Gina* sent me an awesome package for my birthday – three pocket pie molds (lattice, star and apple) and pocket pie filling from Williams Sonoma!

I had never seen these before, but knew that I would love using them. I love baking fun things in the kitchen.

And they’re actually quite simple to make – make dough, cool it, make pies and fill, freeze, and bake! Of course, it will take me some time to perfect their appearance.

Cutting out the shapes is fun. The cutters are double-sided, so you use one side to cut it…

… and the other side to hold it while you fill it up!

When it’s all full, you put the other piece on top and crimp it.

Voila!

Like I said, I have to work on the appearance a bit. Even after making one, I realized I needed to make the dough thinner, and put flour in the cutter so it was easier to get the pie out.

You freeze them a bit…

… then you bake them. Yum-o!

What a fun, easy and tasty treat! Thanks Gina!

What other type of filling do you think I should try besides peach? Keep in mind, they could be sweet or savory!

*It’s worth noting that I have never met Gina in person, but have known her, and our friend Courtney, online for over 4 years, and the three of us have been sending weekly emails and gifts back and forth since we met. It’s amazing that you can meet such awesome people online. AND I finally get to meet Gina in person this week!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Now if  only Courtney could be there too!

You find a HUGE zucchini. Oops. Not sure what we are going to do with that. We didn’t like the taste of the first few zucchini we picked.

We also found a ton of cucumber. We picked 10 of them, but there were probably at least 5 more we could have taken. Hopefully I will be able to share these with some people in my office. I like cucumber, but I don’t think I could eat more than 3 or 4 by myself in a week.

Since the cucumbers are growing on vines above the ground, it’s really fun to look for them. It’s like looking for a hidden treasure! I am sure we will end up with a humongous one at some point too.

And… the green beans. Wow. We had so many to pick.

Sarcasm.

I am not even sure why I picked these. It’s about 1/4th of a serving for one person. I am so sad our green bean plants didn’t take off.

We’re still waiting to find out if a lot of the other produce will grow. The sweet potatoes are spreading out all over the place, and we have some green tomatoes. I pulled up a “carrot” today to take a peek and it was about the size of a pen cap. Maybe smaller. The rest of the produce is questionable.

At least we have had success with our cucumbers. I love the test of them, and think it’s awesome that we can just go to the garden and pick a cucumber (or 10) when we need one.

Any ideas on what I could do with all of these cucumbers?

I love putting them in salads. I have been eating a huge salad every day though. I like veggies and it, but it’s getting a bit old.

When we visited the garden on Sunday (after buying groceries on Saturday) we had quite a few things to pick: (from left to right above) cucumbers, green beans (!!!), zucchini, onions and lettuce (and basil, not shown). We had already bought lettuce and zucchini at the store. Oops.

We did a bit of weeding and watering on Sunday, along with the veggie picking. You can tell from the photo above that the ground is super dry. It is cracking in big clumps, making pulling weeds a bit of a pain. I wore the new gloves my mom gave me to pick weeds,

but soon discovered that sweat + gloves + weeding tool = ouchy blister in my hand. Duh.

(And unfortunately, I have to post things like this so I remember not to do them again. Okay okay, and I like to share the pain! Side note – notice the blood on my hand – yeah – I killed about 39139874 mosquitoes while I was there, and have 3980808 bites from them.)

Some things are doing better than others in the garden:

Doing well:

1. Cucumbers
2. Zucchini
3. Lettuce
4. Basil

Looking like crap:

1. Green Beans (this may be the only time we get to eat them, sad face)
2. Broccoli
3. Peppers

Questionable/too early to tell:

1. Sweet Potatoes
2. Carrots
3. Tomatoes
4. Onions

Only time will tell what happens!

For now, I am excited that we were able to eat something from our garden! We took our produce home and made a yummy salad with the lettuce and cucumbers, and steamed the green beans.

The cucumbers and green beans were especially good! The lettuce took forever to wash and was a bit bitter, but was good with all of the toppings on it.

I feel so happy that we are actually able to eat the stuff we are growing. Not sure why I was worried about it… guess I was just doubting myself!

