A Gardener's Retreat

This recipe is inspired by the those French pureed soups you see in gourmet magazines as well as by the delicate but still way spicy greens growing in our garden this year.  I’ve taken a lot of liberties with the ingredients and you can too.

Ingredients:

• 3-4 large handfuls of mesclun greens, coarsely chopped (any combination will do including lettuces, baby kale, arugula, baby mustards, spinach, sorrel, parsley, chives and the like)
• 1 medium Vidalia onion, chopped
• 1 medium potato, diced
• 1 tbsp. olive oil
• 1 tbsp. butter
• 1 can of broth or equivalent homemade
• 1/2 cup cream or light cream
• Sour cream or yogurt as garnish

Heat the oil and butter in a medium soup pan and saute the onion for 5-8 minutes until translucent.  Add the coarsely chopped greens and stir around a couple minutes in the butter and oil until slightly wilted.   Add the diced potato and then the broth. Simmer for  15 minutes or so until the potato is tender.

Get out your puree stick and whirl your soup until it is as smooth as you like it.  (Alternatively, puree the soup in batches in the blender).  When it is nicely pureed, add your cream and reheat for five or ten minutes.  

Serve in bowls with a dollop of yogurt or sour cream and freshly ground pepper.

Serves 4 as a starter.

So Memorial Day is come and gone and so is the last frost date.  But wouldn’t you know, they’re forecasting widespread frost tonight.  That didn’t stop us from planting a whole lot more seeds but it did prevent us from putting in tomato and basil.  We’ve decided to wait until the next astrologically auspicious planting days — June 5 and 6 — to put in the warm season starts like tomatoes and peppers.

That said, we put in a bit of a marathon this weekend with two or three hours each weekend day.  On Saturday, Chris cleared weeds and scythed grass while I prepped and seeded.  I put in cucumbers where the peas didn’t happen, and pattypan squashes in the long bed, nearby the other Sugar Ann snap peas which are the only ones that came up.  We figure by the time the squash are in need of space, the snap peas will be done.  We can just cut the tops to the ground, leave the roots in as fertilizer and let the pattypan take over.

Read the rest of this entry »

First Radish

It’s radish time!  we are officially harvesting food from our garden.  The radishes have done pretty well this year — especially the Easter Egg mix which we get every year. There’s something nice about having radishes of many colors and with this mix, they’re good sized as well (half inch radishes hardly seem worth it….)

The other early crop is the spicy mesclun mix which is now at the “harvest every day” stage.  There are about six varieties of spicy greens and boy are they delicious.  That said, our lettuce seeds barely sprouted and we’re going to have to plant them all again.  Same for the sorrel which did nothing — fortunately, the wild sorrel grew in right next to it so we weren’t deprived.

Everything else is muddling along.  The peas are not as big as I’d hoped but I think we’ll get some eventually.  About half the carrots came up and another bunch didn’t.  This is my fault for planting old seeds.  It looks like we’re going to have to replant there too but I’m ok with that.  

And now that Memorial Day is out of the way, it’s suddenly time to plant everything else.  It’s going to be busy for the next few weeks as we put in tomatoes, hot peppers, corn, cucumbers, pattypan squashes, basil and of course, green beans.  The sooner they’re in the ground, the sooner we can start to eat them and that’s what it’s all about, right?