ElainaA

After college, for several years I shared an apartment with a friend who believed in this. Some of the worst meals I have ever experienced.

Orzo cooked like risotto with garlic scapes, what I could rescue from my bolted arugula and spinach, and mushrooms (shiitake and white). I toasted the orzo before I started adding broth. And, of course, salad.

HA! My arugula (rocket) has bolted too. And I am also procrastinating in pulling it. The spinach and mizuna have also bolted. Tomorrow's job...... maybe.

I could do all that and still have lots left over. In our house we are salad addicts. I know there are lots of other ways to use lettuce but that is what we like. But my purpose in planting so much is to have lots to give away. (And there is still a ridiculous amount left.)

I admit that I grow a ridiculous amount of lettuce - mainly because I like variety and am easily seduced by seed catalogs in February. I actually grow more of lots of things than we can consume. The good part is there is lots to give away. The Episcopal church in Cortland (the nearest large town) sponsors a Loaves and Fishes program - a free meal daily for anyone who shows up. They cannot accept home processed food but are delighted to get fresh garden produce. So, today I thinned out one of the lettuce beds, washed it all and tomorrow I'll drop it off.

Mahi-mahi roasted with lemon and lime zest and lemon juice, topped with a lemon-mustard vinaigrette. With a red quinoa pilaf with onions, pine nuts and parsley. And salad.

@kayb Would something like this help: http://www.gardeners.com/buy/garden-tools/garden-kneelers/ It reverses to be either a kneeler (out for you, I realize) or a seat. They have other types of seats for gardening - I covet the one on wheels - but this is the one I have. Not cheap but mine has held up for at least 5-6 years.

@blue_dolphin I'm practically licking the screen......... Host's note: this topic is split into multiple segments to reduce the load on our servers. To continue reading, (c)lick here: Dinner 2016 (Part 6)

@liamsaunt I love that book!

@ProfessionalHobbit I will have to try this. I love the "traditional" chicken cacciatora with tomatoes and peppers (I use Marcella Hazan's Chicken Fricassee, cacciatora style) but my husband does not. (It reminds him too much of his mother's cooking. Not all Italian women - she was first generation American - are great cooks.) I think he would like this. Dinner last night was completely on the grill. Chicken, eggplant, zucchini, red onion, tomato, potatoes. Well, I didn't grill the salad. Or the tomato chutney. I currently have LOTS of garlic scapes so Sunday dinner was pasta with sautéed garlic scapes, onion and sausage. And salad. I have to do something with all the lettuce in the garden. (Sorry for the somewhat fuzzy picture. I'm a better cook than a photographer. )

A hot day yesterday so salad for supper - with grilled steak, pickled red onions, roasted potato wedges, cucumbers, radishes and tomatoes over garden greens. With a sour cream-horseradish dressing. Also the first corn of the year. I broke my long term rule of only buying local corn - which won't be ready for several more weeks. I'm not sure where this was from as it was not labelled but it was pretty good. It would have been nice to have some bread but I hate to turn on the oven when it is this hot.

I can tell you what I have at home - a GE Profile, propane burning, 4 burner stove. I asked my husband about control boards or logic, since that seems to be a frequent issue mentioned here - he said maybe the timer is electronic and probably the oven temperature control but that's it. Our refrigerator is also GE - a top freezer, 29" width model. No ice dispenser or chilled water - just a fridge and small freezer. The dishwasher is a Maytag - their lowest end model. It works just fine. When we bought it, about 4 years ago, the salesman tried REALLY hard to sell us something fancier - but I don't need anything fancier. I've got a 13 cubic foot upright freezer in the garage - also a GE - that I fully expect to run forever. I can't give you makes or models for the appliances I buy for the apartments since the records are all at our office and I have no plans to be there until next Tuesday. Basically, small (usually 24") electric stoves and small top freezer refrigerators. No dishwashers. Maybe we are just lucky but, if so, that luck has been holding quite awhile.

I suspect that most of the problems are with the higher end products - which as @Deryn rightly says have gotten ridiculously complex. "Simple and solid" appliances are still easily available - I buy them for our apartment houses. I might have to call a repairman once a year. And I am not referring to products purchased 10 or more years ago - some were made in the last 5 years. Our home appliances are quite basic also, most purchased within the past 4-5 years when the ones we put in 27 years ago finally gave up. No repair calls here.(Yet anyway).

A shoulder lamb chop grilled, with Julia Child's 'mustard coating and marinade for lamb', plain boiled potatoes with butter and parsley and grilled vegetables - eggplant, zucchini, red onion and garlic scapes. Eaten out in the gazebo because it was a lovely evening.