Do you have any fun basil or zucchini recipes to share with me? We love zucchini on pizza, and sauteed with pasta… but I like to try new recipes too!

I’ve included some more photos of our garden in an extended post below.

The garden:

Cucumbers:

Green Beans:

Tomatoes:

Basil:

Oh yes. Onion rings.

My mom has been on the quest for the perfect onion ring mix for awhile now**. I saw a new mix at a store near our house, so of course, I brought a few boxes.

The onion rings turned out okay, but do you know what is even better fried? Cauliflower! My sister was craving some fried cauliflower, so she drove in to town just to buy some, and boy, was it good. So good, we ate it too fast to take a picture. And my mom made a brilliant mix to dip our fried goodies in – BBQ sauce and vegenaise (mayo). YUM!

So what else could we cover in batter and fry? Am I the only one who comes back from nearly every vacation feeling like I need to go on a detox diet?

Seriously, one year, I ate so much carnival food (parts of funnel cake, deep fried twinkie and snickers bars… maybe some other stuff?) and pizza that I woke up in the middle of the night feeling like I was going to barf. That didn’t happen this year, but I think we all felt a bit greasy the day after our fried food extravaganza.

I almost always overdo it with food when I am on vacation. I’m no good with the whole “moderation” thing. I don’t really beat myself up about it, but does anyone have any good tips on not going crazy with food while on vacation?

I think I should note, we brought some lettuce from our garden with all intentions to eat it. Oops. How could we have forgotten about it?

*Had to put something healthy on there!
**Hey mom, notice I didn’t mention how you went all apeshit a few years ago when the fryer wouldn’t work?!

Steven has been making a lot of bread, but we haven’t shared any of the recipes yet, since we don’t have an exact way to measure the ingredients – now we will!

Do you have a kitchen scale? For what do you use it? Do you like to make homemade bread?

Before

After

Pile of weeds – not as impressive as it looked in person!

Ha, I wish!

It really wasn’t that bad. We spent about two hours on Saturday pulling weeds in the hot sun*. Then we went back Sunday morning and spent a couple of hours planting our sweet potatoes, and various tomatoes and peppers (yeah, we’re a bit late on those), in the not so hot sun.

We started our sweet potatoes at home on May 15th (you can see some process photos here). They were ready to plant about a week ago. And they take about 120-150 days to fully grow in the ground, so it was time to get those bad boys in there! Maybe they will be done just in time for Thanksgiving?!

Waiting to be planted…

… and in the ground!

The soil in our garden is so wet and dense right now. It was a struggle to break it up to plant on Sunday. I spent a lot of time breaking up the soil with a shovel while Steven did the planting.

We planted a few kinds of tomatoes  (8 total plants) – lemon boy (3), heirlooms, red beefsteak, better boy and bonnie grape (2).

And we planted a few kinds of peppers (6 total plants) – big early red bell, bonnie green bell (2), yellow bell, purple beauty, and wenks yellow hots. And a little tiny basil plant (above the second “p” in “Peppers” in the photo above).

I hope our new plants are successful!

And our “older” plants? Well, some are doing better than others. The cucumbers and zucchini are going strong – no surprise there! The lettuce and onions appear to be doing well too.

The green beans and broccoli though? They seem to be struggling. And the carrots are coming along fine, it seems… only time will tell. Honestly, we have no experience in this and no idea what to expect!

I’ve been having a lot of fun doing all of this gardening! (That is, until I am dehydrated and hungry… hours in the sun make me cranky sometimes!) Like I said, I don’t really know what I am doing, but Steven is giving directions!

Do you like to tackle new projects, even if you know nothing about the subject?

Steven is really good at that. And like I said… I take direction. I told Steven I am the “Sous” gardener. Ha!

*I only had to call my grandma once to identify a plant. We were 99% sure, but I knew she had them (green beans) in her garden too, so thought I would ask.

Wait! How does a vegan eat potato salad and hot dogs?

Veganize them!

We’ve been craving vegan hot dogs. There are a few varieties out there too! Our favorite is the Smart Dogs Jumbo brand. If you find them in your area, consider yourself lucky! We’ve only found these a few times, so we had to use the regular (smaller) smart dogs.

