What a weekend!

See that pitchfork in the header? It's there to do more than just tickle your eyeballs when you hit up this here blog--it's a reference to the fact that our food interests supersede just combining elements to produce mouth-watering (and hopefully photogenic) delicacies. A tomato is awesome, but a homegrown tomato--well, there's nothing quite like a homegrown tomato, is there? So we're growing tomatoes. Well, more than just tomatoes--we're also growing cucumbers, peppers, potatoes, carrots, lettuce, broccoli, spinach, peas, beans and zucchini, not to mention strawberries, blackberries, raspberries, blueberries, apples, pears and peaches. Here are four vegetable beds which, if my math is right, occupy about 240 square feet of our back yard.

Our climate hasn't exactly accommodated our gardening endeavors this year--the past month has seen multiple dips from the 80's to 40's, and rainfall has been a nightmare for the folks around here who grow stuff in the ground for a living--but we've been out there, shoveling, hoeing, and tilling whenever the sun offered us a few hours of productive time. So we're not sure what we'll actually be harvesting and what we'll be mourning, but we have high hopes, and, if even a percentage of our little backyard farm yields results, we'll be soon be blogging about recipes assembled from homegrown ingredients...and that could take us to some exciting places.

This past weekend handed us two days of glorious sun, and we spent both days out back, adding our sweat to all those pools of rainwater. Today, of course, my muscles scream in protest. It's important to have little joys to anticipate while waiting for basketfuls of larger joys come harvest season, and that's where this cinnamon ice cream with chocolate swirl comes in: It's how we ended our back-breaking weekend of sunburn and strained...well, everything. I grabbed this recipe and layered in this recipe for the swirl.

  Cinnamon ice cream with chocolate swirl (homemade chocolate sauce pictured in jar).

Backyard Soup

When spring refuses to do anything but deliver showers the only thing for a gardener to do is cook. Chop veggies and throw them in the crockpot to be more exact. It may not be the same as the scent of lilacs drifting through an open window, but it will fill your kitchen with some delicious smells and that will just have to do for now.

One day soon I hope to pull these things from my backyard to make this family favorite soup. 

Recipe:
2 cooked chicken breast shredded
1 red onion chopped
2 whole garlic cloves
2 C fresh or frozen carrots
1 C frozen broccoli
1/2 C dried split peas
1 can black beans or soak 1 1/2 cup dried beans overnight
3 potatoes diced
2 C vegetable broth
1 C water
2 bay leaves
handful of fresh spinach torn into small pieces
salt and pepper

Directions:
Simmer in crockpot 4 to 6 hours