A Little Freebie From My Gardening Starts

Two weeks ago I started my first-of-the-season seeds in a flat under lights. This afternoon I started a second flat. While working on indoor gardening, I noticed the first flat's seedlings needed thinning. About half of the flat was seeded in cabbage family plants -- two types of kale, cabbage, and Brussel sprouts. Some of the seeds I used were several years old, so I was generous with the seeds when planting. This meant there were bunches of seedlings crowding each planting cell. Some thinning looked to be needed.

You know what's in this salad spinner? The cabbage family seedlings that I thinned. (I left one stout seedling per cell in the flat.) Since the entire plant is edible with cabbage family plants, I added these thinnings to our dinner salad tonight, mixing in the end of the lettuce and red pepper bought last Friday and some lentil sprouts. The salad was delicious, looked bright and interesting, and made use of the baby plants that I pulled out of the flat to allow each cell to produce a single healthy plant.

A nice bonus from my gardening efforts.

Helping Each Other With Ideas for Stockpiled Excesses (Need Your Input)

As I was working in the pantry organizing this morning, I noticed I have a lot of peanut butter, like a whole lot of peanut butter. It seemed like we were eating a lot of peanut butter on a regular basis . . . until we weren't. Counting up my jars of peanut butter reminded me of Laura's comment the other day about getting a great deal on canned tuna in EVOO, good enough deal to really stock up. I think we all do this from time to time, find such a great deal we really stock up. Laura's tuna has an expiration date pretty far into the future, so she should be good to use her tuna supply before expiry. Some of my peanut butter, however, has already passed the sell-by date.

So here are some ways I'm cooking with peanut butter to use up my excess.

• Live and Learn's curried pumpkin-peanut soup (I sometimes use additional peanut butter in this soup when I want it to be a good source of protein for a meal)
• peanut butter energy balls (peanut butter, honey, milk powder, raisins)
• peanut butter on apple wedges ( a favorite lunch of mine)
• peanut sauce on noodles or rice

I'm looking for ideas, recipes and links for using peanut butter, if anyone here has suggestions.

And here's how we can help each other. If you have an ingredient or food in excess, mention it in the comments and those of us who have ideas that we've tried, can chime in.

My ideas for Laura and her bonus supply of canned tuna:

• Laura, you already mentioned tuna salad -- one of my childhood favorites was tuna melt, basically an open-faced tuna sandwich, topped with cheese and broiled until the cheese was melty
• tuna cooked with tomato, caper, olives, and garlic, tossed with pasta, similar to this recipe on Food Network 
• my mother's 1950s and 60s favorite way to serve tuna --Mexican tuna salad with avocado dressing -- canned tuna, lettuce, tomatoes, olives, shredded cheese, Fritos-type corn chips, avocado salad dressing (mashed avocado, oil, lemon juice, chili powder, salt)

What are some of your favorite ways to use either peanut butter or canned tuna fish?