Sara Jane: Eating from the Garden

Hi everyone!  I hope you are all having a fabulous week so far.  

While I was out weeding my herb/salad garden this week, I noticed I had some beets that  needed to be picked.  They were huge.  Probably the biggest beets I have ever seen.  Down the row, I also saw some beautiful lemon cucumbers that were ready.  Two of my favorite garden foods.  What to make???

My SIL introduced me to this little piece of heaven a few years ago and now we have it all the time.  During the summer, you will ALWAYS find a few logs of goat cheese in my refrigerator JUST for this salad.  It is delicious!

Ingredients:

*2 large (or three medium) beets, peeled, cubed, cooked and cooled (I cut mine into 1-inch cubes, boiled for about 15 minutes or until I could stick a fork in it easily and then cooled in an ice bath.)

*1/2 small red onion, thinly sliced

*2 regular cucumbers (or 5 lemon cucumbers), peeled and cubed

*Goat Cheese (since we like Goat Cheese a lot, I would use 3 ounces per salad.  Use as much or as little as YOU like)

* 1/4 cup Rice Vinegar

Directions:

In a large bowl, toss together the cucumbers, beets and red onion.  Splash the vinegar on top (again...if you want more, use more; if you want less, use less).  Break your goat cheese into small pieces and distribute throughout the salad. Finish with salt and pepper.

After making this yummy salad, I decided to make a sandwich to go with it to.  In my refrigerator, I had a huge bag of basil from our local CSA.  Pesto!  I have never made pesto before but I know I love it.  One of our local bakeries makes a delicious walnut pesto so that is what I tried to make.  I looked through a bunch of recipies on line but nothing caught my eye so I decided just to go for it and experiment.  Here is what I did.

Pesto

Ingredients:

*1 1/2 to 2 cups basil leaves

*2 T minced garlic

*1/2 cup shredded mozzarella cheese (Not a traditional item but it was the only cheese I had :)

*1/2 cup walnuts

*1/2 t salt

*1/2 to 3/4 cup olive oil

Directions:

I crammed as much basil into my little Cuisinart Food Processor as possible, dumped in the garlic, shoved in the cheese and walnuts and somehow managed to get the top on.  Once I turned on the food processor, I drizzled the olive oil through the top opening.  It seems like you are using a lot of oil but it doesn't actually come out to that much.  Keep adding oil until it is to a consistency that you like.  I like my pesto with a little crunch so I don't do it as fine as others.  

If you have made too much pesto and need to do something with it, try freezing it.  Instructions here.

Okay, so my pesto is done.  The rest is simple.  

My favorite sandwich at one of our local grocery stores, Harvest Fresh, is a turkey sandwich with pesto and sprouts.  I didn't have any sprouts on hand but I did have some left over cucumber that I thought would give the sandwich the perfect crunch.  Here is how I assembled my favorite sandwich.

Two slices of your favorite bread (mind is a honey wheat bread).  Pesto on one slice of the bread, mayonnaise on the other slice.  I grabbed some butter crunch lettuce from the garden, added a few turkey slices, then added my cucumber, a few slices of red onion (from my previous salad), slap it all together and you get this...

I have to say, this sandwich was so fresh and tasty.  Even my husband, who is not a huge turkey fan, really enjoyed it.

Finally, I couldn't leave this post without telling everyone how excited I am for Allison and her sweet little Norah.  Whenever anyone I love has just had a baby, I am slightly jealous of them only because I know how wonderful those first few days can be with a sweet little newborn (I do, however, know, first hand, how hard they can be so I am not too jealous :).  Beatrix was by far my snuggliest baby (and she still is) and I LOVED every minute of it so I hope you (Allison) are getting some restful snuggle time in with your sweet new one.

I thought I would share with all of you how to make my favorite little girl head bands.  With Penelope, I didn't really use a lot of stuff in her hair.  I'm not really sure why but it just wasn't my style then.  With Beatrix, however, I went all out.  I had a hard time finding headbands for her little head though so I decided to try and make them.

I had some wonderful pictures to show you all, step by step, how to do this but I have misplaced my card reader (in the last 10 minutes) and cannot figure out where it is.  If I ever find it, I will post the pictures.

All you need to do to make the greatest headbands ever is first to find a cute elastic (I found some at Joann's).  After you have your elastic, measure the babies head and subtract about 1/2 to 1 inch from that total (depending on how tight you want it to be....don't make it too tight, please....I hate seeing lines on babies heads from where their headbands were too tight).  Cut your elastic to the number you have figured out.  Using a hot glue gun, glue the ends of the elastic together.  It is seriously as simple as that.  I have received so many compliments on my girl's head bands.  They are also perfect because you can clip flowers or bows directly on the headband instead of the hair (just in case your cutie pie baby doesn't have hair).  My older daughter uses Bea's headbands still when she has her hair up in a pony.

I have another headband trick I wanted to show you but I'm afraid I'll have to wait until I find that stinkin' card reader.  (It is just one that I can't really explain without pictures).  Oh, I thought you might also like to know that Beatrix has misplaced my keys as well.  As soon as I get off this computer, we are going to have a search party for the keys.  Sometimes all you can do is laugh!

I hope you all have a wonderful week.

Sara Jane