Joyful Abode

Good: Basil is growing (from seed! Thanks Meagan, for the herb kit)
Not so good: No parsley is growing… it died (I like basil better anyway). Also, something is munching on the basil leaves a little.

Good: The eggplant is making lots of fruits and flowers. The plant is in generally good health.

Not Good: Something ate lots of little holes in all the leaves on the entire plant.

Good: Tomatoes galore, and they’re finally ripening!

Not so good: A few of the tomatoes were affected by less water while we were in Michigan, and have cracking on them.

Not so good: No zucchinis in a while… and the plant does not look happy. It got this way while we were in Michigan. Moral? Never go out of town, ever.

Not so good: Cucumber plant has lots of sad dead leaves (again, trip to MI).
Good: It has flowers and  little baby cukes.

Good: Banana pepper has a few tiny peppers forming.

Not so good: The last two banana peppers that got big at all ended up getting big brown spots and I had to get rid of them. Also, the plant is scraggly and sad looking.

Good: Our green beans look happy and there are itty bitty beans starting to grow!

Good: Zora is a very good helper. Here she is letting us know which tomatoes to pick.

…and inspecting the fruit.

So… we sprayed insecticidal soap on the ones that look like something’s been eating them. But any other ideas? Any amazing tips?

Most of all, I want our zucchini to spring back… I LOVE zucchinis, and the ones from our garden have been so good.

This was one of those dinners-on-a-whim. We had some zucchini and eggplant lying around (funny how that happens now that we have a vegetable garden!) and I wanted something with that and chicken. Enter, stir-fry.

Here’s how we roll:

1. Husband cuts goopy gross stuff off of the chicken breasts and slices them thinly, diagonally across the grain.
2. Meanwhile, I start cooking some white rice.
3. I also wash and cut the veggies.
4. Then, I throw the chicken in the pan with a little bit of vegetable oil and toss it around until it’s about 2/3 of the way cooked.
5. Then, I add zucchini, eggplant, and a can of baby corn (drained and rinsed).
6. In goes some oyster sauce and soy sauce, and everything gets tossed around.
7. When the vegetables are soft and the chicken is cooked all the way through, there’s “juice” in the bottom of the pan… I want to make this into more of a sauce.
8. So husband makes me a slurry of corn starch in cool water, and I drizzle it in, still stirring everything in the pan. After about a minute, the corn starch has thickened the “juice” into a nice sauce.
9. We eat.
10. Yum!

So there I was, face to face with a huge pile of eggplants. The guy requested eggplant parmesan again, but I wasn’t in the mood for breaded crispy stuff. Or the usual accompanying pasta.

So I decided to make eggplant patties and eggplant balls (which would go great as a meatball substitute in spaghetti or baked ziti or something), some of which I planned to freeze for later enjoyment.

The verdict? SO GOOD and I will definitely be making these again, possibly with variations!

We ate them as sandwiches, but they’d be great on a hamburger bun with the usual hamburger-esque toppings and condiments, too.

Eggplant Patties Recipe (or Homemade Veggie Burgers)

• About 5-6 Japanese eggplants, peeled and cubed
• 1 Tablespoon garlic
• 1-2 shredded zucchinis (optional; carrots would also be fantastic as an addition)
• 1 1/4 cup grated parmesan cheese (the stuff in the can is even fine)
• 1 1/4 cup Italian breadcrumbs
• 3/4 cup wheat germ
• 2 or 3 beaten eggs

Sautee the garlic in a couple tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil over medium heat. After about a minute, add the eggplant and 3/4 cups water. Steam, covered, over medium heat about 10 minutes, stirring occasionally. Remove the cover and stir until most of the water has evaporated.

Remove eggplant to a bowl and mash to your desired consistency. Some chunks are okay!

Squeeze the excess water out of your grated zucchinis and/or carrots by putting them into a dish towel and wringing it over the sink. This just removes some of the excess moisture so that your patties won’t be soggy. It’s an important step; I promise! Add the squeezed veggies to the eggplants.

Chill for about half an hour, just so the mixture isn’t hot anymore. Meanwhile, preheat the oven to 350 degrees

Add parmesan cheese, breadcrumbs, and wheat germ. Stir. Add 2 beaten eggs and combine. If it’s too dry, add another egg. If it’s too wet, you can add more breadcrumbs, cheese, and/or wheat germ.

Chill again to let the mixture get a little more firm.

