Fresh Food

We went blueberry pickin' late last week. There is a place that's kinda on the way to grandma's that offers $1.50/pound pick your own. The best part is there are no additional fees like other places tack on. It's great. Unfortunately, we had late freezes this year, so the blueberries are more sparse than usual, but we still had fun:

Here's Sierra doing her job at clearing out the low branches:
Me, with Sedona in the back pack (she'd reach over my shoulder and pick herself a little snack straight off the bush) and grandma trying to ward off the heat:
Somehow or other, we've so far managed to completely avoid sibling rivalry. This is awesome in that our girls really do love each other as much as it looks like they do in these pictures. It's also a bit worrisome, because I'm quite certain they will gang up on us when they're older ;-)

Back at grandma's house, we made blueberry muffins and blueberry oat bars with some of the berries. Here's Sierra showing off her egg cracking skills:

Also, this weekend, I found myself with over 1 pound of green beans in the garden that needed to be used up, so I made green bean fries. The only thing I changed about the recipe is I followed some reviewer's suggestion to bake instead of fry them. They were very yummy dipped in ranch dressing. We snacked on them for the afternoon, then put the rest in the freezer. The reviews claim they freeze well, guess we'll find out. I also tried making Cookie dough filled cupcakes, which were a bitter disappointment. The recipe and reviews made it sound like if I just thoroughly froze the dough (which I did) and only baked for 20 minutes (which I did), I would get a chocolate cupcake with a gooey lump of uncooked cookie dough in the middle (which I did not). They were still tasty, but the dough cooked to the texture of a cupcake, so it's really just like regular cupcakes with chocolate chips. I suppose that's safer because of the whole "don't eat raw eggs" thing, but I LOVE cookie dough and was so looking forward to a cupcake and cookie dough in one. Oh well.

Very quick and dirty garden update----I hate early blight. Hate. It. There are extremely drastic differences between some of our tomato beds and others and in the future, tomatoes will be planted only where they can expect full sun first thing in the morning and at least most of the day. That said, we have gotten our first tomato, the green beans are growing like crazy, black beans are drying on the vine, black eyed peas were doing okay, but just didn't produce much....which is what happened last year, and I'm not sure why. Bell peppers and chili peppers are in full production now and okra looks great and like it will bloom any day now. Squash was hit with vine borers again this year. That happened right about the time I stopped spraying the Neem, so I'm thinking maybe that area needs a soil drench of Neem after this season's over (I believe the vine borers leave eggs in the soil over winter, then come up in the spring).