That is certainly not my experience. With one exception, all our major appliances were new when we built our house 27 years ago. We have only had to replace any in the last 5 years. The original dryer is still just fine. (Did you only mean kitchen appliances?) The original stove and refrigerator lasted about 20 years each. The dishwasher was not quite new when installed - it was a model way too expensive for our budget. My husband's company had installed it in a new home a year before. When the home was sold the new owner pulled out all the appliances (very expensive! one year old!) and replaced them. My husband brought the dishwasher home. It lasted about 15 years. I see that in your article you are talking about newer models and primarily high end models. Everything I have is very middle-of-the-road. No bells and whistles. The newer appliances we have, mostly around 4 to 7 years old, function perfectly. We also own some apartment houses. The appliances in some of the apartments have been there over 20 years and work fine. Again, these are basic models. That may be the difference.

My harvest is still limited to lettuce, other salad greens, radishes and garlic scapes. Nothing else is anywhere near producing yet. Both the arugula and mizuna are beginning to bolt. It's time to put in a second planting of each.

I rarely post on this thread since my lunches are extremely boring. However, today was Eurocar - the one car event to which I always go with my husband. He shows his car (a 1970 Porsche 914) and I make a picnic lunch. For a car show dedicated to European sports cars the food on offer is terrible - hot dogs (not even Hoffman Snappy Grillers - the iconic central NY hot dog), hamburgers, salt potatoes.Previous years that was it. This year there was a vendor with a mobil, wood fired pizza oven - a huge improvement. But we still had my picnic. A salad with greens from my garden, chicken, avocado, fennel, red onion, cherry tomatoes and pea shoots with a variation on green goddess dressing, using a yogurt base. Plus some bread I baked yesterday. I did a trial run of this a few weeks ago so you may have seen it on the dinner thread. We always take champagne, which may or may not be legal. Dessert was a sponge cake with sweetened, home made ricotta between the layers with strawberries and whipped cream. This was my first venture into making ricotta. It tasted really good but was far from the required 'spreadable' texture. (And my husband's car took 3rd place in his class.)

I empathize. One of my very close friends is allergic to the entire allium family. No garlic! No onions! No leeks! I find cooking for her extremely difficult.

@Shelby I am so sorry!! I'm away for awhile and disaster strikes! I can't imagine how you are dealing with this. I lost all my tomatoes and peppers to hail a few years ago - but that was late in the summer so there was no recovery (I admit to crying.) - you may be luckier both with time to replant and perhaps for some plant to recover. As I said in a post above - gardeners are at war with nature more often than in tune with nature.

@Deryn It looks like you have a nice amount of space to play with for a garden. A long, slender bed would be attractive, especially if not straight. My concern would be weeds - in my experience the edges of the garden that are contiguous with a grass area have the worst weed invasion. You might consider some form of weed barrier. Trenching is effective - digging a v-shaped trench about 6" deep and 4" wide at the top around the garden. You can leave it empty or fill with gravel or mulch. My so-called soil is mostly rock so the only garden I have trenched is a perennial bed that I dug up and redid last summer. The trench is really effective in cutting down on grass invasion. I really wish I had known enough to trench the vegetable garden when we first put it in. I'm looking forward to pictures of your progress.

That is beautiful. I love all the pictures even though (or because) I can only identify, at best, half of what I am looking at. Thank you for posting this.

It is the age of medical miracles so I hope you will be back to the things you love soon.

It is really a ridiculous amount of lettuce - I'm a total sucker for variety - I have 12 varieties this year plus all the other greens (arugula, both green and red mizuna, Persian cress, 2 kinds of chicory...). We do eat salad every night which puts a dent in it. And I take bags of extra stuff to our local Loaves and Fishes organization. There is garlic bed in the background, behind the raspberries. I'm still using garlic that I grew last year although the quality is deteriorating. This year i plan of pickling some of the crop. Besides the lettuce there are several varieties of beans, some to eat fresh and some to shell and dry, fennel, basil, cabbage, peppers, peas, leeks, onions, shallots, spinach, lots of radishes interplanted with carrots. I'm probably forgetting something. You can't really see the other end of the garden which has tomatoes, squash and cucumbers. In my experience, June is sort of a honeymoon month with the garden . The pests and diseases don't usually set in until later in the summer. Then it is war.

Oh I am sorry! My gardening guru, who also has knee problems, has created a standing-up-garden using containers meant for watering or feeding cattle. Could something like that help you?

Things are coming along... Baby cucumbers