Shape patties and/or balls on a cookie sheet sprayed with cooking spray. I used the two-spoon method (illustrated in the Red Lobster biscuit recipe) for balls, and a larger lump, flattened with a fork, for patties.

Bake 30 minutes, flipping over halfway through. Enjoy as you see fit!

We had ours on a sandwich. One side of the sandwich had melted mozzarella cheese. On the other side was a tomato mixture (in a bowl, mix a can of tomatoes, drained, with a drizzle of olive oil, a couple splashes of balsamic vinegar, and a few shakes of dried basil). It was amazing!

The next day for lunch, our sandwiches were similar, but instead of the tomato mixture, we spread on a dressing made of light mayonnaise mixed with balsamic vinegar. Very yum (and the dressing also worked well as a dipping sauce for some of the eggplant balls)!

I think these would be really gorgeous with some more color added… carrots, red peppers, something pretty. Also, to beef up the texture a little (excuse the pun) mushrooms or cooked brown rice would be welcome additions.  So fresh-tasting!

I really like the idea of serving up veggie burgers that aren’t pretending to be something they’re not. Veggies should never masquerade as meat in my opinion. They’re too wonderful in their own right for that!

Out of all of our plants, so far the eggplant has proven the most productive. If we wanted to, I’m sure we could pick 6 eggplants at any given time, though we tend to leave them on the plant for a few days after they’re ready until we want them (which doesn’t seem to affect their flavor at all).

So during the summer and warm months of Fall, I’m sure you’ll be seeing eggplant recipes alongside the Zucchini ones.

Here’s one we tried recently:

Eggplant Dipping Sticks 

• 1 large eggplant, or 4 ichiban eggplants (they’re long and skinny)
• 1/2 cup toasted wheat germ
• 1/2 cup Italian breadcrumbs
• 1/2 cup parmesan cheese
• 1/2 teaspoon garlic salt
• 3 eggs, beaten

Preheat your broiler and wash your eggplants…

Cut them into little french-fry like wedges, and then if you want to, you can salt them with Kosher salt to draw out the bitter juices.  The way I did it this time was to put the wedges into a colander over a bowl, sprinkle liberally with kosher salt, and top with a smaller colander weighted with the Kosher salt box, so the eggplant pieces were squished.

Mix together the wheat germ, breadcrumbs, parmesan cheese, and garlic salt. I toasted the wheat germ in a pan first and then added everything else in with the pan still on low heat, stirring.

When your eggplant sticks are ready, rinse or wipe off the salt and pat dry with towels. Then dip each stick into the beaten eggs, and roll in the breadcrumb/wheat germ mixture. Place on a cookie sheet prepared with cooking spray.

Now broil for about 3 minutes, flip, and broil another 3 minutes or until they’re crispy.

If you’d like, you can serve them with warmed up tomato sauce as a dunker. We ate ours with some pasta salad leftover from a couple days before. Mmm!

Enjoy!

Again, straight from our garden…

It’s so fantastic to go out into the garden and pick dinner! I know people get tired of their zucchini plants by the end of the summer, but I don’t think I will. In fact, I’m already planning to plant TWO next year instead of just one. Haha.

Our Japanese eggplant has also been quite productive, and for this meal, I combined the two in a simple stir-fry. Just cooked in a little oil and with a sprinkle of salt. I thought of adding more seasonings, but the rice has a strong flavor and I didn’t want to overshadow the FRESH veggie taste.

Oh goodness! It’s me in the kitchen WITHOUT an apron! It’s only because this meal took like 5 minutes to cook… though usually when I do this I get something on my shirt. I didn’t this time, which was incredibly lucky. My face looks all tired and hot (we went to the gym that day, and I only changed my shorts before dinner), but I look thin and good other than that. haha.

This is the rice... it takes 20 minutes or a little less to cook, and it’s very yummy. Also quite cheap.

And… here’s dinner! Yum!

Should I keep including the recipes I make with my garden-veggies in the “gardening” category? Or should I just do food/recipes/how-to, but leave out gardening?

I’d never made a quiche before, and I have NO IDEA why… they’re so easy and delicious. I imagine that I’ll be making them more frequently from now on!

We had three more zucchinis that were ready to eat, so I decided to make a quiche. I started with my flaky pastry crust recipe, which makes a double crust.  Instead of doing a “lid” on one quiche though, I decided to make two lidless pies and freeze one for later.

Each pie started with a sprinkle of grated cheese (the 4 cheese Mexican blend, but you can use whatever you’d like). Then a few layers of thinly sliced zucchini on top (salt and seasonings should go here… cumin would be really nice, or nutmeg), followed by a little more cheese.

