ElainaA

Pork and peppers (sweet bell peppers, hot pepper, cubanelle), With salad and bread.

Actually broccolini and broccoli rabe (rapini) are different plants. Both are brassicas but broccoli rabe is a naturally occurring cultivar, native to Italy, while broccolini is a hybrid - a cross between broccoli and kai-lan, developed by a Japanese seed company. Broccoli rabe is much more bitter than broccolini. Which is why my husband prefers broccoli rabe and I prefer broccolini. Broccoli rabe is also called cime de rape or sometimes simply rape.

Host's note: this topic is continued from Gardening: 2015-2016. To borrow Shelby's word - today's pickage. Several varieties of lettuce, red and green mizuna, arugula, bianca riccia chicory, Persian cress, a little spinach. All going into tonight's salad.

Eggplant slices, grilled and rolled around a filling of goat cheese, garlic, pine nuts, raisins, lemon zest, olive oil, bread crumbs and an egg, topped with tomatoes and mozzarella. And salad greens from the garden. I love garden salads - every bite tastes different.This has 6 kinds of lettuce, arugula, Persian cress, bianca riccia chicory, mizuna, red mizuna and spinach. Plus - not from the garden (yet), cukes, tomatoes and carrots. And bread - not mine, baking means too much time inside just now, but from a very good, sort of local, bakery - Ithaca Bakery.

I know that the originals were lamb but that is never available in supermarkets - including those in Binghamton (where I bought the beef ones we had for dinner). (I prefer pork but they were not available.) And traditionally, at least for the past 20 or so years since I have had them, they are served in very soft Italian bread folded in two. I prefer to omit the bread.

We left Friday morning for Northampton, MA to visit our daughter and just got back this afternoon. Lots of great meals posted while I was away! Thursday dinner had to be easy as we were getting ready to leave (which primarily meant dealing with all the animal family members). So I picked up some vegetables to grill (zucchini, red bell pepper, sweet onion), some potato salad (which was mediocre) and a package of beef spiedies. Spiedies are a central NY specialty that becomes ubiquitous in the summer - beef, pork or chicken cubes marinated in "spiedie sauce" - a vinegary, herby marinade. Legend says they originated in Binghamton, NY - about 45 minutes south of here. For real authenticity the marinade should be made by one of 2 Binghamton companies - Lupo or Salamida. Out of curiosity, I googled recipes for spiedie sauce and found several - Epicurious, Food Network, etc. - all the usual suspects. The funny thing that for each recipe the comments section was dominated by former or current residents of Binghamton insisting that the recipe was NOT right. I was amazed that so many people from Binghamton read recipe sites. Also - the first salad with greens from my garden!

Some meals that I keep failing to find time to post: Corn chowder (the last of the corn I froze last summer), salad and home made bread. I seasoned the chowder as i always do but it tasted sort of flat. Then I remembered seeing a recipe somewhere for bourbon corn chowder so I added a pour - HUGE improvement. I almost forgot to take the picture as you can tell from the slice of bread. Grilled chicken breast with my tomato chutney, black-eyed peas with spices (cumin, coriander, cayenne, cardamom) tomato, yogurt and cilantro. There was a salad with this, as usual. Grilled steelhead trout, roasted broccoli, rice with onions and pine nuts.

@Wayne Nice!

This is actually yesterday's (Saturday's) dinner. It was a long outdoors day of yard and garden work so dinner was super easy thanks to Friday's trip to Syracuse with a stop a Trader Joe's. Trader Joe's artichoke ravioli with a fast tomato sauce (my last quart of home canned tomatoes from last year's garden! ), a salad with everything in the fridge and bruschetta with toasted baguette that was rapidly getting stale, some left over mascarpone and Trader Joe's Roasted Red Pepper Spread. Uploading this took me about 20 minutes (and 5 games of Spider solitaire). Just saying.

Well, in this thread rather than a forum, if you have questions about basil or arugula, I grow both. So just ask.

Salad and bruschetta last night: Salad is Boston lettuce, chicken, avocado, fennel, tomato, red onion and pea shoots with a version of green goddess dressing (EVO, wine vinegar, yogurt, avocado, chives, parsley and cilantro all run through the food processor).On top is some crumbled, fried chicken skin - a nice crunch. The bruschetta are seasoned ricotta, red onion and oven roasted tomato. Maybe someday I'll learn to clean up the edges of the plate before i take a picture - but I doubt it.

@Okanagancook Everything looks delicious! What a warm and practical welcome you have provided for this family who are so far from home in such a different culture. I'm sure that their experience would have been VERY different without you as their guardian angel.

@Shelby Wow! That's very impressive and makes my garden look mini. I don't know how you take care of all that - and then process the crops. The climate trade offs are interesting to me. You get a much earlier start and, I would guess a longer fall growing season (We sometimes have frost in late September, almost always by mid October) but you also have MUCH hotter summers which must be good for some crops but bad for others. Have you ever grown artichokes? Nurseries here often have plants. I've tried them several times but only once with any edible success - I think our growing season is just too short. Wishing your tomatoes a speedy recovery.

