Cheap & Cheerful for the week

Sunday
pinto bean burger patties
*brown rice cooked in chicken stock with garden herbs
*yellow crookneck squash, sauteed in chicken fat with garlic
*tomato wedges with 1000 Island dressing (leftover tartar sauce combined with ketchup)
*fruit salad of blackberries, bananas and early pears

Monday
*rosemary-bean soup, with garden rosemary, beet greens, 2 bunches of shallots, garlic, new potatoes, ham stock (w/ bits of meat). This would have been nicer made with white beans, but pinto beans were what I had.
scratch cornbread, using bacon fat for most of fat in recipe, oil for the rest
*cucumber-dill salad
*blackberry-rhubarb sauce

Tuesday
baked ham (I needed to make room in the freezers, so pulled a ham out to thaw, late last week)
*garden green and waxed beans
*sauteed zucchini and crookneck squash
*tomato wedges
*leftover brown rice, cooked in chicken stock w/ garden herbs
toffee bars (made with half chocolate chips, half butterscotch chips which were on sale)

Wednesday
leftover ham on scratch biscuits (using up whey from straining yogurt, and pureed "skimmings" from making the yogurt)
*pears, apple and blackberries (blackberry picking in the afternoon)
*tossed salad with leafy greens (baby chard leaves, watercress, lettuce), cucumber, and tomatoes
toffee bars

Thursday
*ham fried rice, with veggies from garden (shallots, carrots, cabbage, zucchini, green beans)
*fresh blackberries
toffee bars

Friday
ham and gravy on scratch biscuits
*cole slaw
*fresh pears

Saturday
*rice and beans, topped with fresh, chopped tomatoes
*cole slaw
*fresh blackberries
toffee bars

Sunday
*hamburgers on homemade buns, with garden lettuce and tomatoes and homemade dill pickles
*sauteed zucchini and yellow crookneck squash

Monday
*garbanzo bean soup, with garden veggies (chard, carrots, shallots, green beans, tomatoes), topped with cracklings from rendering ham fat
homemade French bread with pesto
*blackberries with vanilla yogurt

* indicates part of meal was prepared with fruit or veggies from the garden/orchard or the wild (foraged)

Our kitchen fridge looks rather bare these days, especially the produce drawers. That's because, this time of year, we don't store our produce in the fridge. We store it in the garden!

I realize that keeping a garden isn't possible or desirable for a lot of folks. This is just something that I used to dream about when I was younger, the possibility of growing most of our produce. In actuality, we grow about half of our fruits and vegetables. With a family of five, I feel we would need a much larger yard to devote to growing all of our produce, given that our growing season is limited, and we are surrounded by tall evergreens. We definitely eat what is in season and local -- ha ha!

Digging my shallots

Shallots are from the onion family and to me taste like a cross between mild garlic and onion. Their mild enough that they can be used raw, minced in salad dressings. I particularly like them, as they fill a gap in my cooking staples. I typically find 50-lb sacks of onions on sale in late August or early September. My shallots begin maturing in mid to late July. So, with the shallots, I can have something onion-y for that 5 to 6 week period in summer, when I am often all out of purchased onions.

I've been digging these 1 or 2 clumps at a time, to add to recipes. My shallots give me a 5 or 6 fold increase. For every 1 shallot I plant, I get 5 or 6 in return. I planted these in early spring this year. Previously, I had planted them in October, per the instructions I was originally given with my initial purchase of the shallot bulbs. But this past fall was a difficult one for me, and many things I might do in "normal" years was put off. So, I didn't plant these until early in March. And as it turns out, these shallots seemed to gain in size better than fall-planted ones. I'll give it a shot again next year, and see if my results are the same.

These shallots are descendants from my initial purchase 19 years ago. I bought 1 dozen shallot bulbs, planted them out, and saved a few more each year. This spring, I planted 36 shallots. I estimate I will dig a total of about 180 to 200 shallots from this planting. I will save about 40-45 from this year's harvest, and plant in early spring. I will lose a couple over winter, so 40-45 should give me roughly what I had this past year.

Oh, and I found that shallots keep well in a paper bag in the fridge, over winter. I was using up the last of the shallots from last summer, in late spring this year. I had forgotten that bag was in the fridge, and was happy to find it when I ran out of purchased onions.

I've only begun digging them. I could just dig them all at once, but I was just out in the garden, gathering some veggies for dinner and quickly dug an extra few bunches. I'll dig the remaining shallots over the course of the next week or two.

My garlic is also almost ready to dig. Garlic is so cheap in the store, that the only reason I plant it every year is that one year, I had several purchased cloves of garlic that sprouted over winter, so I planted them out. And lo and behold, they grew into garlic bulbs. I've continued on for about 16 years with descendants from those first few cloves of garlic. These do not size up as well as the garlic I find at the produce stand, but for something that's free, I'm happy to do it, and have slightly smaller heads of garlic. I haven't dug any this year, so who knows, maybe these will also have sized up better than usual.