Veggie Overload

Well I made it through a week as a Girl Scout day camp counselor relatively unscathed. Actually, I probably had more fun than Bailey did -- you're not allowed to have your own kid in your unit. Each unit leader was given pretty free reign outside of a few scheduled activities so we did a lot of hiking and creek walking. It was tiring though, I was also a bus monitor and had to be at the bus by 7:45 a.m. and couldn't leave until everyone was picked up in the afternoon. It was hectic, hot and humid. The camp, Camp Shanituck in Bullitt County, Ky, just south of Louisville was pretty and mostly shady. Anyway -- my garden didn't suffer too much from the neglect. I got a chance to pick beans and cucumbers in the evenings. I also made my yellow squash with the oregano and chicken broth for dinner one night -- this time I added some grape tomatos and tossed it with pasta.

I froze green beans and edamame today. I also made 2 little containers of pesto and froze one of those. I'm not sure that I like my basil. I have 3 sizes of basil in my basil patch -- normal large-leaf basil that volunteered from plants 2 years ago, small leaf Summerlong basil (I liked it better last year, it seems the leaves were slightly bigger) and some mutant basil with leaves that are so tiny it's ridiculous. The small leaves are very time consuming to strip -- my pesto had more than a few stms processed in. I've never dried basil before -- I may give that a try -- maybe with the oregano as well. I'm still steadily adding cucumbers to my refrigerator pickle crock. I was looking in a Mediterranean cookbook I have and may try some Tzitliki (?) Greek cucumbers in a yogurt and garlic sauce. It's hard to figure out what to do with all this bounty. I also found a couple of intriguing zucchini recipes - one for zucchini lasagna - using long strips of zucchini instead of noodles - and one for a zucchini and basil muffin.

My next challenge is to figure out what to do with all my jalapenos. I wound up with 4 jalapeno plants out of my 7 pepper plants because I couldn't remember which was which when 2 bit the dust and I wanted to make sure I had some for salsa. Unfortunately timing is not my friend this year since my tomatos are about 3 weeks behind I usually pick the first one by the second week in July. I looked up a recipe for green tomato and jalapeno salsa that I may try. I'm also dying to get some cream cheese and make some poppers. Now my question is -- will the tomatos ripen before the plants keel over entirely -- they look pretty sad.

I did get out there and weed some this evening. We had quite a storm last night so the ground was wet and it was pretty easy to pull the quickweed that had taken over. I have some Swiss Chard and Yellow Beet, as well as more carrot and Heatwave lettuce I'd like to put in, but I'm not sure if I should wait til it's a bit cooler.