Then, I cracked 4 eggs for each quiche into a measuring cup, and filled it with milk until it was to the 2 cup mark (I guess about a cup of milk or so). Beat, and pour over the pie slowly, letting it settle in between everything.

Bake for about an hour (I think it was more like 50 minutes) at 400 degrees, then let cool so everything “sets.”

We ate most of one for dinner, and finished it, cold, for breakfast/lunch the next day… good thing I wrapped the other in tin foil and safely tucked it in the freezer!

Look at the yummy layers!

We’ve harvested quite a few zucchinis from our garden by now, and thoroughly enjoyed each one. I’m LOVING the fact that I can go out into the back yard and pluck dinner off of a plant we’ve nurtured since it was a seedling.

The first garden-zucchini-laden meal we’ve had this summer was a vegetable fried rice. I read a bunch of different techniques for making fried rice online, watched some videos, and branched off with my own mix of methods.

First though, Let me show you my gorgeous zucchini.

Such creamy dense flesh…

Now, for the fried rice, you need some leftover white rice… it needs to be leftover, evidently, because hot just-cooked rice is too moist or something, and your fried rice will turn out mushy and gross.

But we’re going to start by cooking/heating the veggies over medium high heat. I used my zucchini, chopped up, a can of mung bean sprouts (rinsed and drained), a can of bamboo (also rinsed and drained), and baby corn (rinsed and drained as well).

Stir fry them in a couple tablespoons of veggie oil.  Then, sprinkle in some oyster sauce and soy sauce. Don’t smell/taste the oyster sauce though… it’ll make you not want to use it, but if you want “authentic” flavor, you need to (and it’ll taste good once everything is finished.)

Pour in some beaten eggs (I used three).

And stir with a spatula, moving constantly, until the egg is cooked.

Now add in your rice, lower the heat to medium or medium-low, and stir until heated through. Add more soy sauce and oyster sauce, too.

Add a sprinkle of sesame seeds, and you’re done!

Yum! We enjoyed it with Chinese chopsticks I bought in TaiZhou (Shanghai shops were full of highly decorated pointy Japanese chopsticks for the tourists. hehe).

We had extra rice, so the next day for lunch, I whipped up another version, this time using a peas-carrots-greenbeans-corn frozen veggie mix. Also very tasty.

The next zucchini we harvested wasn’t cooked at all… we enjoyed it raw, on a veggie platter with carrots, radishes, and blanched asparagus.

This was the perfect dinner for munching while watching Lost. We’re in the middle of the third season now, and when a new DVD comes in our mailbox, we look at each other and say, “Are you curious?” “Yes, I’m curious.” “Me too.” and then we go watch… we can’t help it! Please, no spoilers.

This is how the garden looked a few days ago… lots and lots of monkey grass, a weird bush thing on the left (which was actually 3 separate plants), and a bunch of weeds.

So we pulled up a lot of the monkey grass, that ugly bush, and all the weeds.

And put in lots of yummy sun-loving plants… 2 lantana plants, 2 sun coleuses, lots of salvia and 5 gerbera daisies. We surrounded everything with cedar mulch and soaked it really really well.

I think in about a month, everything will be much fluffier and happier, and it’ll start looking nice.  But for now, it’s still a vast improvement. (That ugly black thing covers the water meter. Why couldn’t they put that somewhere else?) The two lantana plants are cut off in this photo, but this is the basic idea…

Zora helped us, too. Check out her bling.

The plants are (mostly) thriving! I took these pictures several days ago, and they’re already outdated!

The first two plants (left) are my tomatoes. They both have had little flowers but no tomatoes yet… The left one looks kind of sickly compared to the right one, and I’m beginning to think that those two may benefit from larger pots. Next is the cucumber, which has grown even more and now has tons of yellow flowers! Today I saw bees buzzing around it so hopefully there was some pollination going on.

The far right is my zucchini plant. It’s doing great! It has several little zucchinis and one of them is ready to be picked any day now.

I actually had a dream about it last night… that I picked it, and then I wanted to taste it, but it was so good (and smallish) that I ended up eating the whole thing… nothing left for the husband, and I felt kind of guilty about that. haha.

On the left here are the two peppers… a bell pepper and a banana pepper. They’re not doing so hot. The guy thinks maybe we’re overwatering them… In the corner is the Japanese eggplant, which is doing pretty well! It’s grown a lot and has a lot of flowers on it, and one little eggplant!

