Easy summer dinner: New potatoes and peas

We all have a button, some kind of trigger, that immediately catapults us back in time to a moment from childhood. One of mine is peas.

For two glorious weeks in the summer, nature aligns and a garden will give you all of the sweet peas and new potatoes you can ask for. As a kid, this occurred during summers in Idaho at my grandparents' house and all I have to do is see a pea on the vine and I am transported. Nothing tastes like a young pea, straight from the pod.

When we put in the garden four doors down, my mom's sole request was to plant peas and potatoes. She's making memories with my boys, much like her own mom did with my brothers and me, teaching them how to pick the fattest pods and split them down the seam with their thumb to reveal the perfectly straight row of plump peas hidden inside.

And this weekend, we finally sat down to a meal of new potatoes and peas. What was once a staple on my Grandma's summer table has made it to my own weekly menu.

It's a great option for Meatless Mondays and a simple way to show off produce from the garden or farmer's market. And, if you're lucky like me, it will take you right back to being a kid.

New Potatoes and Peas - a loose recipe (the kind I hated when I first started to cook)

To serve a family of 4 with leftovers I dug up roughly 30 new potatoes of various sizes, and as many peas as were ripe. You can never have too many peas, so pick more than you think you'll need.

Wash the potatoes, quartering the larger ones, cutting some in half, and leaving the littles whole. Boil in a pot of heavily salted water until easily pierced with a fork. While the potatoes cook, shell the peas.

When the potatoes are done, turn off the heat and add the shelled peas to the hot water.

Make a roux. I used 4 TB butter and half a cup of flour, mixing over medium heat until it was a golden brown. Then whisk in whole milk - taking care to smash the flour chunks - until you have a thin gravy. There should be enough liquid to act as a sort of soup when combined with the potatoes. Liberally salt and pepper the gravy to taste.

Drain the potatoes and peas. Put in a serving dish, pour the gravy over the top, and serve.

Happy eating. Let the memories begin!

Prepping the home for winter

I write a guest blog, Hey Neighbor, for Dwell Denver Real Estate once a month. This is September's post.

*****

Hey Neighbor,

It’s that time! The nights are cooler, the leaves are edged in yellow, and we’re a few short weeks from what always proves to be a snowy Halloween in Colorado. So how best to prep your home for the months ahead? Follow the checklist below and you are well on your way to a stress-free winter. 

1. Check gutters and downspouts for debris. Buy extenders that divert downspout water 3-4 feet from your home. I love these downspout extensions from Home Depot and have used them on 2 homes to great success. 
2. Scan your roof for missing shingles or damage from summer storms. Make sure all flashing is secure.
3. Clean your fireplace and chimney, making sure the flue is open and free of debris.
4. Clean your outdoor furniture and cover or store for winter.
5. Blow out your sprinklers and outdoor faucets before turning them off for the season. (We call a professional for this, but you can always try your hand at it via a Youtube tutorial.)
6. Remove the bag from the lawn mower and mulch your leaves to allow them to protect and feed your grass through the winter. This is also the time to mow down seasonal grasses and wild flowers to allow them to reseed next spring.
7. Add soil amendments (bone meal, manure, compost) to your garden soil and cover with leaves until spring. Alternately you could plant a winter cover crop like rye. Check out Plant Talk Colorado or Organic Gardening for more info.
8. Drain the gas from mowers and power tools before you stash them away for the winter.
9. Make sure snow blowers, shovels, salt and ice melt are stocked and in working order before the first storm hits.
10. Fix drafty windows and doors. You can address the issue yourself, or pop over to Ogsplosh on Etsy and order a few cute draft snakes for the home. Sometimes the easiest fixes are the best!
11. Reverse ceiling fans (there should be a switch on the base) and use on the lowest setting to blow hot air back down into your living space.
12. Install a programmable thermostat if you haven’t yet. Check out this Lowe’s tutorial – super easy. 
13. Replace the filter in your furnace.
14. Test the batteries in smoke and carbon monoxide detectors as well as flashlights.
15. Stock a few essentials for snow days so that you aren’t one of the masses hitting the local grocery during a blizzard. Easy go-to dinners to keep at the back of the pantry include macaroni and cheese (yep, we have little kids!), canned chili, canned soups, crackers, and that all-time classic, the frozen pizza. Better yet, make double batches of soups, sauces and casseroles going into fall and freeze them!
16. Put your feet up with a spiced apple cider and a good book – you’ve earned it! Bring on the snow.

