Chicken Pizza with Strawberry Salsa and Garlic Scape Pesto

Strawberry salsa-tossed chicken layered with cheeses on a garlic scape pesto-sauced pizza crust. A pizza recipe straight out of my edible back yard (exceptions chicken, peppers, and cheese).

I was thinking about starting a "What is Edible in the Yard This Week" sidebar column, but then I looked around the yard and realized that the chickweed growing up between the bricks on the patio is about it. [FYI, chickweed tastes bright and lemony, if you're wondering, and Robert Barker snacked on it for me. But he snacks on everything.]

Sure, the garlic is growing well, the raspberry canes have leafed out, and the peach tree bloomed beautifully. Burgeoning piles of mint, rosemary, and thyme are spreading out in the sun. The sugar snap peas, chard, strawberries, and parsley have begun to grow. I've even spotted volunteer pumpkins [or mutant squash] and cilantro sprouting their first true leaves.

Despite the lack of current edible items in our garden, the pizza I'm sharing today shows how I put up food when it's ripe and then eat it year round. Strawberry salsa and garlic scape pesto came right from my little back yard, and I open jars/thaw cubes when I want some Spring flavors. With a stove and a freezer [and a food processor or blender is nice as well--and power too, since I'm blogging from the library because a transformer blew and our power is out] eating pizza like this is well within reach for you, too.

Seeing an albino squirrel in the back yard [photo by my lightning-reflexed spouse] I'm feeling the absence of the composting pigs this Spring. After nearly 5 years with them, my spouse finds himself plucking dandelions before he remembers there are no pigs to wheek their pleasure at the treat.

PSA:  If you're in the market for another family member, consider rescuing a pair of guinea pigs. Keep their large cage in a common area [ours lived in a corner of the living room atop the dog crate] and these social creatures will not only brighten your day and let you know when it's dinner time, they'll eat up any unwanted Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm share produce. [Thus I termed them the 'composting pigs', as guinea pig poop is perfectly fine for your compost bin.] I'm glad of my worm bin to take up the slack, but the worms aren't very interactive. Not like our beloved pigs. [Will we get more? Not at this time. For me, 3 dogs are plenty of animals to care for.]

For other recipes using garlic scapes or garlic scape pesto, please see my Garlic/ Garlic Scape Recipes Collection. For other recipes using strawberries, please see my Strawberry Recipes Collection. These are part of the Visual Recipe Index by Ingredient. I even have a Visual Pizza Recipe Index, because I have a thing for indices.
I've pinned more garlic scape recipes to my Garlic Scapes Pinterest board and more pizzas to my Friday Night Pizza Night Pinterest board. Wanna know how to Use This Blog? Click here.

Roasted Garlic & Pesto Buttermilk Pizza Dough--on Fathers and Gardening

A tender wheaty buttermilk pizza dough flavored with homegrown roasted garlic and prepared pesto

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Part 1:  An Old Farmer's Advice on Gardening

My dad was a guerrilla gardener before it was hip. [Is it uncool to say hip? Is it uncool to say uncool?] If Johnny Appleseed was known for planting apple trees, then Freddy Daffodilbulb would be my dad's nickname.  It's kind of unwieldy, though, so I'll stick with Dad.  My dad has stealthily--or blatantly--planted daffodil bulbs from Delaware to Ohio.  That's a pretty cool legacy.

When I was a little kid, my parents worked to turn our suburban backyard into an edible landscape.  [Homesteaders before that was cool, too.] The old small inground pool was filled in and turned into a bed for rhubarb, herbs, and bulbs.  I remember being pretty little and getting to use a hammer (!) to break up the concrete patio which became a strawberry patch.  It seemed like every year the amount of grass got smaller and the land in food production enlarged. We had cherry and apple trees in addition to that strawberry patch, and 2 areas of vegetables. **

Easy Celery Rice Soup (with Slow Cooker option)

A comforting soup of simply celery and rice, flexible for multiple eating styles and cooking styles

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Want to add more vegetables to your daily life? Do you think celery is underutilized in your kitchen? If so, read on for an easy soup--including a slow cooker option if you'd like to use that. This can be a vegetarian or omnivore soup--I've made it with vegetable stock as well as chicken stock--and appeals to my kids in a way that ants on a log never did. [Um, that's our term for a celery stick spread with peanut butter and dotted with raisins, just in case you were thinking I'm feeding my kids ants deliberately. Accidental ants I'm not responsible for.]