I meant to post this with my other garden pictures - this is the herb garden. I also have a container just outside a door with some herbs (rosemary, thyme, marjoram, mint) for easy access. I tired putting parsley in either the container or the herb garden but it turned out to be woodchuck candy - now it is in the fenced gaarden.

I think there is an extreme dichotomy and some mythology going on here. I have encountered lousy food in Europe and great food in the US. And wonderful food in Europe and awful, inedible food in the US. (However, after spending quite a bit of time in Germany and Austria, if anyone offers me a potato dumpling I will probably throw it at them. But that's just me.) The mythology does have a thread of reality - but wander through European supermarkets whether in Germany, France or the UK and you will find a lot of the same (often processed) foods you see in American supermarkets. And many American farmer's markets - now present in many towns even as small as mine - have offerings of wonderful fresh veggies and fruit. I think that idealizing one countries cuisine over another's neglects the normal (as opposed to tourist) experience. And, I would add, some of my best meals in American and European cities were in hole-in-the-wall restaurants. Thanks to my daughter who is brilliant at seeking them out.

Pasta with chicken, mushroom, spinach and tomato sauce. And salad. And today's bread (neither in the picture, obviously) A very simple dinner because, right now, the garden has priority. Grilled boneless pork chops with Dinosaur Barbecue " Sensuous Slathering Sauce" (a local icon) , with baked sweet potato fries and a salad.

@DiggingDogFarm, @HungryChris I can really empathize with knee issues. A friend who has something between a large garden and a small farm has most of her beds in circular containers used here by dairy farmers for watering cows - about 2 - 3 ft. high and 4-5 ft. in diameter. They are filled with a mix of compost (free from the county compost heap - luckily she has a retired husband with a shovel and a pickup truck) and soil. So she gardens standing up. As my knees get older and older I am increasingly jealous.

That is interesting. Maybe that is why this was available when none of the other varieties listed in the Dwarf Tomato Project web information are? I did a little more research and found some seed companies that list seeds from the Dwarf Tomato Project. The one I am growing (Big New Dwarf) is not listed. The Australian influence is made very clear in the names- for example, Kangaroo Paw, Sweet Adelaide, Kookaburra Crackle, Tasmanian Chocolate. The earliest seed releases I am seeing is 2012. I think it very strange that these have not made it into major seed suppliers such as Johnny's .

I have read that there are actually many dwarf varieties now available, especially in Australia where 2 of the main breeders are based. Here, not so much. Neither of the seed companies that I usually use have any of the dwarf varieties available - I had to search for seeds and this is the only variety I found. I have never seen plants at any nurseries near me. Since container gardening is such a growing field i would think they would be much easier to find.

Thank you @dcarch !!

Salmon stuffed with mascarpone and spinach, topped with bread crumbs and parmesan and baked. I cut this recipe out of a magazine (Cuisine? Food and Wine?) at least 20 years ago. With broccolini and rice with pine nuts.

Here is why I haven't been cooking very much recently: The year's big experiment - the greenhouse. with 34 tomato plants. This is the whole garden area - the greenhouse, the garlic bed, raspberries and the main garden. The lettuce bed: So far almost everything is looking good. After a week of hot, dry weather we had some good rain yesterday and last night. The beans are popping up so fact I can almost see them grow. The tomato plants in the main garden are still looking rather sickly - they always do for a while after transplant. The difference between the ones in the greenhouse and the ones in the garden is striking. I planted squash and cucumbers a few days ago - the cukes and zucchini are up but no winter squash yet. Sadly the flea beetles have already found the arugula and mizuna. I don't have a picture of my second experiment. At the end of the garden are 7 5-gallon buckets with seedings of one of the varieties developed by the dwarf tomato project - this one with the oxymoronic name of Big New Dwarf. I think the 'big' refers to the fruit while the 'dwarf' refers to the plants. The plants only get to be 2-3 foot tall but should produce full crops. Since 2 of the founders of the project are from Australia (the third is from North Carolina) I am wondering if any of the Australian gardeners here are familiar with these varieties?

I make tabbouli frequently in the summer. I have never cooked bulgar - I soak it. I like it better when, instead of just hot water, it is soaked in chicken stock with a little olive oil, some crushed garlic and sliced onion. And although I know it is not authentic, i include tomatoes. Sorry Darienne.

@Shelby - What an awful start to the growing season! Mother Nature certainly likes to remind us of how little control gardeners really have. Do you have extra seedlings in reserve or will you have to purchase plants if they are needed? I wish there was some way to even things up - it has been very hot here (high 80's. 90 yesterday - that is August weather here) with no rain for the past week. Finally a short thunderstorm today.

The local Agway here sells bottles of fox urine and of coyote urine to use as critter repellants. The smell, to my perception, dissipates quite quickly. And they work - until it rains anyway. I have always wondered how the stuff is collected.