through the dirt in my burlap bags.  It has been 11 days since I planted these potatoes and everything I read suggested that they would appear dormant for up to a month.  I guess my seed potatoes were ready to get growing.  This photo is of an “All Blue” potato sprout and it looks quite blue in person.  A few of the Russian bananas have begun to sprout as well.

Carrots, Brussels sprouts and fennel have all been recently added to the garden and there are a variety of tomatoes in the greenhouse that need to be transplanted.  Nate also planted a variety of melons, summer and winter squashes last week.  I hope to have more information on all of those soon!

I’m going to blame my tater tardiness on the fact that we took forever to decide where and how to plant them.  To get the most food out of your potato plant, you’re supposed to cover the green plant that grows out through the dirt with more dirt on a regular basis.  So it was necessary to plant the potatoes in a way so that we could mound several more inches of dirt on them throughout the growing season.  Many resources recommend planting in trashcans, but to be honest, spending $10+ on each trashcan seemed unappealing when you can buy a bag of potatoes at the supermarket for dirt cheap.

Instead, we picked up a roll of burlap from the local feed and seed store for eight bucks.  I spent today sewing it into individual bags, filling them with dirt and planting the potatoes.  As they are, each bag is only filled to about a fifth of their capacity.  The idea is that as the potato plants grow, I can unfold the bags and fill them with more dirt, covering the plants.  Hopefully it turns out to be as easy as that.  I’m a little concerned that the bags may deteriorate or become unsteady as we go along.  But I’m trying not to fret about it; only time will tell.

As for what kind of potatoes we’re growing, I thought it would be fun to be a little adventurous and get some varieties that we can’t often find at the grocery store.  I picked up one bag of “Russian Banana” seed potatoes and a bag of “All Blue”, which should be a little more exciting than your everyday Russet or Yukon gold.

Even after sewing six burlap sacks and planting 15+ potatoes, there are still a few more to be planted.  They’ll have to wait, though.  It’s Friday and I’m done shoveling dirt for the day!

I’m not sure what exactly drove me to add a can of green chilies and top them with cheddar cheese the second time I made them but I’m thankful that I did!  We split them and served slow-cooked pork carnitas on them.  Delicious!  I think that the addition of a little chili powder and cumin really rounds out the flavor.  These muffins are a little more exciting then their predecessors, but I would recommend both versions.  The original variety may be better suited to pairings with strong flavors, while my cheddar chili beer muffins are great on their own.

Cheddar Chili Beer Muffins

Adapted from Recipe Zaar

Makes 12 muffins

• 3 cups regular flour
• 3 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon chili powder
• 1/4 teaspoon cumin
• 1 – 4 ounce can green chilies
• 1 – 12 ounce bottle/can beer (I’ve used Deschutes Cascade Ale, Pabst Blue Ribbon and Corona with good results)
• 1/3 cup grated cheddar cheese (or more if you like)
• 1 tablespoon butter, melted

Preheat your oven to 375 F.

Sift the flour into a large bowl.  Don’t skip this step: it is very important in giving your muffins a light and airy texture!  If you neglect to sift you flour, your muffins may be closer to bricks than bread.  Add the rest of the dry ingredients and mix together thoroughly.  Add the green chilies and stir.

Crack open your beer.  Take a swig (don’t skip this step either)!  Pour remaining beer into the dry ingredients.  Stir the mixture until well incorporated.

Spoon muffin mixture into a well-greased muffin tin.  Top muffins with grated cheese and melted butter.

Bake for 25 minutes, until cheese has melted and an inserted toothpick comes out clean.

Best eaten right away, but will keep for a few days in a plastic bag or tupperware container.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean we’ll soon be feasting on asparagus.  Asparagus is one of the only perennial vegetables, so it’s necessary to let it establish itself for a year or two before you harvest.  Still, this is a great sign for a tasty future!