Cheap & Cheerful Suppers for mid to late July

My daughters and I were not the only ones picking blackberries the other evening. There was a mom and her young son picking, as well. They filled an ice cream pail of fresh blackberries. My daughters and I picked 3 quarts before heading home for dinner. We had blackberry shortcake that night, and was it ever yummy! Something to repeat, for sure.

I've been putting more effort into our dinners, lately. Not fancy, but terrific meals, nonetheless. Here's what we had this past week:


Thursday
black bean burgers topped with quickie ketchup
homestyle macaroni and cheese
sauteed kale in bacon fat
fresh blackberries w/ vanilla yogurt

Friday
baked chicken smothered in pesto
brown rice
yellow wax beans and diced tomatoes
cucumber-dill salad

Saturday
chicken and black bean tostados, with lettuce, canned tomatoes, black olives, plain yogurt, cilantro, green onions
preserved figs

Sunday (son comes home after a week out of town)
homemade pizza
cucumber-dill salad

Monday
hamburgers on homemade buns
oven fries
large tossed salad with leafy greens, beets and cooked green and wax beans (all from garden -- whoopie!)
raspberries, blueberries and blackberries, topped with whipped cream

Tuesday (blackberry picking in evening with daughters)
refried beans and rice
sauteed garden greens in bacon fat (beet greens, Swiss chard, mustard greens, kale)
blackberry shortcake

Wednesday
ham sandwiches, with mustard, spiced fig jam and lettuce
creamy tomato-basil soup
blackberry-rhubarb crisp

Yesterday . . .

. . . I got up way too early. I've now decided that 4:45 is NOT a good time to get up and make coffee, no matter how awake I feel at the time. I discovered that I did NOT get more done, simply because I got up earlier.

. . . I enjoyed some time downloading music for free though our local library. Our library participates in Freegal, a free music service available to library patrons, which allows 3 free downloads per week, and 3 hours of streaming per day. They have a pretty good selection of music, but not everything I might want. I am building a nice library of music for myself, though, and for free.

. . . I went blackberry picking again with my daughters after work. We picked 3 quarts of blackberries. We could have picked even more, but we were hungry for dinner, so will plan on coming back to that spot again another day.

. . . We used some of those blackberries for blackberry shortcake. Who says shortcake HAS to be made with strawberries?! This was yummy. I baked the shortcakes earlier in the day, using a sweet, rich biscuit dough. After spooning the fresh blackberries onto the shortcakes, I drizzled some runny blackberry syrup (from last year), then topped with whipped cream. Yum!

. . . I checked the pumpkin patch and it looks like I have a couple of pumpkins and spaghetti squash developing already. I'm making plans for some September meals.

. . . I found the last of a package of corn tortillas in the fridge, needing to be used up. So, I fried some chips for my daughters to take in with their lunches tomorrow. Home-fried tortilla chips are so delicious, and not overly salty, like a lot of commercial chips.

. . . Although I was tired all day, I did get a fair amount of housework done, laundry, vacuuming and  bathrooms cleaned for the week.


How was your day?

Garden accessories on the cheap

There's something about elevating an urn or a planter that gives that piece distinction in the garden. Like putting a piece on stage.

I've drooled over many lovely urns and pedestals in catalogs, over the years. What I'll usually do is find the planter/pot/urn that I like at a place like Home Depot, on clearance online, or if I'm lucky, at a yard sale, but make-do on the pedestals.

The rear planter in the above photo gets it's elevation from none other than an 8 X 16 concrete block, that we already had in the stack of leftover construction materials. I topped the concrete block with a ledge stone, leftover from some stonework on the front of the house a few years ago.

Here's an urn that I saw in a pricey catalog many years ago. They had it paired with a very nice pedestal. They wanted about $50 for the pedestal, alone. I found the urn, on clearance at another online catalog, minus the pedestal. I checked around with our extra supplies, and found that these small square pavers fit the base of the urn perfectly. I placed a stack of 2 pavers on top of some larger pavers, for a pedestal effect -- all from our stack of leftover construction materials.

Here's another, smaller urn, from Home Depot. While not a perfect fit, this 8 X 8 concrete block makes a good enough pedestal for this urn and it's mate, the two which are flanking the steps down into the sunken garden.