spring time veggies

one of the many luxuries of living out here in the country is being able to have a v. v. big garden. well, we actually have many raised beds in a big bit of land (mainly dug by the family workhorse, a.k.a. dedicated gardener, alnis) because the soil is a bit cruddy, mostly clay, very wet, in need of major TLC.

watermelon starting to vine

in the fall before we had realized that we weren't going to be able to just have a big ole' garden, clay and i rented a rototiller and dug up the designated area in a bit of a rush since we were already late to plant our 4 (or 5?) varieties of hardneck garlic. fortunately the garlic made it in in the nick of time and now we are delighting in the consumption of millions & zillions of garlic scapes. more like dozens but almost too many to eat, that is for sure. scapes are the immature "flower" (apparently they aren't actually the flower but they look like they would be) stalks that are removed to encourage the plant to focus energy on the bulb. they are a bit milder than regular garlic & you can eat them raw or cooked. i think they're seriously delicious.

there are still many more to be harvested. holy scapetown batman. 

i had some last year from the farmers market and under liz's influence made these smitten kitchen biscuits using cheddar + scapes instead of blue cheese + scallions. really really delicious. i've really gotten into experimenting this year because we have so many. i've been making the salad dressing from this recipe from sarah b. using scapes instead of cloves, made pesto with almonds & parmesan, chopped them up into scrambled eggs for my pals post-party, and yesterday sauteed them in their all their curled glory to find that not only does the flavour mellow considerably with cooking, their taste & texture becomes a little like green beans!

my homegrown breaky. check out the colour of our ladies' yolks! 

pesto is not that glamourous to look at