Posts Tagged ‘potatoes’
« Older Entries |potato frittata with green onions
Monday, October 25th, 2010
Garden potatoes are perfect for making a potato frittata. And according to Martha Stewart, who is sort of like the Merriam Webster of cooking terms, frittata is spelled with 2 “t”s first, and 1 “t” second.
Phew. I think I have been spelling it wrong.
I am such a huge fan of the potato frittata now. Almost as much as I love crustless quiche. I mean, essentially they are first cousins. Except that the frittata uses potatoes as a “base” with the egg goodness on top. The last time I made a potato frittata I used roasted red peppers. You can read the recipe and basic steps for making one complete with photos here.
This time I took the same basic recipe, but I used less roasted red peppers. Instead, I added whole green onions from the garden on top!
It was delicious! And a great way to use green onions that I had plucked from the garden that were starting to wilt in the fridge.
I serve the frittata on a bed of organic baby spinach and mixed salad greens.
Tags: autumn, crustless quiche, eggs, gardening, green onions, organic, potatoes
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october garden harvest!
Sunday, October 10th, 2010
This weekend was beautiful, filled with sunny weather and crisp, yet warm-ish Autumn temps in the low 60s. While Craig tackled sanding the side of our house that we’re going to re-paint asap, I set about harvesting a bunch of fruits and veggies from our garden before frost comes. Last night the temps dropped down to the upper 30s (brrrrrr!) so a real frost is imminent.
We are still growing huge bush lake beans! And here’s the last cucumber.
And last cantaloupe. And likely last pepper.
Today I cleared out all the dying watermelon and cantaloupe vines, alone with the cucumber vines, so the bounty above is our last for this year. Always a little bit sad.
This pear tomato plant is actually from seed from last year! It sprouted up
amongst our carrots, and I let it go.
Even though this tomato plant bloomed late, we are getting a few pear tomatoes!
I picked a few more roma and cherry tomatoes today, too. I got rid of all but one of our roma plants since they’re not doing great in this weather. Worst case scenario, I will pick the green romas that are left and see if they ripen on the windowsill.
I also harvested our green onions today!
And I picked the last acorn squash. Our squashes only grew to baby size this year. Bad year for squashes. But they are cute.
We also grew corn this year in a very limited amount. Most of our stalks did produce corn, but the ears were really tiny. Bummer. So I cut the stalks today and I will bundle them in some sort of ornamental way for our front door.
The biggest thing I did today was dig up the rest of our potatoes. They have been ready for weeks (months?) but I have been putting off the task. Thankfully, Craig’s Mom told me we could wait to dig up the rest of the potatoes, and they would be fine. I wasn’t sure, but she was totally right! I dug through our bed today and extracted the rest of the lot.
I am psyched because I wasn’t sure which varieties would be left. But it appears we got a harvest of a bunch of different organic types!
Looking forward to making another potato frittata this week!
Hope you had a great weekend. Hope you had a chance to relax. What have you been up to?
Tags: autumn, beans, cantaloupe, gratitude, green onion, organic, potatoes, raised garden bed, tomatoes
Posted in The Growing Season | No Comments »
potato frittata with roasted red peppers and feta
Thursday, September 9th, 2010
It has been so much fun to come up with recipes for my excellent potato harvest from the garden! I made a made a delightful potato frittata that generously stretched for two dinners. I was inspired by a recipe from Martha Stewart and embellished from there.
I started by scrubbing the dirt off of the harvested potatoes, giving them a good wash. I keep my potatoes dirty after harvest to “protect” them from light. So far it has worked very well. If you store your potatoes in a cool, dry place they will stick around for a lot longer.
The hues and colors are incredible! So pretty.
Once the potatoes were cleaned and patted dry, I sliced them thinly—about 1/8″ each.
This organic variety is called all-blue.
Then I sliced up two shallots.
I sautéed the potato slices and shallots in a deep-dish skillet with some olive oil, fresh ground pepper, and a dash of sea salt.
I cooked the potatoes for about 10 minutes until they were just tender.
Once the potatoes were pre-cooked, I pressed them down into the skillet to create the base potato layer. To that layer I added some diced roasted red peppers.
These organic roasted red peppers were a sweet Big Lots find for $1.50!
In a separate bowl I beat 8 organic eggs and added a little rosemary powder. Then I poured the egg mixture into the skillet to cover the potatoes. On top I sprinkled some crumbled feta cheese. Then I popped the skillet into the oven and baked the dish at 400°F for about 25 minutes. Oven-proof cookware is the best! One pan does it all.
Wallah! Potato frittata with roasted red peppers and feta!
I cut the frittatta into 8 pieces and served the slices on a bed of organic baby spinach and mixed greens.
Tags: baby spinach, gardening, organic, potatoes, summer
Posted in Cooking Adventures | 3 Comments »
how to harvest potatoes
Tuesday, August 24th, 2010
It’s time! The potatoes are finally ready! We started harvesting them last weekend.
After potato plants bloom, the leaves start to turn brown, and eventually the potato plant part dies. You can begin harvesting potatoes any time after the plant blooms (new potatoes!), but waiting a week or two after the plants turn brown helps the potatoes to develop thicker skins if you want to keep your potatoes around for a little while.
