Farmer's Market Bounty: Candied Squash Seeds

There have been so many squashes in our house over the last several weeks and I'm glad of it, since it means I got the excuse to try these candied pumpkin seeds. They taste delicious! However... I made some significant adjustments to the recipe since I had trouble with them being too chewy.

The first thing I did was boil the cleaned seeds in unsalted water for at least 10 minutes. Then I followed the recipe, cooking the spices together with the butter and sugar in a sauce pan and then adding the drained seeds. But for some reason the mixture was just all too runny. After letting them simmer for a long time in hopes that the candy sauce would cook down to a thicker consistency, I gave up, took them off the heat and then spread the gooey seeds onto a sheet of wax paper, in hopes that the mixture would dry out. No luck. So then I sprayed some non-stick spray onto a cookie sheet and roasted them in a 350 degree oven for about 10 minutes--after 5 minutes, I kept a very close eye. And that did the trick! They were clumped together in chip-sized bites. They were crunchy and not chewy. And they didn't last long, a sad detail considering how long it took me to get the seeds clean. If I could find an easy way to clean all the seeds we ultimately compost, I would make these all the time. Sadly, I think it will be awhile before I build up the endurance to make these again. Even if I don't make candied squash seed right away, I have to admit that my immediate response to the final product was that I wanted to candy everything in the house, in particular, I wanted to abscond with all of the nuts that Sean uses for his various healthy snacks (his homemade power bars, and his muesli cereal) and candy them all! Sadly, he didn't agree with this plan.

Farmer's Market Bounty: Broccoli Pesto

While not a terribly camera-friendly presentation here, I'm very happy with this result. Super easy, and well-timed. Last Monday was our final Farmer's Market and our favorite veggie and fruit farmer had a great deal on broccoli: buy 2 pounds and get 1 pound free. So I had tons of broccoli to use.

We're big fans of broccoli in our house. We regularly steam it up and spritz with "I Can't Believe it's not Butter" spray and salt, pepper, and garlic powder. (This is our very basic, quick and easy way of getting lots of veggies on our table.) My favorite method of cooking broccoli is Ellie Krieger's recipe for "dirty broccoli," which is basically cooked broccoli tossed with sauteed garlic and breadcrumbs. Awesome!




Anyway, for this broccoli pesto, I treated it just as I would regular pesto, just substituting broccoli for basil. I steamed up quite a bit of broccoli (about 3 small heads) and then put it in our food processor.








I put in 5 or so cloves of raw garlic, about 1/2 cup of grated parmesan cheese, about 1/4 cup of pan-toasted pine nuts (just what I had on hand), and blended away. As I blended, I slowly added about 1/4 cup or so of olive oil, after which point I added some of the reserved water that I used to steam the broccoli to give it a bit thinner texture. (Of course, I could've just added more olive oil, but I was trying to keep the fat content under control.) Then I added salt and pepper to taste. It's still a smidge on the thick side. I've since portioned it out and frozen it in 1/2 cup servings to be used to mix with a box of cooked pasta down the road. It will likely need a touch of olive oil or pasta water to thin it back out when it's mixed with the pasta.

It went really well with large batch of pasta salad, which was inspired by our friend, Kathleen's, recipe. She cooked it for us after Auric was born and it was great to have on hand for dinners or cold lunches. I added some of the broccoli pesto to cooked pasta, then added steamed broccoli, chopped oven-dried tomatoes that I store in herbed olive oil, cooked chicken breasts, salt and pepper. Very tasty and Thora-friendly!

Container Garden 2009 Re-Cap

I cleared out the container garden a few weekends ago, snipping and yardwaste-binning the spent or unusable plants from this summer's garden. I'm very glad that I did the garden. In addition to the somewhat measely output, I'm glad for the memories that we shared around the garden.

Harvesting a single strawberry per night and splitting it three ways. Thora turning the bottom of her shirt into a harvesting basket to collect the snips of herbs or cherry tomatoes for our salads. Teaching Thora to gently pinch the herbs to release the aromatic oils of the plant and then smelling her fingers. Watching her explain to her dad which one is the rosemary, which one is the pepper, etc., and pointing out the budding fruit. Teaching her the patience that gardening demands.

I will do it again next year but with a few adjustments.

* One of the best performers were the yellow gooseberry tomatoes, despite the fact that the weather and blight combined to thwart the tomato production. And frustratingly, just as the sun was getting weaker and weaker as we moved through September, my gooseberry plant seemed to shift into overdrive. I had dozens of branches weighted heavy with a handfulls of large, green tomatoes. But they just couldn't ripen. That was a shame. But I'll definitely plant these again next year. The Brandywines were attacked by the blight, I think. I didn't get a single usable tomato from 4 plants. That was a disappointment.