I'm not a huge fan of celery, so when my regrown celery resulted in an overabundance in the garden plot [shown below with one of my garden assistants, Simon] I scrambled around looking for ways to enjoy it.  Sure, I'm happy to stretch meat by adding chopped celery (and onions, carrots, peppers, or shredded squash) into my recipes for tacos, burgers, or meatloaf.  But I wanted to try some other ideas.  After all, celery from the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm share--or in this case from my garden--actually has a delicious CELERY flavor that I've never really tasted with store bought celery.  Who knew? While scanning the cookbook shelves at the library I saw a recipe for celery rice soup.  I didn't have any of the ingredients, other than celery and rice, so I didn't take note of the cookbook name, I re-shelved and moved on, but the recipe idea stuck with me.

Later in the week we were feeling run down, and celery rice soup seemed like a comforting idea.  It was good enough that I made it again a week later.  I've tried this with both yellow onions and leeks.  I bet it would also be good with shallots, so any alliums you've got on hand--use them.  We preferred this with chicken stock and chopped cooked chicken, but I could see taking it in a different direction--soy chorizo for vegetarians?  It's fairly . . . I won't say bland, but I will say it's not crazy seasoned like Ma Po Tofu [I got a jar of Ma Po Tofu sauce in my Christmas stocking and I'm looking forward to trying it--with celery].  This soup is just nice, basic, easy, and no frills--good for warming your belly on a cold day. And good for using up an abundance of celery.  Speaking of abundance . . . here's what I was dealing with when I made it:

For other ways to use celery, please see my Celery Recipes Collection, part of the Visual Recipe Index by Ingredient. For ways to Use This Blog, please click here.

Roasted Acorn and Butternut Squash with Corn and Smoked Sausage

A savory late summer or early fall supper of roasted cubes of simply seasoned winter squash, topped with corn and optional bits of smoked sausage.

My friend Heather, of garlic oil on a pizza fame, knows her way around good food.  No, she doesn't cook it much--her spouse does--but she sure has great ideas for what goes well together.  She was raving about her leftovers for lunch and the combination sounded so good I had to try it.  Heather's lunch was loosely patterned after Ina Garten's Caramelized Butternut Squash, but her spouse added canned corn to pump up the veggies.  Heather combined another leftover and cheese on top for her leftover remix.

I'm a gardener who has helped teach elementary school aged kids about gardening, so when I hear "squash and corn" I immediately think of a Three Sisters garden.  Native Americans would companion plant squash, beans, and corn together--known as the Three Sisters.  The Three Sisters helped each other:  the corn would provide the scaffolding for the beans to climb and the squash would spread around the base, shading the soil, holding in the moisture, and preventing weeds.  When it works, it's a thing of beauty.

I had both acorn and butternut squash, as well as some corn I'd put up [boil briefly aka blanch, cut off the cob, spread on a tray to freeze, and store in a bag], so I figured 2 out of 3 I'll call it Two Sisters.  I wanted to add bit more protein, however, so I chopped up a piece of smoked sausage.  Now it's more like Two Sisters--and a Brother?  I've been busy canning lately (you can see the results on my FB page) so an easy filling recipe like this is wonderful for cool nights.  And Heather's right--the leftovers are terrific!
I've revamped my Visual Recipe Index! For more ideas on what to do with your butternut squash, click here.

Roasted Shrimp and Potato Salad with Grapes and Celery

A savory and sweet, crunchy and filling late summer salad with roasted potatoes and shrimp, chopped celery, and whole grapes in a dilled yogurt-mayonnaise-lemon dressing.

I've been doing a lot of walking to train for a half marathon, and part of my walking has been to pick up milk at the local grocery store.  Normally I have Simon (the photobombing dog below) with me, waiting patiently at the dog tie up & water station, so I don't linger in the aisles.  The other morning, however, my daughter and I walked together, and after walking in the woods (just found out there's elevation changes on the course, so I need to get some hills in) she and Simon headed home and I headed to the store for milk (and to pad my mileage).  I had time to linger over the deli section, and two salads in particular caught my eye--a dilled shrimp, celery, and grape salad and a dilled lemon potato salad.

On the way home (lugging a gallon of milk is not the hassle it used to be--a side benefit of having kids who go through a gallon every 36 hours) I wondered what would happen if I combined the two salads and, for grins and giggles, roasted the potatoes and shrimp instead of boiling or steaming them.

Since the celery I'm regrowing in my garden is doing amazingly well (of course it is, since I'm only meh on celery by itself, though I love it in soup packs and to help stretch a pound of ground meat) I figured I'd try and combine the recipes.  Our farmers have a nifty new tool, a potato digger, and we've been getting lovely harvests of red potatoes lately, so I had most everything I needed.  I played around with my kitchen scale again, like I did in my Chicken Salad by the Ounce recipe, but this time in metric form.  The volumes in this recipe are my estimation of the weights I used.

