Someday I'll be the perfect gardener. I'll be able to time the harvest of my vegetables so I can eat the perfect salad with all it's individual parts harvested at the same time. Until that perfect time comes I'll just have settle. I can have butter lettuce, peas, carrots, arugula and onion from my garden, throw in a few things from the store, and voila... almost perfect salad.
My garden is coming to the end of the spring vegetables I'm on the last of the peas and lettuce and the first of the zucchini and green beans. The carrots are small but yummy. I've been too impatient to let them get any bigger.
I love my little baby peas in a pod. I like to zip them open and eat them in the garden as I'm watering. It's luck alone that these babies made it to the bowl.
My tomato plants are huge. Tons of flowers, a few black crim tomatoes forming, lots of green cherry tomatoes and noth'n else. Hmmm. I'm sure they will come around. (Threats of being tossed into the fiery furnace should do the trick.)
This morning I discovered a new love. Garlic blossoms. Also known as scapes. The scapes form when garlic is just about ready for harvest. A long green stem grows from the center of the leaves. It can have a couple of flirty curls/loops to it before ending in the blossom. The whole stem and unopened flower head is edible.
Boy howdy is it edible. I made a breakfast omelet with the scapes and zucchini.
Mellow, roasted garlicky goodness. Topped with a little fresh basil and swiss cheese.
Would sour cream be over the the top? Since I didn't have any I guess we'll never know.
I asked my self, self what should I do with a gorgeous bunch of neon lights chard. So I googled, "What to make with chard". I found a recipe on Martha Stewart for tacos with garlicky Mexican greens. Hmmm, sounds intriguing. The original recipe was meatless and called for feta cheese. My carnivorous, cheese nazi wasn't going for it, so I added ground beef and stuck with less stinky shredded Mexican style cheese.
Outstanding colors and texture and tasted great by itself. I piled it on warm corn tortillas with all my favorite taco fixings. Homemade roasted tomatillo salsa sealed the deal on a great meal.
Describe a land that is foul and evil smelling. Where green plants yellow and the beautiful fruit rots and becomes a malodorous mushy mess. No, I'm not writing about "The Wheel of Time" (book 14 not coming out until 2012, grrrr). I'm talking about my own personal potato famine. The unusually cool, wet, spring has spread the dreaded fungus, phytophthora, to my yukon gold potatoes. A late frost killed the top growth of these plants but they came right back. Then black spots appeared on the leaves. This is my first year growing potatoes so at first I thought it was more damage from frost. But nooo... some of the plants started to yellow. I pulled one of the offending specimens and the potatoes were still good. We had fried potatoes. Man were they yummy.
So I decided to wait for the other plants to go ahead and keel over in order to maximize my harvest. Bad girl, no, no, no! I pulled a particularly sorry plant and the stinky, slimy, disgusting mess was amazing. Truly blighted instead of truly scrumptious. (Thank you Robert Jordan, I now know what "the blight" is all about.) Next, I tried a fungicide... all to no avail. Insert sigh of utter despair here. My new plan is to pull the plants in between beginning to yellow and rotten slimy stinky mess. Good Plan! 
hao chyr, yum.
