It is SO Springtime -- Eye Candy From Today's Trip to Merrifield Garden Center!

Even the pots look all shiny and happy and excited about EOS (Early On-set Spring). (Below)

What a glorious day, and I can't wait to come back to Merrifield later in the week sans HoneyHusband so I can lollygag for hours.  The place is huge and has everything, and best of all, the people are fantastic.  Barry helped us first with choosing our new shade loving bush for in front of the house, and he handed me off to the woman who knew everything about the early salad greens to plant, and she handed me off to the soil guy who showed me what I needed to put them in pots rather than the garden proper.

Rosebushes, waiting to go to their forever homes.

I loved this plant/flower.  Helleborus.  I know I have seen them in a million beautiful colors before, but had never seen this gorgeous pale sage tipped in pink with yellow centers.  When I got home I discovered they are the "plant of the week" at Merrified with specific information on their website here.

And back at home:

Hubby planting the new bush between the two laurels.  It was tragic to take up the hydrangea, but it just got no sun in front of, and right up against, the house, which faces North.  Don't get me started on stupid design and planning.  No excuse for it being built 80 years ago.

Pear tree starting to bloom in the backyard!  So pretty.

Honey Husband had to trample a few daffodils putting in the new bush.  I salvaged a few -- I think these mostly white ones look perfect in that little blue vase I bought in Morocco.  Yellow and blue dish behind it I bought in the restaurant district in Tokyo.  In it are tomatoes from the Schlagel Farms greenhouse -- they come to the Delray Farmers Market year round, thank goodness.  I asked why he had green tomatoes this time of year and he said he broke a stem while he was picking some red ones and voila, I will have fried green tomatoes this week!

One last shot from the garden center.  Om Garden Frog says: Namaste!

Busy Girl's Tomato, Goat Cheese & Arugula Flatbread -- Gorgeous + Tasty Enough to Bring to Someone Else's House

When I made this, I hoped it would be yummy.  It was, and I lucked out that it is pretty, too!  I based this on a great looking recipe from the Prevention website called  "Arugula and Goat Cheese Pizza." I didn't have the recipe handy when I was cooking so I improvised. I ended up changing the recipe substantially, so I have listed that I am only putting my recipe down at the bottom.  Please refer to the other, also.  The site has great, healthy recipes.

I  LOVED how it turned out.  So elegant and delicious.  

About four teaspoons or less of oil.  I used canola instead of olive so I could cook those onions at a higher heat in order to finish cooking them more quickly.  You can see the thin, whole wheat Boboli in the background.

Cooking the onions at high heat causes splatter.  Ergo, the splatter shield. Using it makes me feel very chef-like.  Splatter does not make me feel chef-like. Splatter is never good, especially in a tiny kitchen.

Pioneer Woman says to show pictures with movement (see pouring oil above) whenever possible.  Maybe that didn't include dropping sliced yellow pear tomatoes into my pan, but hey, I'm new, and and I'm tryin'!

One pint of grape tomatoes, sliced in half, and about the same amount (eyeballed) from my last crop of yellow pear tomatoes from my garden (*sniff* *sniff* see you next year my sweet little beauties).

[Hey, cat, what about this smells like tuna to you?  You'd better tune up your tuna sniffer. Additional note to cat, you do not like tomatoes, you like salty french fries.]

Back to our regularly scheduled flatbread...Keep up the heat and cook for a few minutes until the tomatoes just start to soften. I added about a teaspoon of Kosher salt to bring out the tomato flavor.

Mild goat cheese with rind that cuts like a brie.  Remove the rind or use the crumble goat cheese ithout rind.  I am a rind person.  Into the oven it goes, 450 for 8-10 min, and out to the garden I go for the arugula to mix with a little olive oil and put on top when it comes out of the oven.

Spouse refers to this (below) as "The Arugula Situation."  As in, "When are you going to take care of that Arugula Situation you have in the backyard?"  The growing issues of the garden this year make me really enjoy anything that is able to become wildly overgrown.  Please note, to the right of The Arugula Situation, is the up-and-coming "Parsley Situation."  Since it is not overflowing onto the walkway hubby built, he doesn't notice it right now.  He will, soon, though, when it becomes the "Pesto Situation" taking over our tiny, elegant little freezer.

Hacked off this handful (below) and pulled the best leaves off to top our pizza!

Tomato, Goat Cheese & Arugula Flatbread

Ingredients:  (You can totally eyeball everything for this recipe.  Except the flatbread)

• 2-4 teaspoons canola oil
• One medium onion, chopped (use a larger onion if you love onions like I do!)
• 1 thin whole wheat pizza crust (I used the Boboli 12” 100% whole wheat)
• 2 pints (or 2-3 cups) grape tomatoes.  If you see any yellows, use those with the reds!
• A pinch of salt (about ¼ teaspoon)
• 1 1/2 ounce(s) goat cheese, sliced or crumbled
• 1-1.5 cup(s) loosely packed baby arugula
• 1 teaspoon olive oil (or olive oil spray)

Make it!