The main problem with it (and the cucumber and zucchini) is that it seems to be watered more than once a day because it uses the water/it’s so hot out. The whole plant visibly wilts in the meantime… which I know is not a good sign.

Does anyone have any experience with these plant watering balls or other tank systems with outdoor plants? I know they’re supposed to work well with houseplants, but I think I’d need a huge one for these outdoor plants, with how hot the Mississippi summer is!

We also got 4 long planters from my mother-in-law, and planted green beans in them! They just sprouted a couple days ago, and look like they’re doing okay, as far as little tiny seedlings go. I hope they grow and produce a lot of beans! Mmm.

On Sunday, for my birthday, my sweetheart got me some veggie seedlings, pots, and potting mix. I couldn’t be more excited!

We were thinking about digging up part of the yard to make a “real” garden, but evidently that is a LOT of work… you have to get rid of the grass, till the soil so it’s soft, add fertilizer and topsoil and other junk… and then hope it can support life. Evidently with the potting mix, you have such a rich loose nutritious “soil” for the plants (in quotes because there’s no real soil in it) that it should be pretty easy. Plus, they are portable so we can move them around if they need more or less sunlight, and when we move we can take them with us if we want to.

Also, because we live in base housing, if we dug up part of the yard, we’d have to return it to its original condition when we left… digging up the plants and replacing sod. Ew. Who wants to do that? Not me!

Monday morning, we planted them in their pots, and now they’re sitting in our back yard chilling in the sunlight and drinking the water we just gave them.

If anyone has any tips about container gardening I’d love to hear them! Especially when it comes to vegetables and herbs… these specific veggies, and herbs in general. For example, I’d love to know which herbs can get along well together in the same pot!

And now to introduce you to the kids! I hope they grow quickly and strong and produce many fruits!

Bathilda the banana pepper:

Tamara tomato: (better boy variety)

Zoe Zucchini:

Ichi-Ban the Japanese Eggplant:

Bettie the Bell Pepper

And Clara and Carla the Cucumbers (the guy at Lowe’s said I could plant two of them in the same pot):

Please do share any knowledge or advice you have about these vegetables or about container gardening (and herb gardens) in general! I’d love to learn from your experience so that hopefully this summer can be full of fresh veggies here in Meridian, MS!

Yesterday was my birthday. I turned 24! Woo hoo!
And today is JoyfulAbode.com’s birthday. Check out the first-ever real post, from May 28th, 2007… Desk Makeover.

I didn’t really do anything to commemorate JoyfulAbode.com’s birthday but maybe I will do a belated thing later… it’s hard to keep up with things in the middle of a move. Speaking of which, we spent our first night in our house last night! We still don’t have much in the house (it’s all still in storage until the movers get it to us) but it was nice to be there!

For my birthday, we went “into town” and did a little bit of shopping. We got some shirts and jeans for the guy, and I got a new shirt too. Then we went to lunch (I already forgot the name of the place… but it was like an Applebee’s sort of).

First we shared some French onion soup. Not too great… I want to try making some at home sometime though.

Then I doodled on the table while we chatted and waited for our entrees. 3 points go to whoever can correctly tell me the origin of this quote… but no googling or other methods of cheating! I seriously love places that have paper and crayons on the table…

Mmmm… my salad. The guy had a Philly cheesesteak.

And this place gives free dessert to birthday girls and boys! I picked out a fried brownie… it was amazing. It came with vanilla ice cream and lots of whipped cream…

Mmmmmmm…

The man helped me finish it off.

Then we went to PetCo and did a scavenger hunt… I had a list of puppy essentials (from the book The Art of Raising Puppies by the Monks of New Skete… very good read) and we found them all and wrote down prices. Very exciting. I hope we find a good puppy when we go to South Carolina!

After that, we went to Lowe’s and my hubby bought me the makings of a (container) veggie garden! I couldn’t be more excited.

This is me being excited.

The veggies waited in the back of the truck while we watched Narnia: Prince Caspian (which was only okay, but VERY pretty to watch… and gorgeous costumes).

This post probably already broke your computer with so many pictures, so I’ll save the garden post for tomorrow. *grin*

In all, it was a fantastic birthday, and I got very nice phone calls from my parents, my little sister, and my dear friend Meagan. I always love that part. You know, where they either burst out into song or pretend that they don’t know what today is, “Hey, is something special happening today? I can’t remember what it is! Do you know what today is??” haha. Thanks, you guys.