Cheap & Cheerful Meals: Using as Much Garden Produce as We Can

Friday's pizza and movie night -- we watched Indiana Jones and the Raiders of The Lost Ark

Friday
homemade sausage, mushroom and basil pizza
orange segments and fresh figs
garden green beans
cabbage and celery slaw
blackberry pie

I can't quite say that I "found" an orange in the spare fridge, as I've known it was there since late last winter. What I did find was the motivation to use the orange. I'd been hanging on to this last orange so I could make a batch of candied orange peel (how I make candied orange peel here). Friday afternoon, I peeled the orange for segments to go with fresh figs in our dinner, then sliced and candied all of the peel. I'd intended to chop and freeze the candied peel for baking with this winter, but we ate it all.

My cabbage has not grown to a good size at all this year. So, I've been plucking off the outer leaves from several heads to slice thin and make into slaw. We will still get some small heads of cabbage, but this way we will get more food from each head overall. The outer leaves tend to be tougher and less crunchy than the inner portion of cabbage. Because of this, I slice the leaves as thin as I can. 

I picked blackberries Friday afternoon for Saturday and Sunday's breakfasts.

Saturday

Saturday
refried beans (cooked from dried beans) and homemade salsa

rice
sautéed kale
cucumber and tomato "salad" (cucumbers with a light dressing and tomato wedges)

Sunday

Sunday

kale and onion frittata

garden green beans

tomato wedges

mashed potatoes

blackberry pie

I picked blackberries again on Sunday for the family's breakfast the next day. At the same time, my daughters picked a large bucket of blackberries to make a pie for us. Our plan is to pick and use as many blackberries as we can for daily meals while they're still good. This will help us stretch out the other fresh fruit that we have coming in or already harvested and stored.

Monday

Monday

teriyaki chicken and garden vegetables, using leftover pickle juice in the marinade

leftover rice mixed with cooked broken noodles

garden salad, using leftover pickle juice in the dressing

fresh figs

blackberry pie

Tuesday -- I promise there's a hot dog under the relish and mustard in that bun.

Tuesday Cook-Out

hot dogs in homemade buns from freezer

kale, apple, celery, pecan, raisin salad in a rosemary-rhubarb dressing (rosemary-rhubarb preserves with mayonnaise)

grilled onions and squash (a winter squash that fell off the vine long before ripening, peeled/seeded, chopped)

blackberry-rhubarb jello 

s'mores

The blackberry-rhubarb jello can be made with any fruit that will gel (these won't -- pineapple, figs, mango, kiwi, prickly pear), stewed, fresh, or frozen. Instructions for making gelatin with real fruit or fruit juice are in this link.  For this batch, I stewed rhubarb and blackberries together until the rhubarb was soft. I then sweetened and puréed the stewed fruit and mixed in the softened plain gelatin. On the plate for Tuesday, it's in squares. that's because I wanted the gelatin to set up quickly, so I poured the mixture into a shallow baking dish. It set up in about 3 1/2 hours.

Wednesday

Wednesday

blackberry cheesecake French toast with blackberry syrup

steamed green beans

tomato, cucumber, cheese salad (in mustard vinaigrette made by rinsing out a mustard jar with vinegar, adding garlic, additional vinegar, oil and salt)

Thursday

Thursday

homemade black-eyed pea, hot dog and vegetable soup

bruschetta toast, using garden tomatoes, garlic and basil, plus cheese on homemade bread

blackberry pie

Other meals

After I baked 3 loaves of toast and sandwich bread on Monday, I baked a batch of blackberry granola. To do this, I mashed a large handful of fresh blackberries and combined with sugar, salt, vegetable oil, and dry oats before baking in a slow oven. My daughter baked 2 blackberry pies this past week. We're trying to use all of those fresh blackberries before the season is over. 

Another breakfast item I baked this week was an apple snack cake. The squirrels had been up to their usual mischief in the apple trees and knocked 4 apples off. I picked those up, washed them, cut off the bruises, and chopped to add to an eggless, milk-less snack cake, roughly following the recipe in this link. I followed the one for the chocolate cake, omitting the cocoa powder, chocolate chips, and vanilla. I added 1 teaspoon cinnamon, 1/4 teaspoon ground cloves, and 1/4 teaspoon ground allspice, then adding in the 4 chopped apples. It's delicious! I would normally bake an apple crisp to use for breakfasts, but my oat allergy is acting up and I wanted to have some of this.

I also finally got to making another batch of yogurt. I needed whole milk for this, so I had to wait until I went to Fred Meyer for the monthly grocery shopping. Breakfasts were some combination of granola, toast, apple snack cake, yogurt, apples, blackberries, orange juice, coffee, tea, milk, eggs, and peanut butter.

For lunches, I showed my daughter how to make sorrel and squash blossom soup one day. She also put together a couple of quick salads for us and we added tomatoes (most often as tomato sandwiches), apples, raisins, bread, cheese, peanut butter, eggs, hot dogs, rice and beans/lentils, lentil sprouts, and various leftovers.

We are still trying to live as much as possible on what we have at home and in the garden. I did go grocery shopping this week. I'll post on that later. But I will say I bought very, very little produce -- 3 bananas and a handful of jalapeños for making salsa. 

The garden is not exactly winding down, it's changing. The produce items that like the heat are winding down, but the cool weather vegetables and fruit are just getting started. The fall raspberries have just begun this week. I have a few plums, apples, crabapples, green figs (unripe figs), and pears to harvest at the end of the month or in very early October. In vegetables, we still have cabbage, kale, Brussel sprouts, turnips, beets, carrots, spinach, mâche, potatoes, onions, pumpkins, radish greens, celery, and Swiss chard for early to mid-fall meals. Oh my goodness. It's been a lot of hard work with this year's garden, as I've tried to grow as much of our food as I could. Some things didn't grow that well, while others surprised me with their bounty. But I kept working at it as best as I could. The bulk of my work in the garden will be behind me after the potatoes and carrots are harvested the first week of October and I finish making pickles, relishes, and salsa. As odd as it sounds, I'm a tiny bit glad this is an off year for plums. Harvesting, pitting, and drying all of those is a week's work in itself.

Anyways, these were our meals this past week. What were the highlights of your week? Have you made candied orange peel before? What did you think of it? Some folks don't care for it. My family seems to like it. Do you ever make jello with fruit or fruit juice and plain gelatin? Amy D. from Tightwad Gazette fame inspired me to make fruit jello with her description of making blackberry jello with puréed fresh blackberries. Her thinking on using fruit to make a jello dessert was that this would be a healthier way to use up blackberries compared to lots of pies or other baked desserts. My family ends up eating these fruit gelatins as servings of fruit with meals. One can only eat so many pies, right?

Wishing you a wonderful weekend!