Guacamole

There is nothing more simple and delicious and flavor absorbing than avocados. I was a late bloomer in learning their fabulous flavor. I was in my early 40's when I came around to eating this little green balls of fantasticness. But a good recipe eluded me. Yes every region has thier own distinct flavor and spices. But I was looking for a basic recipe which I could eventually elaborate on. Well I found just the recipe. I found it here, at Avocado Central , and with a name like that, how could you go wrong? You can't. This is simple, easy and more like a side dish for me. I can now eat this with anything, or nothing. Thee only thing I have left to do is go out to the garden, cut back some cilantro and we are good to go. Yippee!



Ingredients
4 ripe avocados, peeled, seeded
1 tsp ground cumin
1 ripe, medium Roma tomato, seeded, diced
½ Cup minced sweet white onion
2 serrano chilies, seeded, minced (we had none)
¼ Cup chopped cilantro leaves
4 Tbsp fresh lime juice (we used lemon juice)
Hot pepper sauce, sea salt, white pepper to taste(we used sriracha...sparingly!)

Instructions
Cut avocado in large chunks and mash coarsely in large bowl with a fork. Add remaining ingredients and blend gently - leaving some small chunks is fine. Taste and adjust seasoning with more pepper sauce, salt and pepper if desired."

Your Own Tomato Planter

We have all seen the commercials of the Topsy Turvy, but you can make your own homemade growers. Check them out here at the Cheap Vegetable Gardner.

I am all for cheap and economical things that can help us reuse and recycle items. I myself do not drink sodas, so finding one of these is going to be difficult. I will just go dumpster diving and hit everyone's recycle bins. Trust me when I say there will be tons to choose from in the neighborhood. I have about 2 dozen plants growing right now, and at all different levels. So I could take the newer ones and put them in the litre containers. The more the merrier.

I will definitely be canning this summer and I also plan on making tomato jelly as well. I use to get it from this place we use to visit in Pennsylvania called Kitchen Kettle. Very quaint place and if you are ever in Lancaster County, go and see this place, you will not regret it.

Once I get going on my new planters, I will of course and as always, blog about it. So stay tuned, same place same channel.

Grey Water And Garden

What do those two things have in common? Everything. I was getting into a good groove of using my grey water to flush my toilets. But then I began slacking off a bit. Then South Florida got hit with a drought and I was trying to grow a lush vegetable garden along with an herb garden. But with the water restrictions that have been placed upon us that was about to get difficult, unless I wanted to stand out there all day and water by hand, which is still allowable. Not in this Florida heat.

Enter grey water. I have a bucket I acquired from my local grocery store. I believe it is a 3 gallon bucket. All you do is go to your bakery department and see if they will let you have a frosting bucket. It is not a big as a wheat bucket (which is 5 gallons) and it fits right in my shower. Plus, the quicker you use your grey water the better. Usually a 24 hour turn around is best advised. But my garden needed more water, so I finally convinced my children to put a 2 gallon cleaning bucket in their shower. Viola! I have lots of water now. I am nearly collecting 5 plus gallons a day just in grey shower water. And my plants are loving me for it.

I still utilize the watering restrictions, but this grey water has its definite perks. It is water you would be wasting all the same, and now it is going for a worthy cause...my stomach, eventually that is. My son drags the heavy buckets outside and pours them into our watering can and I take over the rest. What a team. I almost call us the dynamic duo...almost. So let me show you some pictures of my efforts.

This first picture is of our cucumbers, and they are finally latching on to the fence. No need for steaks and string here.

This second one is of tomato plants that are finally starting to bear fruit. I wanted most of my plants to either be heirloom or organic, and most of them are. Next year I will do both.

This next one is of all my tomato plants. Last count I had 24 and that was not the row that has multiple baby plants. I will be taking many of them an making my own Topsy Turvy plant hangers. Check them out here.

This next one is of my fledgling curly parsley. I use this way more than flat, due to how much Tabbouleh we like to eat. And there are 2 sprigs of dill that in there as well so I am seeing homemade dill pickles in my future.

This is my daughters okra. WE LOVE OKRA. It does help that we are form the south. Yummo.

This is all thee okra plants. and they are doing wonderfully. I will soon need to add steaks and string so they can begin to climb.

I planted tons of cilantro seeds and the ones in the front of the garden came up wonderfully, but the seeds in the back piddled out. Fear not, I planted more seeds and guess what? I have tons of cilantro now. Then it hit me as I was weeding one day...these have multiple root systems. dag-nab-it, I had cilantro to uproot and replant. I now have about 8-10 cilantro plants all thriving.

