The most rewarding part of harvesting food you have grown is enjoying it after you have prepared it. Eating food fresh from the garden is good for your body and tastes better than anything you can purchase from the store. I learned how to cook from my parents and grandmother. There were many dishes my grandmother made that I enjoyed that I do not know how to cook today because she died before she was able to teach me. This is why I believe it is important to document my recipes. I have not posted on my blog lately because I have been refining our recipes and a few we are still fining tuning. The ones we have perfected are linked to the bold subtitles.
Our blueberry plant did not produce any blueberries this year. Luckily, we live five minutes away from Driving Wind Blueberry Farm. We picked 4.2 pounds of blueberries. We ate many fresh blueberries and used them for toppings on salad and oatmeal. The rest were used to make blueberry lemon jam (following the Ball recipe), blueberry syrup, and blueberry lemonade. Our boys never cared much for lemonade, but since they have had blueberry lemonade they can't get enough.
This year we decided to plant a type of tomato we have not grown previously, the salsa tomato plant. This tomato has less juice and is meatier inside; it's perfect for making salsa. We have fried some tomatoes while they were still green, but once they began to ripen, we used some in salad. At the same time as the tomatoes ripened our cilantro and onions were ready to harvest, so of course we made tomato salsa.
One of our favorite meat dishes is lamb, although we do not eat it that often due to its cost. Instead of making our typical basil pesto, we made mint basil pesto to compliment the grilled lamb. Our boys were skeptical about the pesto, but after having it on lamb they insisted on having it on French bread too.
Our hope, if God blesses us to live this long, is our boys will be able to pass down the recipes we have created together and use them with their children.