We pulled out a mini hoe, shovel, and wheel barrow and began to dig away!
Here is our little potato patch.
We planted 6 different varieties of organic potatoes this year, and you can read more about how we did it here. As we started digging, it was so fun to see what color the potatoes would be!
Hi potato! There you are!
Is it a cranberry red or red cloud? I’m not sure.
So you remove the dying potato plant from the soil, and then gently dig down into the soil sifting through to pick out the potatoes. Some of our potatoes were pretty big, some were very teeny, and just one was a little rotten. Ewwwww.
The rest came out quite dirty, but nice and firm with skins intact.
We have harvested 4 plants so far, and here is our bounty.
I love the color of the purply-blue ones. They are called all-blue.
We are quite thrilled with how our first year of growing potatoes has turned out! It was a nice harvest last week.
While our squashes failed this year, so far in August we have gotten tremendous amounts of bush lake beans, roma tomatoes, melons, and beets.
Now what to make? Should I roast the potatoes? Warm potato salad? Home fries? Scalloped? What is your favorite fun potato dish?
Tags: beans, beets, gardening, gratitude, organic, potatoes, summer, tomatoes
Posted in The Growing Season | 2 Comments »
good eats from the garden
Sunday, July 11th, 2010
After a long, hot week where we didn’t have the energy to do much of anything, I finally got inspired over the weekend by my garden veggies and local market finds to make some really fresh, yummy meals.
I tend to plan meals around what is ready to go out in the garden or what I can get a great deal on at the market. So Friday night’s meal was centered about a freshly picked zucchini from our garden and some beautiful red-skinned fingerling potatoes I had bought. I also picked up some organic chicken thin-sliced breasts too.
And here’s a tip about buying organic chicken and beef. Yes, they are pricier than the icky other meats at the market. However, my local food store carries a decent selection. And often they will mark down the price if it’s within a few days of the sell-by date. And then I get a sweet deal and stock up. Chicken can go right into the freezer. The beef I cook right away. And while it’s still more expensive than “regular” chicken and beef, I would rather pay a little extra. I consider it a treat rather than a dinner must-have. We go veggie many nights a week anyway. But I do loves me some good chicken.
I decided to cut the thin chicken breasts into long strips and sprinkled them with organic flour, sea salt, black pepper, and paprika. Then I sautéed them in a little organic butter and olive oil.
Because the breasts are so thin, they cook very quickly—about 2 minutes per side.
I arranged the cooked chicken on our plates, and then added a little freshly squeezed lemon juice and a dash of white wine to the pan to make a sauce with the leftover flour and brown bits. Meanwhile, I heated another pan with a generous amount of organic butter and the zest from the lemon I used.
I’ve pretty much decided that butter and lemon zest are just about the two most amazing things in the world.
I cut up the zucchini from the garden into thin round slices and added them to the pan along with some black pepper. I lightly sautéed them for about a minute and then I added some grated parmesan/romano cheese to the pan to mix in. The cheese melts and pairs wonderfully with the buttery lemon zest flavor. And the zucchini keeps its firmness because I only cooked it briefly.
With the potatoes I made a fingerling potato salad using tarragon, parsley, minced garlic, and minced shallot. I used a little white balsamic vinegar and mayonnaise for the dressing.
Very quick and easy to make. The fingerling potatoes cook with skins on and only take about 12 minutes.
Here’s the final result:
Paprika chicken, sautéed zucchini in lemon butter, and fingerling potato salad
Always exciting to make a non-salad meal!
Saturday night was back to salad, but I decided I wanted to make a different type of salad than our usual. We had plentiful fresh lettuces from the garden to use as the base. And I knew I wanted to use hard-boiled eggs because we had four eggs left in the fridge that needed to go. Plus I discovered 3 pieces of organic turkey bacon in the freezer. Perfect! I decided to make a modified cobb salad.
On top of the lettuces I added big chunks of roma tomato, garden zucchini, garden sugar snap peas, and red onion. Then I added quartered artichoke hearts and stems, roasted red pepper strips, sliced organic hard-boiled eggs, organic turkey bacon, and the leftover cheese from burgers from our BBQ last weekend. The dressing was italian.
Great to use up eggs and bacon. Plus artichokes and red peppers in a salad are so good!
Tonight was a bit tougher. How to top last night’s cobb salad? Not easy.
I centered tonight’s salad around garden lettuces and zucchini, of course, but I also wanted to use up some of our garlic scape excess. I still had a full bag of scapes in the fridge from our trip to Lull Farm a few weeks back. So I decided to repeat the butter lemon zest parmesan/romano sauce from Friday night. But this time I did it with zucchini, garlic scapes, and turkey kielbasa. It was awesome.
Salads really can be a filling meal if you get creative with them. We do salad probably 5 nights a week. Do I ever get burnt out on them? Oh, absolutely. But I love coming up with new, fun toppings!
Tags: garlic scape, herbs, organic, potatoes, salad, sugar snap peas, summer, tomatoes, vinegar, zucchini
Posted in Cooking Adventures, The Growing Season | 1 Comment »