This is my basil plant/bush and that puppy is doing great. Remember, that with basil you cannot pluck off a leaf, you have to take thee entire stem. This one we have had the longest.

This is our oregano. My son loves this on his homemade sub sandwiches. So when we run out he panics. Today I will be dehydrating more. Just chop it down and it grows right back.

This is my mint. There is no other way to describe this plant. IT GROWS WILD, and that my friends is no joke. Unless you want it to overtake your garden, I am suggesting a huge, not big, planter to house this is so it will not interfere with your other plants. I chopped this down to the ground a month ago and it is ready to be pruned again.

This is my flat leaf parsley. When I purchased this in its planter, the label stated that it was curly parsley, but it never got curly. We have adjusted and use it in many a things. But my preference is still to curly.

Way in the back you can barely see what looks like wild grass. No, that is garlic. We just popped off a few cloves form what we had in the house and here we go. But it did take a very long time for it to come up. So we thought we had lost it and planted over it. So now we have 2 things growing in the same place...oh well.


And these are our sweet peppers. the little ones that come in yellow, green and red and you can just pop them in your mouth. These are the same. I am so excited to start eating from our garden. Well worth the time and effort we have put into this.

Saving My Assetts

We have recently started composting, which I will eventually post about, one day soon in this century. But I have had cause to appreciate my composting, especially today.

I have been sick lately, and will cover that as well in an upcoming post, but suffice it to say I wanted to get as much cleaned with as little effort as possible. Insert children. My daughter took all veggies out of their perspective drawers and lay them upon the counter tops of the kitchen. The only item that was close to being lost was my 3 bunches of parsley. So I threw them into an ice bath and them puppies came back to life.

I ran them through the salad spinner and began chopping off the stems separating the parsley into 3 bowls, yes, 3 bowls. One was for tonight's tabbouleh which was about 85 %, the next bowl was for juice, meaning it was not up to par for the salad, and last but certainly not least was our composting bowl. Man, are we good or what?

See, nothing goes to waste any longer here in our home, or at least since we started composting.

Mint Me

We love mint. And the one I use most often is spearmint. I was introduced to this lovely herb when I met my husbands extended family in Cleveland Ohio. They are of Arabic decent and well, you can imagine food in their home. That is where I found my love for the Mediterranean diet, and more specifically the Middle Eastern diet.

But the one thing that caught me completely off guard and something I fell in love with wholeheartedly was their Fattoush Salad and this is the one salad my non vegetable eating son will woof down. He loves fruit and could probably be a fruititarian, but this salad keeps bringing him to thee other side.

I had brought back some mint from my family on my last visit from Ohio and my mint flourished greatly, until last year, then my crop just up and died. So this year I vowed to start an herb garden and mint was on the top of the list. And for right now that stuff is taking off like wildfires as is the basil, oregano, curly parsley and we are waiting to see what the sage and rosemary do. they have been planted but do not seem to have taken good root yet. Keep your fingers crossed for them and us.

So yesterday, being good weather and all, I traipsed outside, and took the mint down to the skivvies. Luckily it will grow right back and in full force. I also trimmed the basil back, came in the house and began to dehydrate them. I had 4 trays. One of basil and three of mint. The house smelled so fragrant. What I did forget to do was keep some fresh mint aside to make some tea. But hey, I can walk back outside and clip some more HAH!

This is the picture of my trimmed mint before we stripped it off the stem and laid it in the trays to be dried out.

Let There Be Herbs

Well in Florida we do not have to 'technically' worry about our growing season. In fact, while may of you up north are putting your veggies to sleep, we are waking ours up.

I had grown spearmint for years, and then all of a sudden thee entire bunch just up and died. I was devastated. I use that in my Arabic salad. Plus it is thee only way I can get my son to eat salads. Not that I am complaining, for I love our mint salads. (Recipe forth coming) so here are some herbs we have growing in our garden thus far and soon to added, will be our newly sprouted dill.

Here is the basil, and boy do we love this. Freshly chopped on a bagel with cream cheese, Yummo!

And this is our new spearmint. What was special about our old mint was that it was from a family member in Ohio. We had taken some roots from her garden and transplanted them. So sad.

The basil is also used in our spaghetti sauce, Savanah loves basil and our mint can be used for so many things, dehydrated, we put it in our salads, and it can also be used as a tea. That is next on my agenda to try. It is supposed to be great for tummy aches, plus who does not like the taste of mint!