Farm to Table

As our temperatures hover in the 90's day after day, the garden is quickly dwindling.  The cucumbers are playing out, the corn is finished, the green beans are "on their last legs," and the squash is showing signs of "giving up the ghost.  The tomatoes are tiring.  Those that still bear fruit are being attacked by hordes of stink bugs.

The produce in the garden that really carries us through until the fall is cow peas (southern peas) and okra.  We grow purple hull peas, blackeyed peas, and ozark razorback peas.  They thrive in hot weather and laugh at the other garden vegetables that wither in the summer heat.

We are picking the last of our green beans (Contender and Blue Lake).  I think that green beans are my favorite garden vegetable.  I can't get enough of them.  As a kid when my parents were trying to get me to eat my vegetables, I think green beans got my foot in the door.  I just love 'em.  I fresh pick 'em in the garden, bring them in and wash them up.  We snap the ends off of them, usually picking when they are young and tender. 

Simply lightly sauteing them in butter is a perfect side dish, but I'll show you what we do when we want to kick it up a notch.  We add bacon.  Is there any dish that can't be improved by adding bacon?  I think not.

We arrange the fresh green beans in little bundles and wrap with bacon.  We add a little brown sugar or molasses to the top of each bundle and pop the tray in the oven.

Holy, moly, is this good!

Use a spatula to put a bundle on your plate and it makes you feel like you are in a fancy schmancy restaurant.

We've blanched a number of green beans and frozen them in quart freezer bags to enjoy when they are out of season.  In mid-August I'll plant a couple of rows of green beans so that we have more to enjoy!

A Fresh Garden Lunch

I'm picking a 2 gallon bucket of tomatoes every afternoon, trying really hard to stay ahead of the miserable stink bugs.  I wish Noah would have stomped on the two stink bugs when they boarded the ark.  When I bring them inside, I place them on platters on the island and let them finish ripening.  When they hit perfection, we eat them.  I'll show some of the other ways we use the tomatoes later this week.  We grow numerous varieties of heirloom tomatoes, so there is a wide assortment of shapes, sizes, and colors.

On Saturday Tricia decided to make BLT's for lunch.  She checked with me to see if it would be okay since for some strange reason, I cannot make myself enjoy eating raw tomatoes.   Each year I try.  She sliced big slabs of tomatoes that resembled steaks and got everything ready.

BLT - Bacon, Lettuce, and Tomatoes

I put a lot of Creole mustard on the bottom slice of bread and began assembling the ingredients to build the perfect sandwich.  A little yellow mustard on the top slice of bread and some salt and pepper to top it off.

I still don't like raw tomatoes by themselves, BUT this sandwich was just doggone good!  So simple and yet so delicious.  We'll eat more of these before the tomato crop comes to an end.

Word of the Day

I read an article yesterday about a man who was eulogizing his grandfather who had just passed away at 101 years old.  He was talking about what a remarkable man his grandfather was and recounted a story of how his grandfather always carried a pencil and notepad with him.  One day he was with his grandfather (and his grandfather was 91 years old at the time), he saw him writing something down in his notepad.  He asked him what he was writing down and his grandfather answered, "I heard a word a while ago that I don't know the definition of and I don't want to forget it.  I want to write it down so that I can look it up in the dictionary." "Why?" the grandson asked.  "To improve my vocabulary, of course!" the 91 year old grandfather explained!

Well, The Word of the Day is - Quinquagenarian: One who is 50 years old.  Yep, that's me today. I've never head of that word, but now I know what it means.  As they say, if you stop learnin', you start dying.

Speaking of dying, I was dying to get home to see what my wife made me for my birthday surprise. Wow! Tricia and Benjamin sang Happy Birthday to me and then presented me with a homemade Italian Creme cake with cream cheese icing that she made from the rich cream from Daisy Lou, our Jersey cow.  Tomorrow I may show you how she made the cream cheese.  Then there were some chocolate dipped strawberries...  She saved some of the chocolate to drizzle in our coffee tomorrow morning.  Nice.

But it didn't stop there.  Also on the lineup was a wheel of brie cheese baked in a puff pastry and if that wasn't decadent enough, a new recipe she tried from Southern Living Magazine: Roasted Bacon Pecans.  What's not to love about that?!

Tricia knows that the old adage is true: "The way to a man's heart... is through his stomach!"

In addition to using Daisy's cream to make the cream cheese, she used a lot of pecans from last year's crop of pecans.  We don't have much inventory left, but that's okay as the first pecans of the season have started falling.  We'll have to pick them up before the squirrels get them.  Or maybe we'll just 'thin-out' the squirrels.

I'm going to bed tonight fat and happy!