* I only got a few peppers but will likely try those again. However, I doubt I will bother with eggplants or zuchinni, both of which failed to give me a single vegetable. Again, I'm not sure how much of this is due to the strange weather (a very rainy June and a short, hot, summer). As I get more experienced, I will happily take on more of our family's food production in the form of a garden. But while I improve my gardening skills, I'm happy to let the local farmers do the squash and large veggie growing for us.

* The herbs were far and away the easiest and most prolific plants that I grew. The basil just flourished and gave me a lot at the end to make a good amount of pesto. We've got dried rosemary, thyme, sage, and oregano coming out of our ears, which is a good thing. I'm very happy about my experience with the herbs and will add those to next year's garden.

* While the strawberries weren't abundant, they were fun. I'll likely get another strawberry plant again next year, especially since it was the most rewarding one to harvest for our toddler.

* Lastly, I'd like to do more to mix in flowers to the garden and incorporate plant stands for some of the plants in an effort to design a more visually-pleasing layout.

And we're back

I hate that it's been ages since my last post. Life got a little unexpectedly... well, life-like: vivid, breathless, chaotic, when this little guy, Auric, showed up almost 6 weeks early:

Here he is at 5 weeks.

He's 11+ weeks now and wonderful. With the sleepless nights hopefully becoming less so, and our toddler transitioning slowly to life with a little brother, I hope to begin to posting with more regularity.

Overall, life is hard but good. Our boy, seems to be the calm to his sister's storm... at least for now. He's smiley and coy-seeming, fascinated, and above all, so lovable.

Lots more to come.

Gardening in July

Our container garden is a happy garden these days. Lots of growth, lots of potential, lots of comebacks.

Here are the Golden Sunrise peppers. And seemingly out of nowhere, new growth has sprouted all over the tops of these plants. In a sense, this is what I mean by comebacks. I'd kind of resigned myself to limited production, despite healthy-looking plants. It's the old fear that despite doing what I think I should be doing (buying from good growers, giving plants appropriate sun and regular water, good soil, etc.,), that there's some impossible hurdle that I can never clear once I get plants home. However, perhaps it's the sun that's finally shining down on Massachusetts, but new growth is appearing and I'm looking forward to a larger crop than I'd originally feared.

Speaking of new growth, the strawberry plant is probably the most extreme example of this. It's been growing runners, or "daughter" plants for the past week. I've potted those, so that the little nub that in the case of a daughter or two was showing new roots is dipped into soil. Again, I'd kind of resigned myself to a very very small crop. We harvested about 5 strawberries... total. And with days in between. So Thora and I would pluck the ripest one, bring it inside, give it a rinse, and then with Dad, each take turns taking a small bite out of it. I've never tried strawberries before and was told that June was their most prolific month. But June in Massachusetts was the grayest, coolest, wettest in years. So I thought there was a chance that I'd missed my chance for a decent harvest. But I was consoling myself with these daughters. However, in the last day or so, I spotted the white and yellow flowers that preface actual fruit. So, perhaps all is not lost with this venture.

Sorry for the out-of-focus photo, but these zucchini are the little, yellow oblong shapes in the middle of the photo.


While I'm not sure where the growth will be coming from, these are the sweet, little purple flowers growing on the eggplant plant. I'm pretty sure that the fruit are slowly appearing out of the non-flowering little bulbs. However, they're so shy, I can't really capture them on film. Soon, hopefully.

And to my great joy, the echinacea are opening in numbers. And they're almost 4 feet tall.


More photos to come. Now that the garden is really doing something visible, I'm out there everyday marveling at the growth and changes.

Gardening in June

My container garden, as well as the flower garden, have really filled out. We've had sooo much rain, (see Thora doing some well-loved puddle-stomping), I've done practically no watering. But apparently there's been enough sun (a surprise to me) for these plants to flourish, rather than being totally water-logged. Check out some of the highlights below.



The oregano (in the middle of the cluster, right in front of the staked tomato plant) is growing like a weed!!! Is there a recipe for oregano pesto?!? The tomatoes are full and seemingly robust. All the other herbs are plentiful!








The view of the other side of the container garden. Here we have a second tomato plant, basil, zucchini, eggplant, peppers and strawberries, along with two more pots of thyme.














Here are the peppers, which are a small pepper, best when ripened to a yellowy orange. We have four plants going strong, but one of the peppers was prematurely picked by the ever-curious Thora. I swear, the refrain I feel like I most say is, "No, NO, NO! Don't pick that!!!" This refers to flowers growing around our house, as well as those growing in other people's gardens and public green spaces. I love that she's interested, and that she's got a harvesting instinct that connects her to where flowers and food come from. However, I can't seem to convey the idea that once a plant or flower is picked, well... that's it.


