Garden Fresh

Last night we realized that the last three dinners we'd eaten all contained at least one ingredient—at least a minor one—that was homegrown. That night it was quesadillas and tomato salsa, made with homegrown cilantro; the night before it was "casualty eggs" (a sort of hash of scrambled eggs, potatoes, onions, peppers and bacon) made with the first green pepper of the season; and on Wednesday night, we had the pasta with garden-fresh arugula, chick peas and sun-dried tomatoes that I mentioned in my last entry.

After making this discovery, I started wondering just how long we could keep this trend up. I decided to challenge myself to keep it going for at least a week, longer if possible. Tonight's dinner technically meets the requirements, though it's a bit of a stretch; we're having polenta with mushrooms and asparagus. Most of the asparagus came from the farmers' market, but one spear was harvested from our very own asparagus patch—one of about half a dozen we've managed to collect from it this year. (It's a bit disappointing, since I was expecting to be up to full production by now. I hope that doesn't mean this is full production....)

We've also got a batch of bean sprouts in a jar, which sprouted in record time due to the high heat; we started them on Thursday night and they're already big enough to use. I'm not sure whether we should count those as home-grown produce or not. We did grow them from seed, technically, but they didn't come out of our garden. But if we use them in a pad thai, we can add some more of the home-grown cilantro and continue to fulfill the rules. We've also got some home-grown snow peas we could throw in. And after that, who knows? There is a head of lettuce out there (just one, sadly; most of it never came up) that looks about ready to pick, and one of our zucchini plants has a tiny little incipient squashling on it; perhaps if the heat wave continues, that will be ready to use before the week is out. But I'm hoping to make it at least until Tuesday night with every dinner including at least one home-grown component. If I make it through the week, I'll see if I can go for two weeks, and so on. Watch this space for updates.