Outside Projects

A month or so ago, Jeremy and I spent a couple of full weekends scraping/priming/replacing our fascia and installing the flashing to finally finish the roof. We now have a house almost entirely ready for paint! We're pretty stoked about that.

We also planted our garden (these pictures are hilarious to me, the garden was planted months ago and everything seen here is about 5 times this big) with lots of tomatoes, peppers, herbs, squash, beans, edamame, fennel and onions:

What's Cookin'

I have been in a season of trying to be a better steward of my home. I'm trying to cut my work days a little short and pick up the slack around the house, like I used to. I threw together a dinner made up of mostly left overs, tonight that ended up being delish!

I've had some ginger in my fridge for some time now and we got a bag full of lemons that we've been trying to use before they go bad. I also cooked an entire chicken the other day to use throughout the week and have some carrots left in our garden. Add all of those up plus some other ingredients and what do you get? A seriously yummy stir fry.

Ingredients:

Sauce:
2 inch piece of ginger
3 stalks of celery
1/4 of a white onion
2 cloves of garlic
2 tbsp peanut oil
2 tbsp olive oil
salt and pepper
2 tsp red pepper flakes
Juice of 2 lemons/zest of one lemon

Stir fry:
Chicken
3 carrots
1 portobello mushroom
1/4 pound edamame
1/4 Jasmine Rice
2 cups Orzo
1 cup chopped raw/unsalted peanuts

Throw rice and edamame in steamer
Once the steamed ingredients are done set it aside
Put the rest of the ingredients in wok with 1/4 cup of water and a splash of olive oil
Once the veggies are softened throw in the rest of the ingredients, turn the heat down to low and let flavors infuse for about 15-20 mins

These portions are estimated, I don't normally measure when I'm cooking.

Enjoy!
I'm going to have seconds :)

Crops!

I harvested our first crops of the year today

and I'm thrilled!

You're looking at jalapenos, some mint sprigs, onions, squash,
beans, brussel sprouts, 3 different kinds of lettuce and cauliflower!

Garden

I was looking back at my previous blog posts to print out our to-do list before my mom gets here in August and saw the pictures of our garden from when we first planted everything. I cannot believe how full our planters are now! I thought I would update you on how well everything is doing.
Can you believe that? Terrible picture aside, the veggies are clearly taking over!

YUM!

Our very first garden

Jeremy built and we planted our very first garden this weekend. We spent a lot of time at our local home improvement garden center probing the poor staff. I'm pretty sure we've got all of our questions answered.. if not we can certainly call and pester them some more. It was a rough venture trying to choose one fruit/herb/veggie over another but we narrowed it down to:

Eggplant, beans, 3 different kinds of lettuce, cucumber, brussell sprouts and garlic...
...which is why we had to build a second planter

so we could plant some squash, carrots, potatoes, broccoli, cauliflower and onions. There's also some dill, mint, chives, dwarf curry, cilantro, lemon balm and basil in the pots and we'll add some peppers to the middle pot.

We added a little walk way in between the two beds with bricks we already had, and this is all made out of material that we already had too by the way. I'm starting to learn that it's completely ok to have a somewhat of a pack rat of a husband. Sometimes tolerance doesn't mean that you're a push over! GO FIGURE.

It truly didn't look like we had nearly this much produce to raise when it was in our cart. But we are so so excited to see the fruits... er veggies of our labor in a couple of short months!