Home-grown and homemade

It is that time of year again when the backyard garden is producing goodies. Tomatoes, green beans, broccolini, cauliflower, peppers and cucumber are ready for harvest. Fresh herbs from the garden are always available. Beet will be another few weeks. Another crop of lettuce is growing too from seeds planted last week. What could be better than walking to your backyard and picking the vegetables to have for lunch and supper?

My husband and I eat vegetables and fruit every day. How we eat them changes with the season. 

Now, salads are the stars of the menu with homemade dressings. Quinoa salad containing roasted vegetables is delicious with such dressing and is a new favourite this year.

Fruit in combination with vegetables is new for us. Today we are having a pineapple, cucumber, avocado and onion salad. We quite like watermelon salad with spinach, onion and feta with a lime dressing too. The combination of fruit and vegetables is tasty and there are endless ideas on-line.

We always experiment with the combinations of course. Recipes on-line are a great starting point for your own combinations of favourite vegetables or fruit. We often add avocado and tomatoes. My husband likes cucumber. We prefer blanched cauliflower and broccoli to the raw vegetables, a bit of crunch but easier to chew.

Prepared salad dressing hasn’t been in our shopping cart for a long time. Making our own is so much better, leaving out the chemical preservatives and using combinations of fresh citrus, Dijon mustard, maple syrup, honey, olive oil and balsamic vinegar which have so much flavour. We go easy on the salt and use pepper liberally.

The garden produce gives the wallet a break for a few weeks. The prices in the grocery store are on the rise and our income is not. This time of year, with produce so readily available, one would think the prices of fruit and vegetables would be lower. That isn’t the case. A large package of cherry tomatoes a few weeks ago was almost $9.00, more than we paid last winter. Eating fruit and vegetables isn’t cheap. Our grocery bill will be lower for the next month with our home grown vegetables. Besides, time in the garden is good for the mind and body.

Restaurant food has lost its appeal for us. Every so often we eat out but we always enjoy coming back to our homemade fare. Time has made us less appreciative of convenient and easy, leaning more towards our own tastes and preferences, good old homemade! Home-grown is the added bonus.

The vegetable patch

The raised garden plot in the backyard has brought us much enjoyment and nutrition in the past number of years. During that time, we have grown a variety of vegetables, some more successfully than others.

This year, we are growing cabbage, cauliflower, cucumber, tomatoes, peppers, yellow beans, kale, onions, lettuce and herbs. We bought our starter plants at a nursery in the country this year and the plants were sturdier than those available in the city.

We have been eating kale and lettuce for weeks now and the other vegetables are growing nicely. I enjoy the Russian kale with a sprinkle of flavoured balsamic vinegar.

Presently I am using a blueberry variety. A few leaves are enough for my husband and I. In the fall, I will blanch and freeze what remains. We usually have enough kale until mid winter. 

There are savings with growing these vegetables even taking the cost of the starter plants into account. For example, a three pack of peppers here is $6 or $7 this time of year and doesn’t decrease much as the season progresses. 

In another month most of the other vegetables will be ready for harvesting. If we have a bumper crop of tomatoes again, I will can some as I have in the past, making tomato jam, marinade or pizza sauce or just bottles of tomatoes. Knowing what is in your food is a huge bonus.

Besides there is nothing better than produce which goes from the garden to the table in minutes. It doesn’t get any fresher or better than that!