How Does Your Garden Grow?

My house has been busy, busy for the last four weeks, no time to write a blog!  The flower beds are all done and I finally got the vegetable garden planted, not done yet though.  I am waiting to see if my Critter Ridder truly does work in keeping the animals at bay.  So far it has, it's been 1 week and it's still standing.   I may fence it, but only if the animals get out of hand and eat my plants.  I would like to keep it natural looking, putting up a fence is a pain and makes it hard to get in and out of, kind of like Fort Knox! I love wildlife but it frustrates me when all they do is ruin everything I plant.

I planted corn, beets, kale, spinach, green beans, yellow beans, purple beans, peas, sugar snap peas, zucchini, yellow squash, peppers, eggplant, tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuces, fennel, onions and carrots.  It sounds like a lot but I didn't put a lot of plants in, just enough for us.  I also planted herbs - basil, oregano, rosemary, Italian parsley, chives, sage, mint and thyme that are on the deck.  I love using fresh herbs all throughout the year when I cook, I also use them in drinks, for cool refreshing flavors.

This is my secret weapon, supposed to last for 30 days, we'll see how that goes!

Delicious Sauces (Gravies)

We made three sauces, or gravies if you will, for the Italian Feast Dinner.  I had an Irish mother who learned to cook Italian food from her Italian/Sicilian mother-in-law, but my mother still called "the gravy" the sauce.  So that's how I grew up calling it "the sauce" instead of "the gravy".  Three big pots of sauce for 25 big appetites to feed.  So here they are and they were fabulous.

Red sauce with homemade meatballs and braciole.

 Fresh clam sauce (recipe in an earlier blog)

 Fresh spinach and portobella mushrooms in a garlic olive oil sauce.

 And hey, you can't eat pasta without Italian bread, right?  You need something to sop up all those sauces. So, I made this ciabatta bread with garlic cheese butter (Wegman's) and fresh Pesto (Costco). Cut the bread in half, spread with garlic cheese butter then spread the pesto on top of that.  Broil until melted, browned and crispy, slice and serve hot.  Yummy!