Gardening update: July 1

We’ve been away over the really hot days this weekend. Luckily, we have self-watering pots for all our vegetables, so we didn’t need to rely o a neighbour to come and water our plants.
This greeted us when we came home:

The type of cherry tomato that yielded this lovely bunch is called “Tiny Tim”. They don’t grow too high, don’t need pruning and yield fantastically. A perfect plant for windowsill farming! I think we’ll be using this one exclusively next year.

Sadly, some of the chilies seemed to have gotten too much sun despite plenty of water and dried out. But I have a nice palette of chilies anyway:

I got a whole bowl of Jalapeños that ripened before the plants died. I’ll have to do some emergency pickling and freezing tonight before we go away on vacation again! (No, not freezing the pickles. :D)
(Yes, yes, that’s my acrylics paint palette with dried-in paint on it. I thought it made a fun contrast. :D)

Bento #236

There we go, long hiatus but now it’s two in a row!
Just something quick and cobbled together, but nice anyway: Leftover Bulgur and cherry tomatoes from the vine in the small box, Ajvar, broccoli, hardboiled egg, pieces of veggie burger and (because I ran out of ingredients and had lots of space left) half a banana chocolate muffin in the big box.

Bento #235

I have a few more boxes that might be postworthy lined up, but I just can’t get myself to blog very much recently.

For a nice midsummer picknick – mushroom and zucchini quiche, homegrown cherry tomatoes and sugar peas, and bulgur.

Happy midsummer!

And a few random summery pictures for you:

More things to do with homegrown tomatoes

Yes… I need to update more often, sorry :(

It’s simple, but here’s the blog post that reminded me to make this more often.

Mother’s Day (in Sweden)

Sweden is celebrating Mother’s Day a little later than other parts of the world, and it’s May 31st this year. Happy Mother’s Day, mom! *waves*

According to a survey done earlier this year, most moms wish for a dinner rather than fancy presents. So take them out to a restaurant – or dine in!
Here’s a lovely salad I recently made when she visited. It’s made from boiled Spelt wheat, which has a delicious and nutty taste that works wonderfully together with the sweetness of the vegetables and the saltiness of the feta.

For 2 persons, I used:
1 measuring cup (100ml) of dry spelt boiled in salt water until al dente
150g feta, crumbled
1 big handful of herbs and leafy vegetables from the garden, including several types of basil, rucola, cress and other herbs, sliced
1/2 red bell pepper, sliced
3 sundried tomatoes, sliced thinly
1 red onion, cut into rings and fried until caramelized
Olive oil (I used some from the sundried tomato jar), lemon juice, freshly ground pepper
You can see on that picture that I also used mushrooms the time I took the photo, but I didn’t think they made a very good addition. The rest of the vegetables are all very strong in taste and harmonize with the rest of the tastes.
I have tried both cooling the spelt before mixing and mixing it in directly. I think I like to mix it in while still warm so the feta can coat it completely, but it’s up to your individual taste – both is good!

So what were you doing for your mom on Mother’s Day?

Gardening update, May 27

Mm… there’s not really anything that beats food grown in your own home. Jalapeños, cherry tomatoes, rucola and basil, all homegrown. (Bought the mozarella and the baguette, due to a certain lack of buffalo around here and being out of flour :) )

I have a few old-ish pictures to post too, so keep an eye out for more stuff coming soon. I’m not dead, just not very inspired recently. Hope this changes soon!

Bento #232 – May 1 bento

It’s May 1st, which is a red day in most of Europe – so I brought out my picknick boxes and made a picknick bento for myself and the BF! We went out to look at flowering trees (finally!) and birds in the nature preserve and had a snack of those somewhere in between.

4 plain onigiri with nori stars, a strawberry bottle with soy sauce and a packet of umeboshi furikake in the top layer. Oranges, the first of our homegrown sugar snaps, hardboiled egg, homegrown cress, falafel, red bell pepper flowers and some chocolate easter eggs in the foreground.

I didn’t even bother making the upper layer sealable – I just folded down the lower layer,put the onigiri layer on top, put saran wrap on it and tied it into a napkin for carrying :) I need an onigiri box!

Why, hello there…

…little Pisum sativum, commonly known as sugar pea.

Gardening update: 2009-04-19

My windowsill garden!

How’s your growing going? Can you guess the plants this time?