Deer Repellent

My tomatoes have turned me against Bambi.

I am relegated to a container garden this year as we are overrun with deer and rabbits in our neck of the woods. (Seriously, where have all the predators gone?) Normally I love the wildlife, and am enamored by Aidan running to the sliding doors every morning and calling out "Deer? Rabbits? Are you?"

Until a month ago, I was also in love with the container garden. Virtually no weeding. Pretty colored pots. Giant lovely tomato and pepper seedlings courtesy of my favorite plant-pushers, Seed Savers. I was set up to have the most successful, trauma-free garden of the last four years. Two of my plants were taller than my toddler! I should have taken a picture because, as we learned from our old pal Pony Boy, nothing gold can stay.

Enter the deer.

Sad little garden.

They took me down to the stalk. Then the plants recovered over the course of a week! And then the bastards took me down to the stalk again. Only the prickly-stemmed squash escaped unscathed.

Deerpocalypse 2013!!!

Like a discarded popsicle stick...

The sight of two speckled day-old twin fawns frolicking in the trees outside my window almost made me offer up my plants directly...and then I remembered how delicious summer tomatoes are fresh off the vine, hot from the sun, and I toughened up. I taught Aidan to say "No deer! Bad deer!" and we returned to the garden.

Photo bombed!

I wish we could blame the dead yard on the deer too, buddy.

I sprayed the plants with liquid capsaicin from the local feed store. So far so good. Apparently Bambi is not into food that registers on the Scoville scale. We're 3 weeks out from the last deer blight and the plants are making a strong comeback.

Heritage plants unite!

I'm hoping for one solid round of fruit before the frost, and then I'll chalk this up to a lesson learned for next year. If the capsaicin doesn't hack it in 2014, I have a girlfriend who can get me a bag of deer-deterring hair from her salon (it's Aveda, so it's designer!) and there is an African lion rescue 30 miles down the road that gives away free lion poop to spread as a natural form of deer-be-gone. Ah, country life.

Simple Skillet Recipes - Zucchini and Eggs

I can thank my Italian grandma for my great hair, pleasing peasant build, and this recipe that takes advantage of baby zucchini and (eventually) my own eggs. Farm to table in 8 minutes or less.

Zucchini and Eggs

(serves 1)

Ingredients

2-3 baby zucchini (less than 6 inches)
1/2 TB butter
2 eggs, slightly beaten
salt and pepper to taste
fresh salsa (or pesto...or a nice slice of stilton...maybe a fruit compote...)

Melt the butter in a skillet over medium heat and add the zucchini, sliced thin. Sauté until softened. Add eggs, salt and pepper, and let set. (I scramble them - easier!). Remove from heat, top with salsa and enjoy!

(This pairs well with an NPR Tiny Desk Concert and San Pellegrino Aranciata over ice.)

$6 Pallet Compost Bin

I write a guest blog, Hey Neighbor, for Dwell Denver Real Estate once a month. This was June's post.

*****

Hey Neighbor,

What has two thumbs, 12 chickens, and more poop than she knows what to do with? This girl!

 

Urban farming has been an adenture so far. Harder than I anticipated when reading about it, but more gratifying than I could have imagined when I see our hand-raised chickens scratching for bugs, or the bees coming and going at the hives by the dozen. Lately we've turned our attention to waste, both the noun and the verb. 

The chickens are great garbage disposals and save a lot of food scraps from the trash. But once they process said scraps, there is a different kind of waste to deal with. Since I'd love to divorce myself from buying big box garden soil, a compost bin was the logical conclusion. And then I priced them. Yeah...After building a 200-square-foot chicken palace out of cedar, we were a little short on farm funds.

So, I hightailed it to my local feed store. I purchased used wooden pallets for $2 each. I saved myself $94 and saved the wood from the trash heap.

The fastest way to compost, besides having a huge pile of grossness rotting somewhere in the yard, is a three-sided bin with no top, no bottom, and plenty of air and moisture. Our perfect pallet composter was assempled and in use in under 10 minutes. 

