Garden delights!

After picking the garden yesterday I did have enough sugar snap peas for dinner. I washed them, snapped off the ends and boiled them for about 5 minutes. Wow! They were so good. Even Kinsey liked them. Neal grilled some little steaks and corn on the cob and I made the peas...it was a good meal.
Tonight I made chicken tenders and oven roasted veggies. I had zucchini, potatoes, onions, and bell pepper to use up today. You preheat your oven to 450 degrees and line a cake pan with foil. Spray with non-stick spray. Cut the potatoes in to small cubes, the zucchini into thick slices, onion into wedges, and bell pepper into cubes. Put the veggies in a bowl and drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with citrus grill seasoning (or any seasoning of your choice). Give it all a good stir then pour into your pan. Put it in the oven for about 30 minutes then enjoy! I use whatever veggies I have on hand for this so it may also include squash, carrots, or tomatoes.
Occasionaly we will also make veggies in a foil packet to put on the grill. It's basically the same but you use heavy duty foil and make a packet. I like to put 1/2 stick margarine in the packet to keep it from burning. Neal cooks it for 20 minutes over medium heat on the lower rack then moves it to the top rack while the meat cooks. The veggies have an entirely different texture than when you roast them. Roasting them gives everything a bit of a crust but packet grilling makes them soft all over.

Good intentions

I have good intentions of posting then it goes to the wayside. I haven't been making very exciting meals this week so I haven't posted about them.
On Thursday I did finally try out a new roast recipe. I read it on another food blog and thought it would be interesting. You take a roast and put it in your crock pot, pour in a 12 oz can of Coke, a package of onion soup mix, set it to low for 6-8 hours and you are done. You could also add onions, potatoes, and carrots if you wanted. It turned out so good!! My Mom has occasional made a roast with coffee in it and this had a similar taste to it. That works out good for me because we don't drink coffee so I never make a coffee roast. Now I can get the same flavor with a Coke. The drippings make a great gravy.

I had intended to make real mashed potatoes with it but when I peeled the potatoes I had just bought at the store they had bad bruises and were black in the middle..YUCK! I ended up making instant which were ok.

My garden in doing great!! In fact, I should be outside pulling weeds and picking it instead of posting right now. I think I'm finally going to have enough peas for dinner tonight. I also have 2 squash I need to pick. I'm sure there is enough lettuce grown again to cut. The lettuce seems to be my best crop. I have been eating more salads and lettuce on my sandwiches since all I have to do is walk out the door to get it. One day last week, I pulled all the radishes. The had gotten hard and not very good so it was time for them to go. The tomato plants and okra aren't doing very well. Neal needs to work on them more.

Guess I had better get out to the garden..................

Brenda, Brenda quite contrary How does your garden grow?

We decided to grow a garden as an experiment this year. We are on water restrictions so we had to be careful what we planted. The last 2 weeks we've had quite a bit of rain so everything suddenly started growing really good.

Here's some radishes Neal picked yesterday. That is a full size steak knife under them


Here are my lettuce, cucumber plant, and peas




Lastly is Neal's tomato plants which are not doing so great



Yes, yes, I know I need to weed but it's been so muddy that it's been almost impossible to even get to the garden. I guess I will get to that in the next few days. We also planted some carrots which never came up. DH planted okra but is was so late that they will probably not produce any before our first freeze.

This year was more more of an experiment so we can see what to do next year. We will definitely start earlier in the house with seeds.