Vegan hot dogs don’t equal a complete meal though… what goes with hot dogs? Potato salad*! Steven came up with a really good potato salad recipe on the fly on Saturday:

Vegan Potato Salad

Ingredients:

• 6 potatoes
• 1/3 c chopped onion
• 1/2 c chopped celery
• 1/2 c chopped carrots
• 4 garlic cloves, pressed
• 1/2 c veganaise
• 1 1/2 tsp mustard
• 1 1/2 tsp celery salt
• 1/4 tsp onion powder
• 1/4 tsp garlic powder
• Paprika (for looks)

Directions:

1. Peel and wash 6 potatoes. Cut in to small chunks (your size preference) and cook in boiling water until almost soft.
2. Remove potatoes with slotted spoon and put in large bowl. Save potato water and keep it boiling.
3. Cut up onion, celery and carrots. Press 4 garlic cloves. Blanche all in boiling potato water, remove (you can dump the water now).
4. Mix potatoes in large bowl with onion, celery, carrot and garlic.
5. Mix the remaining items, except the paprika, together in a small bowl. Mix in to larger bowl with potato and veggie mix.
6. Cool (if you are patient enough).
7. Sprinkle a bit of paprika and celery salt on top. Enjoy!

Yum! This potato salad was so good! I love how Steven can just whip things together without following a recipe! And this could obviously be made with regular mayonnaise in place of veganaise.

And how did we dress our dogs? Well, Chicago style**, of course!

That’s with:

• a poppy-seed bun (almost purchased, oops!)
• yellow mustard
• chopped white onion
• sweet pickle green relish (forgot, oops)
• peppers
• tomato wedges
• pickle spear
• celery salt (oops, forgot again)

Notice something missing? No ketchup. I am pretty sure if you eat a hot dog with ketchup on it in Chicago you will get shot. Just kidding! I am not sure where the “no ketchup” rule came from. Don’t tell anyone, but we each put ketchup on one of our dogs and each enjoyed that one more!

What is your favorite summer picnic food?

*Real complete meal after we added the ice cream at the end. Ha ha.
**As close as we could get, anyway!

Steven and I took a long bike ride yesterday in the beautiful sunny weather, then made our way over to the garden in the mid-afternoon to take care of this:

Our garden is in serious need of weeding. Unless you know what you are looking for, you can’t tell it’s a garden. It just looks like a wild, over-grown… mess.

Obviously, I have spent the past few weeks coming up with wonderful excuses as to why I could not weed the garden on that particular day. Too muddy. Too many bugs. Too late. Not enough time. I’m hungry. I’m moody. It’s raining. You get the idea.

So, we finally made our way over there yesterday (with a smile on my face). It was weird – it was beautiful and sunny all day, but as soon as we got in to the car to head to the garden, it got really dark. Optimistically, I told Steven we should just go, and if it started to rain, we would head home.

Ha.

We get there and Steven shows me how to pull the weeds out. I start to get in to the groove of it, wondering why I put it off for so long, it’s not that bad…

And the storms roll in. We notice there are very dark clouds behind us. And they are moving fast. We hear lighting, but there is no rain so we keep working (smart, I know). It starts to rain a little bit and we hear a strange howling noise. I run* to the end of the fence to see what is going on, and just see the dark clouds. I run* back to the garden and tell Steven I don’t see anything, and it starts to POUR. We pack everything up as quick as we can and start running* back to the car, which is pretty far away. We don’t make it. The cold rain and hail is hitting us hard so we have to stop outside of the police station.

You can’t tell, but the rain is pouring down and we are standing under a little awning (you can see that the trees are bent over).

And wait.

And wait.

A cop comes out to ask us what the hell we are doing. We explain. I don’t think we looked like gardeners – both of us had workout gear on. Another cop pulls up and asks what we’re doing there. We explain again.

And wait.

And wait, watching the lighting.

Then we nut up and make a made dash for the car. We’re completely soaked by the time we get there.

I think we spent 15 minutes in the garden, if even, before it started pouring**.

