Crazy Week!

Well, I had wanted to post more during this past week but work was just insane. I think I worked 7 or so overtime hours...too bad I'm salaried. :-/ So there was not a lot of cooking going on on my part. I did make a delicious pasta sauce using a 16 ounce can of tomatoes and just about every vegetable we had in the house at the time. Garlic, onion, broccoli (steamed for 2 minutes in the microwave in a bowl with a plastic wrap lid), collard greens (chopped up really fine, they cook in no time. This is my trick to adding greens to just about everything I cook), and eggplant (pan fry it in some olive oil before adding it to the sauce or it will take FOREVER to cook, believe me, I've tried it!). This made a huge amount of sauce, more than enough for an entire pound of pasta. So I ate the extra with some bread for lunch one day. It was so thick and vegetable-y. Mmm...so good.

Also this week, my significant other made the best macaroni and cheese ever. And we've eaten a LOT of mac & cheese. We will only buy Annie's Mac & Cheese (in the purple box) because it is just so tasty anyway. But this was better than usual. For this batch, both butter and olive oil was used to dissolve the cheese powder. However, the secret to making this so good was not the great amount of fatty oils though, it was garlic scapes! I had bought a bunch at the farmer's market a couple weeks ago (these things seem to keep forever) and he chopped up a couple of them and sauteed them in the butter/olive oil mix for a couple minutes. We also added fresh peas (also from the farmers market). Then a little bit of whole milk and voila, the most amazing Mac & Cheese ever!!! The garlic scapes have a more mild flavor and a fresher taste than regular garlic.

Garlic scapes: the secret ingredient for the best Mac & Cheese you'll ever have. Fresh peas also help.

I know, we could have made a cheese sauce from scratch but honestly, we have never had that work out very well for us. Plus we both were working a lot this week and sometimes making something from scratch is just not going to happen.


Also, the mystery creature seems to be deterred by the fencing. Our kale, chard, brussels, and cilantro are growing great!

Yay! Kale leaves, minus the chew marks!

Our tomatoes have flowers:

Our peas are growing like crazy:

And they're so fresh tasting. I've honestly never had better peas in my life.

And I even have my first flower from my purely ornamental dwarf sweet pea plants:

I wasn't sure I was going to get any flowers from these plants at this point!

We fertilized our plants today so they can continue growing well for the rest of the season. Good old poop in a bag!

Chicken poop in a bag!

Simcoe also had a great time this morning at the dog park, followed by the weekly trip to the farmer's market to stock up on veggies while ours are still growing. He didn't have a great trip home from the market home though. Poor guy gets car sick :( I hope that is something he will outgrow.

 Isn't he just the most adorable thing you've ever seen?!

The farmer's market had some amazing squash and zucchini so I stocked up on some of those. Also got a bunch of broccoli (one of my favorite veggies), the best blueberries I've had in a long time, some raspberries (mojitos in our future?), more peas (I can't get enough!), and a cucumber.

I ordered some canning supplies today, I'm REALLY excited to try my hand at that this summer!