In our flower garden, here are the echinacea blossoms that will bloom soon. I cannot wait for this. I just LOVE purple coneflower. I can't get enough of it. Perhaps it embodies the fertile country life that I secretly yearn for. Right now, the plants are vigorous and tall. They will be my favorite sight of summer plant-life, I think.

Gardening in May

I've got the bulk of my container garden in pots and growing. I hit the Gore Place plant sale (they grow heirloom vegetables and ornamentals in their greenhouse out in Waltham) and snagged the majority of our vegetables. I now have two kinds of tomatoes growing, a Brandywine and a Gooseberry (yellow, grape tomatoes), eggplant, zucchini, peppers, strawberries and herbs (a crazy-prolific oregano plant, along with two kinds of rosemary, a golden sage and a purple sage, thyme and two kinds of basil).

I'm going to keep my eye out for a couple used, scavenged, or free children's wagons so that I can move the plants around as needed. Also, I'll be looking for a way to more attractively group them, perhaps raising some up on blocks, etc. They're all lift-able, even when watered, since I didn't fill them all the way with soil, but rather added old milk jugs and upside-down plastic planters inside the pots before filling with soil and transplanting them. So I can indeed still lift them. But even in their semi-haphazard state, I love looking them at them when I get back home. I can't wait to see what produces!

Our flower garden, planned and planted with our upstairs neighbor, seems to be coming back strong for the most part. The front of the plot seems strangely vacant, so my fear is that those perennials didn't make it. But we'll see. Everything else (the purple coneflower, the phlox, and the ornamental grass look hardy and full). Can't wait for those blooms to appear! Here is a view of the flower garden last summer when we planted it. So you can see, something hasn't come back.

Gardening in April

The warm weather has hit Massachusetts and I've been reveling in it. In addition to getting to run in a ball cap instead of a sock cap and gloves, and the infinite relief of not having to fight the Epic Coat Battles with a two year-old, what this warm spell has done is jump start my gardening impulses.

This summer, I'm hoping to grow as much food for our table as I can with a container garden. So far, so good. I've got two pots of herbs (pictures to come).

I've got two major hurdles with the our space, both indoor and out. First, we've got mostly shade in the grassy part of our yard. This is the reason for the container gardening, since the sunniest spots are the sides of the house, which are covered in asphalt.

But the second problem that I'm seeing is that we don't have the appropriate indoor space to effectively start plants from seeds. (Actually, the window in our daughter's room would be great, except, well, that's just heartbreak waiting to happen.) So that means that I'm going to have to use mostly all transplants from the garden store. Which means that the garden will take a while to fill out. But I plan to post updates as the garden does just that.

As for now, here are my two helpers, Thora and Georgia, actually being very helpful, since they're where I can see them and neither of them are up to something, which in this brief moment, allowed me to weed and mulch the flower garden.

More pictures to come...

While Traveling: Note to Self

My husband, daughter, and I spent a week in Puerto Rico last week. (Here we are at one of the waterfalls in El Yunque, the rainforest outside of San Juan.) It was a lovely, warm week full of lots of swimming and sleeping. But the one thing that nagged at me the whole time was the absurd collection of plastic bags we were accumulating while there. It was nice to have a Walgreen's right across the street for those items that we deliberately didn't pack (we could buy diapers there; we didn't need to pack them") or didn't realize we'd need (the condo where we stayed had a kitchen, but no dishwashing soap). At first, these bags were a blessing, since one of the other things that the condo didn't have on hand were trash bags to line the garbage cans. So we were thankful to have a few extra bags to use for our daughter's dirty diapers, etc. But by day 5, it seemed ridiculous. So note to self: put cloth/reusable bags on the travel packing check list. I'm so conscious of reusing bags here at home; it was so wasteful to have forgotten that practice while traveling.

Natural Hair Dye--Naturtint

I've tried using different kinds of natural hair dye, the ones that don't contain ammonia and other harsh chemicals. Frankly I've been kind of underwhelmed by the amount of time it takes to process and the less that startling results. I'm usually going for something slightly darker than my natural brown hair and to cover the few grey hairs that have begun showing themselves. But what I usually get is something that doesn't look all that different from where I started 4-6 hours ago (!) and often the grey is still visible.

That is until I tried Naturtint. Now granted, I really went dark this time, given my previously less-than-striking results. And so it's possible that I could've had better results had I gone with a darker color in my earlier trials. However, even giving the other henna and natural treatments the benefit of the doubt, Naturtint has a wonderfully short processing time of around 30 minutes. So, if you've been looking for a safer alternative to home hair color and you've been less than thrilled with the results, try Naturtint.

Here are my before and after shots to give you an idea.


I used 3N, which was not the blackest color they had on the shelf at Cambridge Naturals (a natural health store in Porter Square), but perhaps the second darkest.



Like I said, I was tired of not getting a noticeable change. I CANNOT say that this time!