Monster in my Garden

It always happens. This sneaky squash hiding in your garden growing in its hiding spot into a giant monster that your kid wants to try out as a baseball bat.

Stop! Don't do that! Mom needs it for making dinner. Or rather 3 dinners plus desert...

Here is one delicious recipe you can use it for. I call it Zucchini Pesto Soup (recipe has been adapted from one of my favorite cookbooks called The Book of Soups by Lorna Rhodes)
Ingredients:

1/3 of that large 3 pound out of control monster zucchini =)
1/2 onion
1/4 cup of olive oil plus a little bit more
1/2 cup of rissotto rice
5 cups of chicken stock
salt and pepper
two handfulls of basil leaves
pine nuts
1 garlic clove
more salt
grated parmesan cheese
Dice the Zucchini and onions very finely. Heat 3 tablespoons of olive oil in a large soup pot. Stir in the zucchini and onion and cook until they are soft. Add the rice and coat it with the olive oil. Pour in the hot chicken broth and bring everything to a boil.

Make pesto while the soup is simmering in the pot.

Wash and clean basil. Put basil leaves, olive oil, garlic, pine nuts, and a healthy dash of salt into an electric blender. If you feel ambitious you can do this with a mortar and pestle...Add about 1/4 cup of grated parmesan cheese.

Add 1-2 Tablespoons of the pesto to soup.

You can serve the soup with crispy slices baguette that has the rest of the pesto spread on it or serve with bruschetta.

Our son who normally considers zucchini his mortal enemy will eat two bowls of this soup when I make it. Not bad for a scary green monster zucchini!

Peek-a-Boo Beets for Dinner

We have had an amazing season with our community garden patch this year. We have enjoyed many fresh vegetables: Cabbages, potatoes, peppers. Some of them the kids are not too happy with. Cauliflower was a bust. But the kids love beets. As you can see in these playful pictures...

The best way to eat beets - in my opinion - is baked. Just cut the tops and roots off and scrub the beets clean with a brush. Take a fork and pierce them a couple of times. Then wrap your beets in a layer of aluminum foil. Bake in the oven at 400 degrees until soft. Depending on the size...If they are big it can take 90 minutes.

Once you break the foil open and you can eat your beets with butter, or sour cream and some chives sprinkled on. Heavenly!


But don't throw out those tops! They are quite delicious. You can cut the stems off and saute them in olive oil and garlic. Then add the cut up cleaned wet leaves. Once the leaves are all wilted this makes a lovely side! I love to splash a bit of lime juice on top of mine...

Old Time Favorite: Cole Slaw

Maybe you have the perfect coleslaw recipe already. If not, here is a recipe I received from a Jewish friend. It was passed down in his family from an aunt who is in her late 80s now. So it must be healthy - despite the loads of sugar in this recipe...I cut down on the amount of salt some. Will I not live to be past 80 because of it? The original recipe called for 4 tsp of salt. It was just too much for me so I cut the amount in half...Feel free to experiment!

This recipe is so easy a kid can make it. Just remember you must make it 3 days in advance because the slaw is best after soaking in the juices for 2-3 days. We like to use red cabbage instead of the white kind. For some reason the white cabbage gets spicy while the red gets sweeter and tastier each day. When I make it with the red cabbage our kids LOVE this salad and will eat 2-3 servings in one sitting!

Ingredients:

1 head of cabbage (red of white)
2 carrots
1/2 cup white vinegar
1/2 cup canola oil
1/4 cup water
2 tsp of salt
1/2 cup of sugar
ground black pepper

1.Wash cabbage and carrots. Peel carrots. Shred cabbage and grate carrots finely and mix together.
2. Mix vinegar, canola oil, water, salt, and sugar.
3. Put dressing over the shredded vegetables and stir.
4. Cover and refrigerate. Stir salad every day and start serving slaw on the third day!

Hope your family will enjoy this lovely simple recipe as much as my family does!