Pesto Pesto Pesto!!!

This week in our CSA box we got our bulk share of basil. Throughout the season, we get little extra bulk produce. Earlier in the year we got an extra half flat of strawberries. Don't think I have any photos of the shortcake we made. But believe you me, it was yum yum delicious.

Towards the end of the season we'll get a bunch of potatoes, onions, shallots, garlic, and a pumpkin.

But this week it was all about basil. And I didn't quite realize how much two pounds of something can be! That is a lot of basil.

So yesterday I went to work making pesto. I'm pretty happy with the results. And I'm very grateful to Hillary and Bubba for lending me their food processor. It would have been quite a task to do this by hand. Instead, it was pretty quick and harmless.

And the results are lovely. The freezer is a little more stocked. And I've got some for giving away. Let me know if you are a big pesto fan, and I'll either bring you over for some dinner or send you home with a treat.

Summer Harvest

Our CSA box from Helsing Junction Farm has kept us on our toes keeping up with eating our vegies! Each week we get a box packed full of treats.

One of my favorite new recipes is a purple potato salad with feta, mint, and peas. I'll find the recipe and post it one of these days.

Lentil soup in the making. It was a rainy summer night. Tom Waits played on the stereo. A pretty great combination I'd say. And it turned out quite good. I'll be making it again, likely on the next rainy night.

Mija likes the vegies too. I've never met a cat who so enjoys leafy greens! She must be mine.

Purple Potato Salad

4 cups storage potatoes, coarsely diced (they of course don't have to be purple, but it's prettier that way)

1/3 cup fresh mint leaves

1-2 cups new peas

1 cup crumbled feta

¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil

Boil diced potatoes as above. Combine ingredients.

Easy, tasty, and beautiful. Thank you Barbara Kingsolver and animalvegetablemiracle.com

Pears and flowers

Last weekend Richard and I ventured down to Columbia City to pick pears at my friend Barbara's. She has a beautiful old tree, and so do her neighbors on a few sides. It was once an orchard. And she has one of my favorite tools, a fruit picker! It's a metal basket on the end of a long, long pole. So you can reach up into the tree and snag your fruit of choice, and if you're lucky, it lands in the basket. Because the tree was already dropping so much fruit, the disruption of pulling at one pear would knock a few from neighboring branches. So we would pick one, then duck and cover for the fall. And then we scavenge.

We didn't get as many as I thought I would. A ladder would have been helpful. But we got a small harvest to bring home for ripening. After sitting for a week, about half the pears were nicely ripened yesterday, so I got to work drying pear slices and cooking up the rest into pear butter. The house smells cozy and delicious.

I've also been photographing flowers that I see while out on walks, in hopes of remembering them and growing them one day. These are a few of my favorites this year.

Berries Berries Berries

I went a little crazy picking blueberries this summer. It made me extremely happy to come home with buckets full of blue. I made four or five trips out to the Mercer Slough in Bellevue. Some days I only picked two or three pounds. Other days I picked seven!

Then in one lovely trip down to Olympia with Paul and Katherine, I picked twelve pounds in only a few hours! It's always hard to pull myself out of the blueberry fields.

My freezer is now fairly well stocked. But if I came across a few more ripe berries, I'd absolutely pick some more.

The littlest garden

After two years of living in our townhouse, I finally got something growing out on the deck. My first summer here was a little hectic with moving in mid-summer, and being in my first nursing classes. And I was away all last summer. So finally I got going with it this year. I have my tiny little deck outside my room, and I got together pots from around the house (and a few donations), and went to work. I am growing lavender, mint, fennel, parsley, two kinds of oregano, basil, and two cherry tomatoes, sungold and yellow pear. Plus some pink geraniums to give some girly beauty. Tomato harvest has been small, but it makes me happy to go out and pick a handful. I'll definitely grow sungolds in the future. Probably pass on the yellow pear.