1.  Preheat oven to 450 degrees.

2.  Heat canola oil in non-stick skillet over medium to medium high heat, add chopped onion.  Cook, stirring until onion is softened and golden or darker (At the Valentine house, we like it dark brown, almost crispy) 5-7 minutes.

3.  Now add the tomatoes to the onions, sprinkle salt and let it cook without stirring for about two minutes while the tomatoes cook and the then stir to flip the tomatoes and cook another rwo minutes.

3.  Place crust on baking sheet coated with cooking spray.  Scoop tomato and onion mixture onto flatbread. 

4.  Slice (or crumble) and place goat cheese evenly on top.

5.  Bake approximately 8 minutes, according to directions on flatbread/pizza crust packaging.

6.  Toss arugula with teaspoon of olive oil and arrange on top of cooked flatbread.

Cut into quarters, or cut into smaller slices for finger food/appetizers, or hide half and eat it for breakfast with a poached egg, and for lunch with smoked salmon, chicken breast or chicken sausage.

Enjoy!
xo JPV

BTW, when I went in the fridge to get the goat cheese, I was reminded of this, below, my Squash Situation! AARRGGHH!!!

Finally! A Watermelon From My Garden (A Lesson in Patience)

It has been a super rough summer for the garden with the heat.  Clearly, the yellow squash loves it [see previous post, "(I Am) Awash In Squash."]  But the tomatoes, celery and watermelon do not agree.  That said, here is the first edible melon!!  Before potentially disappointing myself when I cut into it, thought I'd take some glamour shots. (That's garden dust on it. I liked how it looked.)

 After the watermelon shots, as I was snapping ten, ok, maybe fifteen pictures of the cat (looking SUPER cute), spouse said to me that he thought the point of an "expensive" camera was that I would only need to take ONE picture.  I started to explain, but gave up and just ordered said, "Hey, hold that cat still."  

I showed him just how cool a camera like this can be.  When wielded by a newbie photographer like me, it can make a watermelon bounce like a basketball!

HEY!  How did that squash get in the picture?! More importantly, where did yet ANOTHER squash come from in my little garden? I swear, I'm cooking them as fast as I can! 

Happy holiday weekend, Mom and friends!  I hope the only laboring you are doing is turning your veggies and meat on the grill in this beautiful weather (in the DC area) or laboring to get that giant juicy burger up to your mouth.

Mwah! JPV

(I Am) Awash is Squash

It is rare that my garden gets ahead of me.  But it has happened.

I spent an hour clearing away the dead tomato plants, and then the bad leaves on the squash and zucchini plants. A few months ago, my husband put up a miniature white picket fence to try to pen in the sprawling veggie plants. They were having none of it. They grew right over his one foot fence and have kept growing new squashes right onto his wooden walkway. (Technically it is our walkway, but he did build it himself -- though, I think, mostly, so I didn't walk on the/his grass)

Removing the leaves revealed at least five more fully grown squash.  I can't figure out what to do with them as fast as they produce. 

Brought some inside before I started the clearing:

Because I already had the four above, I decided to ignore the others for a few days, even though they are getting large.  Like this one:

I kinda had no choice, because I could not ignore these monsters:

Chop chop.  Below, You can't even see that big green zuke sliced up because it is completely buried at the bottom of the pyrex dish beneath the gigantic squash slices.  

These were on their way out to the grill. 

Now they are grilled and packed into glass containers in the fridge to eat all week.  Mmmmm!

 

Speaking of yellow deliciousness ... and with no disrespect to the yummy grilled veggies ... the macarons harvested at Saturday's Del Ray Farmers' Market (see recent posts about these beauties) do disappear a little faster than the squash.  

Behold, the Mariana's lemon macaron: 

Blistering Heat That Hasn't Killed My Plants has Made Them Stronger: My Recipe for Super Easy Grilled Zucchini and Baby Yellow Squash w Balsamic

I figured I'd let my garden decide what to bring to a friend's pot luck the other night. I had been away for a few days in not-as-sweltering Boston and downright mild (comparatively) Provincetown. It’s been sweltering in DC and what heat hasn’t killed our plants (At least two baby yellow pear tomato plants bit it), has only made them stronger, sort of in a scary genetic mutation speed-growth kind of way.  My zucchini for example.  I came home to two enormous and odd looking zucchini (alleged zucchini). 



Baby yellow squash, yellow pear tomatoes (a few still green), two enormous green things masquerading as zucchinis, and two of hubby's jalapenos.

The Bumble Bee Tree of Love (And a Peek at Scrumptious Cheesetique Lunch)

Bumble Bee Tree of Love

We had a very old, strange looking rosebush in the front yard when we bought our 1930s townhouse in 2007 (the yard is more like a yardlet, or a yarditi, whatever is the diminutive for our beloved but postage stamp-sized front yard). One day I came home and the funky rosebush had magically turned into a pink dogwood (I love dogwood, but no comment on the rose-icide, DV and I have had this disagreement many times already). The pink dogwood hated the shade of our front yardlet and promptly committed suicide.  (That’ll show the DV for murdering the poor rosebush, she thought).  Days later, I came home and there was a Rose of Sharon tree where the dogwood had been.  The neighbors had very unkempt Rose of Sharon bushes which I did not like.  But the tree version looked good.  Pink, of course. 