Broccoli and Cheese on a Boboli® (Pizza Night!) Plus Bonus: How to Grow Celery

UPDATE:  It's a pet peeve, but I don't like reading a blog post about how someone starts a new venture.  I want to hear how it turned out, as well.  So scroll down and see the rest of the celery story.

This is clearly not a pizza.  I felt kind of bad posting something so simple to make, like the pizza below, so since I've had some questions about it on my FB page, I've included a bonus How to Start Celery on your Kitchen Windowsill below the recipe. Though it's also incredibly simple to do. Pizza now:

There are times when my best intentions (of making dough Monday before heading out of town, knowing that we're rolling home Friday afternoon hours before Friday Night Pizza Night happens) are OBE. (Is this common knowledge or one of those military acronyms?)

OBE:  Overcome By Events.

This was one of those times.  No pizza dough in the house, though I had plenty of sauce, cheese, veggie, and meat topping choices in the pantry and freezer.  Had I hit Trader Joes, I would have picked up some of their bags of pizza dough.  But our beer/milk/eggs run took me to the rare grocery store that had no pizza dough. Not in the deli.  Not in the freezer section.  Ok, pre-baked crust it is.

I got a Boboli® instead.  I was surprised at the high cost of a Boboli® crust--a bag of uncooked dough is less than half  the cost of a Boboli and isn't that much harder to work with! [I bought the Boboli® myself and this post is completely unknown to the Boboli® corporation, but I feel I should clarify in case you were wondering.]

If you have a pathological fear of uncooked pizza dough and will only use a prebaked crust such as Boboli®, rock on.  You too can make amazing pizzas using ingredients from your CSA farm share.

Because we love pizza here on Friday nights, I bought 2 Boboli® and made 2 pizzas. (And will write 2 blog posts from 1 meal).  This one is the kiddie pizza--because during the grocery store run, while not finding dough, I found a marked down bag of precut broccoli florets.

How to Put Up a Pile of Pumpkins

Sometimes the best-laid plans go awry.  Happens to me a lot.  I tend to just go with the flow.
Take my garden plans.

My garden went nuts with pumpkins this year.  I didn't plant them.  My guess is that they came from my compost, from last year's CSA share pie pumpkins.

I'm not one to complain about free food, though.  We (and by we I mean my dear spouse) just mowed around the vines that spread into the yard.

Pumpkins are easy to store for a good while.  A cool dark place would be ideal, though they sat on my kitchen counter under the window until today's Pie Pumpkin Processing Party.

For ideas on what to do with that pumpkin puree, or even an entire sugar pie pumpkin, please see my Pumpkin Recipes Collection, part of the Visual Recipe Index by Ingredient. Want to know how to Use This Blog? Click here.

K.I.S.S. {Beau Monde Dip with Cottage Cheese and Vegetables}

My family doesn't really go for cucumbers.

When we get them in the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm share my first thoughts are big:

  

I'll make gyros and use the cucumber to make tzatziki sauce!  

We'll have Indian food and I'll make raita!  We'll have sushi!

This past summer I got into pickling.  The one common burger topping in our house is pickles.  Thanks to Food In Jars, I've discovered how easy and tasty it is to put up a couple of jars of refrigerated kosher dills.  I've expanded that to include pickling several other vegetables.

But sometimes I need to remember the KISS principle.

Keep It Simple, Sillybilly.

For other vegetable appetizers, please see my Awesome Veggie Apps and Snacks Pinterest board. For other recipes using cucumbers, please see my Cucumber Recipes Collection, part of the Visual Recipe Index by Ingredient. Want to know how to Use This Blog? Click here.

All About Garlic

Garlic is one of those crops that is ready to harvest all at once.

While it is easy to store for long periods, if you're harvesting your year's supply of garlic in June, you may want to have some put by when you go to grab a clove in November and find nothing but shriveled, dry husks.

In my garden, I use one raised bed for my garlic and pesto harvests.  In the fall, I plant garlic (around the time you'd plant tulips). After harvest in early summer, I plant basil in the same space. I'll use the basil throughout the summer, then pull the plants and put up a pile of pesto (link to my tutorial) for winter. For a full explanation plus more photos, please see my guest post over at She Eats.

Does a CSA save you money? Is a CSA a good value?

Whenever people hear that we do a farm share, one question I frequently get is "is it cheaper?"

George, showing us around his farm, Patchwork Gardens.

I always hesitate before I answer, because it's complicated.  I mean not rocket science (though our farmer trained as a systems engineer), but it's not an easy answer for me.

Each week, if I were to buy the exact amounts/kinds of produce at the grocery store's organic section or the farmer's market as I get in the CSA box, it would probably be cheaper over the course of the season to do the farm share.