It sounds like it was a good thing I was not at work (and I wonder if this is why I didn’t have any work emails in the afternoon?). The wind was so strong (70 mph) that it blew windows out of the “Willis” (Sears) Tower. And apparently the commute was bad? I did say to Steven, “I can’t imagine having to commute home in this.” It’s one thing to get in your car soaking wet and drive a few miles home. It’s entirely different to sit on a freezing cold train for one and a half hours, soaking wet (been there).

So, guess what we are doing today?

Back to the garden…

Have you been caught in the rain lately?

*Ah, running. I am really itching to run again. It felt so good to run in the grass, in the rain. I could have stayed out there all day. Not sure how my legs would have felt.
**And yes, I realize all this rain is helping our garden. We haven’t had to water it in quite some time. I like that.

Okay, mostly onions:

some cucumber:

uh… green beans (PLEASE PLEASE GROW YOU LITTLE GUYS!):

And what has the potential of being lettuce** (my mom told me it’s not a weed if it grows in a straight line right where I happened to plant seeds):

Now, I have something really exciting/creepy to show you guys, but first, I must show you Steven’s watering technique:

(That is before we got smart and brought empty cat litter containers)

There is a big container of water for the gardens (and they village says they water twice a week) but the container is at least 100 feet away from our garden… which is a lot to walk when you have to make 5 or more trips carrying 2 full cat litter containers of water!

So we’ll have buff (or, buffer, for me) arms by the end of summer.

On to the exciting/creepy – when we were first planning our garden we decided to grow sweet potatoes, BUT, could not find the little starter spud things for them anywhere. Since Steven is super resourceful, he figured out how to make them at home.

You cut the bottom of a sweet potato off, and put it in a jar so that part of it is above water and part of it is below, like so:

We started the sweet potatoes on 5/8/10

After a few weeks, they start to look really creepy (picture taken 5/29/10):

They grow out these vines called “slips” as well as create roots through the potato.

Slip

Potato roots (and you can see a slip starting to grow)

After the slips grow, you take them out of the potato, put them in water, then the slip grows roots. Then you can plant the slip. We still have a ways to go. Only one potato seems to be a go-getter. The others are lagging.That’s okay – we still need to buy and plant tomatoes and peppers! It will be a late harvest!

I must be getting in to this whole “gardening” thing since I am watching the forecast and hoping for rain (okay, that might be because I don’t want to haul water…).

Any sweet potato recipes to share? I don’t think I have ever had one.

*I am not celebrating National Running Day… as I cannot run.
**Or as I told Holly this weekend, salad. Yes, I am growing salad.

After I was served bacon and cheese on my salad for lunch, along with chicken as the main course, I took it as a sign from the universe. It is time to start eating meat again.

No more vegan Kim.

Ha! You guys know I am just kidding, right?!

I was served those things for lunch but I politely asked that they bring me a vegan dish (of course, this started a whole conversation I did not want to have with a bunch of people I just met!) and they did. And this burrito? It has Gardein “meat” in it!

Steven shared* this article with me about certain Chipotles trying this Gardein alternative. None of the locations are in Chicago, but you guessed it – there is one in Washington DC !

They call this fake meat the “Garden Blend” (see on menu below). I ordered it in a burrito, along with beans, rice, peppers + onions, guac, lettuce and salsa. YUM! It added a chewiness and spiciness to the burrito that was much welcomed. And it is a lot different than tofu!

I wanted to make sure to tell the manager how awesome I thought it was, in hopes they will continue to have it and bring it to other stores. He told me Dupont Circle is the only Chipotle that has it (contrary to the article) and that people come in from PA to eat it. He said they have had it four months and it has been a huge success.

Do you share product/service feedback with the provider – whether good or bad?

It’s really easy to share negative feedback on a product/service, but I try to share positive feedback as well. As much as we love to bitch, it is important to let people know what they are doing right! I will call the store owner tomorrow!

Now the question is, did I run far enough with Carla today to earn a burrito (and chips)? Ha ha… like I care! You will have to wait until Sunday to hear about my fun run with Carla! BUT, if you are a runner and looking for new blogs to read, check hers out! She runs in DC and is getting married in Brazil in November! I think her blog is very interesting!

Me and Carla after our super sweaty run

*Yes, Steven and I share blog posts with one another on google reader – ultimate dorkiness!