Food, gardens, and preservation

We've been eating a lot of food from our garden lately.  It is very exciting to be able to enjoy the fruits (vegetables) of our labor.  Tonight for dinner we had beef stew, made with potatoes, carrots, onions and yellow squash from our garden.  Yay!  I haven't grown potatoes before, and it was so exciting to put a shovel down in the ground and find some potatoes under there.  I really had no idea what I was going to find --did they even grow?--and it was kind of like a little treasure hunt.

Here are some pictures of my garden today. The dahlias in front have been beautiful all summer.

 We've been loving the cherry tomatoes--at least some of us.  Lots don't even make it into the house.

The strawberries are growing fast and keep trying to spread down over the retaining wall.  That is not the direction I want them to go, silly strawberries. 

 Lots of beets!  A few onions.

 Even a pumpkin.  We'll see if it can be ready by Halloween.

Last month when my sugar snaps peas went crazy, I tried blanching and freezing some.  Hopefully we'll be able to enjoy these in stir fry all year.

Now, the zucchinis are going crazy.  Last year, I planted two plants and neither produced, so this year I planted three zucchini plants and two yellow squash.  They are all producting beatuifully, or shall I say...they...just...won't...stop....   I've made several batches of zucchini bread for the freezer and enough to eat (some with blueberries, some with chocolate chips) that my kids are asking me to stop.  I made muffins the other morning and had to clarify that they weren't in fact zucchini muffins (since we haven't had any other kind as of late).  I've made recipe after recipe using zucchini (lots of good ones on this blog:  http://www.thyhandhathprovided.blogspot.com/)  I chopped some and froze it that way.  We've given them to our neighbors and even resorted to dressing three up as orphan babies and leaving them on a doorstep.  Yes, we really did.  The kids thought it was the funniest thing ever. 

It is also blackberry season here in the Pacific Northwest, and I have been busy picking blackberries (with help from the kids sometimes) and then making jam and freezing them.  We've eaten lots fresh (especially William who eats them by the handful out of my bucket while I'm picking) and had pie and milkshakes and other yummy good stuff.  The best part about blackberries--they are everywhere and they are FREE!  I'm actually amazed at how few people around here take advantage of the fact that the earth spontaneously errupts with free food for a month every year and lots of folks just drive by and ignore it.  We are in a recession, people--you'd think they would jump at the chance for some free food. 

Look at that messy face!

Last weekend when my mom was in town, we canned nectarines and peaches.  Today I'm drying pears. The produce here in this area is amazing. 

My other new cooking adventure is making homemade bagels.  I got the recipe here and my kids love them.   I've made two batches in the last week alone and decided next time I will double the batch because we are eating them so fast.  They taste really good and are super cheap to make--much cheaper than buying bagels in the store.  [By the way, I don't have a bread machine anymore, but jI ust mix the dough in my bosch and then let it rise for 50 minutes or so before shaping them. ]