The Garden on the Menu

The steam made this photo a but difficult to catch. I should have taken pictures of the chamomile flowers before I brewed the tea.

Most days we toss a few pea pods or tomatoes into a salad.

Other days we make bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwiches. The summer has gone buy so fast that we really haven't had time to explore recipes and try other things.

I like to experiment with fresh teas, This time I added a strawberry blossom to the chamomile tea and loved both the scent and the flavor as well as the fact that the fresh flowers made it pretty.

Our radishes failed again this year but the radishes and potatoes look promising. Time will tell.

We make a lot of things with new potatoes. I seem to spend more time eating them than photographing them.

Raspberries: Garden to kitchen

It's so nice to have black raspberries again. Today I made a jar of raspberry jam just to see if I remembered how to do it. We tried it on toasted english muffins and smiled that something this easy works. All it takes is equal parts of sugar and berries over medium heat until it sheets from a spoon.

The next thing we'll be doing is just tossing about a cup of berries into a Pannekouken (dutch oven pancake) which is a sort of an egg rich batter in a round bottomed pan that you bake in the oven. We used to love them years ago in a local restaurant where the waitresses dressed like little dutch girls and ran them out to your table before they fell (the pancake, not the girl...OK, you can stop laughing now). It was very dramatic, not only because of the way it was served to you but also because they raise up light and fluffy over the edge of the pan and just drop flat as soon as they hit the cool air. making them at home promises to be much duller but just as yummy.

I've only heard back from one of the people that I offered berries to and as you can see there are an awful lot of berries out there so I'll be trying many more things before I give up and just start freezing them.