Think you need 5 acres in the country to be able to compost? Think again. We are lucky and can hide the compost bin in the trees, but we've seen bins stashed at the side of the house, in a corner of the yard, hidden by bushes, painted to match the lawn furniture, and right smack next to the garden in all its rotten glory. 

Composting is easy, and virtually smell-free, if a few basic rules are followed:

1. Try to keep a 3:1 browns to greens ratio. 

• Browns (carbon rich): dead leaves, small animal bedding, cardboard, newspaper, dead flowers and plants, sawdust, straw.
• Greens (nitrogen rich): manure, grass clippings, fruits and vegetables, coffee grounds.
• Do not compost meat, bones, cooked foods, cat litter - when in doubt use common sense. Or Google. 

2. Shred large materials for faster breakdown. For example, run the lawn mower over a pile of raked leaves before adding to the bin.

3. Add moisture. The best description I've heard is that the compost should be as saturated as a sponge that has been wrung out.

4. Turn compost weekly. 

5. When the compost is dark brown and smells like soil it's ready for the garden!

Good luck on this next project, neighbor! If I can do it, you can do it. Go forth and biodegrade! 

Greener Acres

Remember way back to the beginning of this blog, when it was all about simplifying and starting a garden in the suburbs? I was so young. So naive. So unaware that a garden isn't simple and that it would lead me down an increasingly complicated path.

Gardening ignited a compulsion for cooking, and cooking fueled a kitchen-based addiction. My old-timey kitchenware proved to be a gateway appliance that led to a sewing machine. Making things with my hands lit a passion for all things Etsy and Organic and recycled. Which led back to the gardening, but on a more obsessive scale. Then life shifted in a surprising and wonderful direction, and we find ourselves living in the country with 5 acres and bees and chicks arriving in April.

Maybe I got in over my head.

Rachel, of the sage "ounces make pounds" advice from blogs gone by, reacted to this news by asking me if I knew that chickens pooped. A fair enough response from someone who knew me when I used to paint my nails on the weekends and wouldn't go to the grocery store without showering and spackling on a little makeup for show. But that girl is now 2 kids and 2 dogs deep and has dealt with her share of shit. And vomit. And various other messes that would have sent the college me running for the hills with a novel, a thermos of tea, and a picnic quilt in all its picturesque glory. Escapism at its best.

Back here in the real world I am more worried about not getting stung to death. I'm taking a few classes at Denver Urban Homesteading, which has me pretty excited. Honestly, I am in love with the term "Urban Homesteader." My pioneer roots start to throb and I feel the need to chop and cook something. (Truth told, I've got a pot of butternut squash soup in an enameled dutch oven on the stove right now.)

I've been stoking the fire with a bunch of great starter books that I recommend if you are having similar homestead cravings:

Chick Days: An Absolute Beginner's Guide to Raising Chickens from Hatching to Laying
Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer
The Bucolic Plague: How Two Manhattanites Became Gentlemen Farmers
The Dirty Life: A Memoir of Farming, Food, and Love
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

These blogs are also pretty fun:
http://ghosttownfarm.wordpress.com/
http://beekeeperlinda.blogspot.com/
http://lazyhomesteader.com/

So, here goes nothing. Our future farmstead site is currently snow covered, but this time next year I'll be wading out into that mess to check the chickens and give sugar water to the bees. Yes, the stuff of Little House on the Prairie-style fantasy will shortly become my reality. I only hope that no one dies of dysentery or gets swept away when we ford that inevitable river...

How Does Your Garden Grow?

I hate to be one to espouse procrastination, but sometimes it's the only way to go. Like with gardening. A late garden seems to be de rigueur at my house. In years one and two, this stressed me out. Here in year three, where the final planting didn't happen until this morning, I see it as a bonus.

Stick with me on this, oh you Almanac gardening calendar purists.

The first year that I planted late I avoided the hard frost that crept in the week after Mother's Day. Last year, my late garden missed out on an early-June blizzard. This year? Many timely gardens were wrecked by a freak hail storm and then two straight weeks of 100 degree weather. But my early July garden is beautiful. And, let's be real. I didn't plant from seed, so a plant growing in a pot at Home Depot vs braving the early elements in my garden probably has a better shot anyway.