The tree seemed to do little until the hottest part of the summer hit when it turned into a profusion of white and pink buds and flowers.  It is beautiful!  This is year three and it is well filled out, if a little misshapen -- something we both work on, with large garden shears like Edward Scissorhands.

This bush is honeybee party central.  I do not know where the bees live, but they love this bush.  At any time of day you can count at least 25 bees busying themselves, moving lazily among the buds to flowers.  They have no interest in us, or anything else in our yard, just the tree.
 
Saturday, after lunch with my girlfriend Holland (coolest name ever, huh? and check out pics of our awesome lunch below the bee shots), I tried out the new camera on the bee tree of love.  I was thrilled with what I caught! Rotund, fuzzy bumble bees careening from flower to flower with their tiny legs dangling during flight.  It was fun to be patient and follow them.  Here are my favorites. (First pic, above, you can see happy bee on heading straight into the flower on the left.  I had to wait him out as he went to the middle flower, then the one on the right, then the bud above, and another flower, all the way to the right, off camera.) Enjoy!  Hi Mom!

Mmmmm, flower number two, hello my sweet!

Fuzzy bumble bee bum sticking out of bud on upper right.

And one more flower ... buzzzzzoooooom. He kept moving, I went into the air conditioning!

And this was lunch (below) at Cheesetique.  Well, lunch is here every weekend.  I'm a barfly here.  A barfly at the cheese bar. Words cannot express my love for Cheesetique, it's food, atmosphere, and most of all the wonderful women and men who work there.  Thick, smooth, Carrera marble counters at the bar, a tall fresh brewed iced tea, carefully chosen cheeses, charcuterie, and tapenade, with breads. And of course, great company from the cool, young Cheesetique wait staff and a great girlfriend (Holland).

Our board:  Left to right front row, saucisson aux cepes (fantastic all naural dry cured french salami with porcinis), Iberico ham (essentiallythe  Spanish version of prosciutto that is velvety and strong and delicious), everyone's favorite triple creme classic, creamy St. Andre, another mellow favorite of Holland and me is the Bucheron goat cheese, and lastly to the right we tried a new cheese, Ossau Iraty, a stronger, slightly nutty sheep's milk which we loved.  (The stinkier the better for us)
Back row, left to right:  Cheesetique serves all boards with a cute little wooden bowl of sweet red seedless grapes, quince paste (fruity jam, yummy!), stone ground mustard, and mini pickles, we also ordered the olive tepenade and the delicious, very fresh, very garlicky artichoke and white bean tapenade (dip).

We caught a glimpse, and a photo, of someone else's burrata (yuuuuummmmy fresh mozzarella filled with mix of mozzarella and cream) with sun dried tomatoes, and drizzled with olive oil, on the other side of the waiting to go to it's table, making eyes at us. (Helllloooo, gorgeous! -- that would be us to the cheese. :)

Cat in the Hat, er, Cats on a Hat: An Ode to Weeding

So WEEDING is also part of gardening?  Ugh, FINE, it’s worth the amazing lettuce (freckled Romaine, anyone? De-lish.)  You know the DV (my hubby, those are his initials, and we actually call him this) has the perfect lawn (the cat part is coming, I promise). The least I can do is try to have the lettuce and herbs keep up appearances around their superstar sibling, HIS LAWN. There were LOTS of weeds. 

So I put on my giant hat (and I mean enormous -- and slightly shapeable black with white under said ginormous brim) that I bought at my new favorite Alexandria consignment store, Mint, (across from the wonderful crepe cafe, Fontaine, where we had the first of two celebrations for my mom -- hi Mom! -- on Mother's Day weekend), put on my purple ipod with the pink cartoon kitty cover, and sat down to pull teeny little weeds.  Pull them away from my suffering baby celery (who knew celery could smell so, well, celery-ish, mmmm) and sage, frazzled French thyme (lemon thyme=growing like gangbusters), and paltry parsley (yes, I had to stop to think about each of those for a sec, just for you, my reader!).

After two hours I took a break and laid down on the DV's exquisite lawn.  He has lawn-dar (radar for his lawn).  I wasn't 30 seconds into one song, laying on my back, giant hat covering my entire face and torso, making grass angels (like snow angels, just in the grass), and singing and dancing a little (on my back in the heavenly grass), when I heard the door over my own singing and the actual singer.  He came to tell me there was BABY grass still under there -- he had seeded some blank (not that I saw) spots and let it overgrown before mowing. (Read:  perrrrrrfect, luscious soft grass for grass angels and recovering from weeding in the giant hat).  I politely moved my dirt party inside.

I tossed giant hat on the bed while I went to strip off weeding (read:  covered in dirt) clothes.  I walked back into bedroom to this: 

Cat on a (gardening/weeding) hat. (dark grey on a black hat taken with acell phone, please forgive me)