weekly roundup: 7.25-7.29

happy friday everyone!!! we have been cooking up a storm here, celebrating our bountiful garden as well as our great farmers market finds. we found ourselves in the kitchen most of the week however, we made risotto and ratatouille, j’s favorite “green chips” and ginny joined us again this week with a recipe for sweet potato leaves. as well as cooking, we also spent some time in our garden, cleaning and trimming (kind of), and getting things ready for a new crop of lettuce.

see that baby up there, it’s our first lemon cucumber. since our first pick we have new ones ready to be harvested every day. not only are they pretty to look at, they are very yummy. they look somewhere between a lemon and a melon, but taste like a cucumber but better. it was time however to trim back our cucumber plants. they had just about taken over the garden. this week while harvesting i was bit by a spider, there is just so much that i when i grabbed a leaf i must of scared it. it wasn’t pretty, i boycotted the garden for the rest of the night.

i am not to sure what’s going on here. my point of this picture was to show you how big our tomatoes are getting. my kids insisted they be in the picture and pick the largest tomato we could find. j wanted to show you all how the tomato is almost as big as his head. the only thing, they refused to smile and only wanted to make funny faces (insert proud mama smile here). right now the tomato is sitting on our counter…fried green tomatoes? yep, for lunch today.

our yard has become a wild kingdom. every day something new pops up. we opened the back curtains to find a praying mantis sitting on our screen. the kids (and me) were fascinated. we stared at it for close to a half an hour until we decided to move it so it would not get eaten by my dog. it now lives in my vegetable garden. see that spider. it’s been living in my umbrella over our table. every night it designs this huge web. in less then an hour this spider takes over half of our back patio. i go out every night to check on him and see what he is up to. the first night i found him he was eating a lightening bug. i sat outside and watched him for an hour. last night his web was at least 6 feet long. it literally went across our whole back patio. when we wake up, he is sitting in the umbrella and the webs are gone. as well as the above, we also had a skunk, 3 deer behind our fence trying to break in and a coyote. it’s been a wild week here.

and now…the farmers market (of course). we scored big time this week. this is only some of our bounty. we also picked up some fresh, organic sausage as well as fresh bread and doughnuts (we can not live with out apple cider doughnuts). stay tuned for some great recipes, here is a little teaser.

i love summer, so much fresh food, i have been so spoiled this summer i am a little afraid of winter. there is nothing like fresh food and eating out on your patio. bbq’s and salads, my gosh it’s almost august! school is starting up in a month and the seasons are gong to be changing before we know it. enjoy every minute of it, i know i will be