Gabe prepped the soil this year with organic compost and one round of grass clippings. I am fertilizing every 3 weeks with an organic fish-based fertilizer. Unlike the fish juice of year one, this time I chose one that had been "naturally deodorized with mint." I'm also relying on my trusty old friend the marigold to help fight off bugs. They are much prettier than spiders, and instantly brighten the garden.

For the sake of ease, I decided to skip the crops that didn't work out so well in years past, namely strawberries (dead before they even started), peppers (all leaf, no fruit),  and pumpkins. "How can one mess up pumpkins?" you may ask. Apparently you need flowers of both sexes to get fruit, and my plant was strictly same-on-same. Yes, much like my boyfriends of yore, this plant was gay to the gay. The blooms were quite lovely though, and I would definitely vote in favor of allowing this plant to marry if it so desired.

But I digress...

This year I planted 5 containers of tomatoes: Early Girl (hybrid), Cherokee Purple (heirloom!), Cherry (hybrid) and two Patio (never heard of them, but what the hell, as I am in fact growing tomatoes on a patio). Yeah...I prefer more heirloom varieties, but late season beggars can't be choosers; I had to settle for what was there.

In the beds, I planted 4 zucchini this year. I know, it's a lot. But the year I did 5 it was too many, and 2 proved too few. Keep an eye out as summer progresses and I'll share my favorite recipes as well as freezing tips. This is the easiest vegetable to sneak into foods that kids eat.

Finally, I planted a lot of herbs. Rosemary, parsley, oregano, cilantro, 2 thyme (my new love), and 5 basil. Sweet sweet basil, giver of all things pesto. I still have one final batch in my freezer from last year and can only now bear to use it with my new basil crop being in the ground. As a general rule I only plant sweet basil, but I did branch out this year (once again, making do with what was available) and buy 2 boxwood basil plants. Look at the size of these leaves - now with 100% less chopping!

(Dirty nail courtesy of the soil, with its chewed-down length being the direct result of an anxiety-based oral fixation.) 

My favorite garden find this year came a few months ago in the dollar aisle at Target - little chalkboard garden signs that I wrote on with a white paint pen. I've been saving these since April. (Who plants in April?! Other than retirees and Texans I mean.)

Not only are these Martha Stewart-adorable, they are especially useful when I send Gabe out to clip herbs while I'm cooking. Helps us avoid the "looks like a Christmas tree but smaller" conversations.

And really, I do love to label so these are perfect for me. With that final touch the garden was planted. Bring it, July!

You reap what you sow...or so I hear.

The garden went in last weekend and it is looking a little sadder than when I started, but I am chalking this up to the seedlings having an initial bout of homesickness for their former life at Lowe’s. That and a week of 90-degree days – who can compete with that?? And let’s be honest, I am not a natural. I like the idea of being one with the earth, I just don’t have much experience with it and find it kind of dirty and overwhelming. But I’m learning.

To my credit I did take good notes on last year’s inaugural garden and made some improvements. I didn’t plant 5 zucchinis. Turns out that is way too much zucchini to handle. And I abandoned the dismal failures (cantaloupe, strawberries), modified the planting style (much less crowded this year), and added marigolds because my grandma used to have them in her garden. I had to Google why she did that – turns out they keep aphids out naturally. My grandma was way ahead of her time…or she lived in a time when “organic” was the status quo and the thought of dousing plants in expensive chemicals for no reason was seen as weird. In any case, they look beautiful and give an instant feeling of gratification.

From a cost perspective, it’s cheaper this year. Last year we had to buy the pots for the tomatoes, and Gabe built the garden beds and prepped the soil with peat moss and compost. This year we tilled then jumped straight to planting, and I have a goal of conquering the magical world of mulch this season. Ah, the optimism of a novice.

The most immediate challenge is to find an organic fertilizer. I used a fish-based one last year, but it reeked. A day in the garden turned into an evening of Danielle and her fish gut fingers. Any suggestions here would be welcome. And if anyone has an idea on how to quell Jude’s natural “I picked a flower!” instinct that would come in handy as well…

Our final plant count: 2 zucchini, 1 Habanero pepper, 1 rosemary, 1 flat leaf parsley, 4 sweet basil, 1 pumpkin, 1 straight neck squash, 1 acorn squash, 1 Mexibell pepper, 1 Anaheim pepper, 1 hill of watermelon seeds, 2 rows of lettuce seed, and 5 potted tomatoes of different varieties. Total cost, $83.87.