Leg of Lamb - Kabob

My brother cooked this up yesterday, but I didn't get to try it...

Tavern on the Tracks

It was President's Day - so we left work a little early and had some drinks and samplers before going home:

Hot Banana Peppers - actually a little hotter than normal; there were tears at the table. These were great though,  big banana peppers with some bread stuffing, some sort of sorghum-ee sweet sauce and other stuff pushed inside a banana pepper.

Gold Rush Buffalo Chicken Wings - good. period. Every place has there wings, but these were actually very good, and the bleu cheese dip was chunky and real. Loved it.

Pot Roast in the Slow Cooker

My wife made it last night - red potatoes, carrots, broccoli, and a roast. It was really good, very few leftovers.

Garden Set-Up

New Garden view from our front porch back - that bright white all consuming light in the distance is heaven (or The Lake, as some might call it).

Potatoes are buried on the left - White Superior on the flower box side, blue on the back side. The right-hand side is for compost - started with an abandoned salad from last night, old plants from prior years, ground up leaves, and every earthworm I found while rearranging the gardens.

Cilantro, Oregano, and Strawberries in the flower boxes - survivors from prior years...

I used 2X6 hangars (aka connectors) typically used in framing to rest the 1X6 removable front portions of the potato box. The idea is that you can remove the bottom board and dig around for potatoes that are mature while younger potatoes are still growing at higher levels. Same goes with the compost side - mature compost can be accessed from the bottom.

MF Bed 1 and MF Bed 2 - MF 2 is the furthest and we planted Mary Washington Asparagus, Red Burgundy Onions, Green Bunching Onions, Green Lettuce, and Mesclan.

We have two other beds that are each larger than these, but they need a little TLC this year. Both are located further down the backyard, and I'll likely focus on growing pumpkins and corn down there since its further away and we don't harvest it much.

Salmon Wellington

Some times you have to try some frozen food because it just looks that tasty, and the Salmon Wellington from our grocer's frozen seafood section lived up to the pretty pictures on the packaging.

Ingredients:
1 2-pack Frozen Salmon Wellington :)
Asparagus
Left-over Hollandaise

Cooked the Salmon Wellington for 35 minutes in a convection oven @ 375 degrees (instructions were for 30-35 minutes at 400), but had to finish it off another 10 minutes.

Pest Control

We've previously tried both organic and chemical pesticides with similar results. Our biggest problems are the vine borers that eventually kill our cukes and squash after we get several good harvests out of them. We're going to switch back to organic this year and try the following tactics:

• Rubbing the vines with Bt or Spinosad about 1 inch above the soil line starting early in the plants life. This supposedly discourages the babies from digging into the plant in the first place.
• At the first sign of boring, we'll slit the stems open and remove any borers we find.
• If the plant is to far gone, we'll cut out the infected area and soak it in a bucket of soapy water overnight to kill the borer so it can't reproduce each year.
• We'll likely re-plant squash and cuke plants every 2 - 4 weeks so even if we lose mature plants we'll have some backups in the pipeline.
• Have also heard that aluminum foil will disorient the moths if used as mulch around the plants.

Garden Pre-Planning Structure & Layout

We have 4 food gardens set up around our house, with two full sun gardens that we're going to re-shape into 6X6 squares this year, one partial sun 6X10 garden, and one slightly more shady 6X10 garden. All of these gardens are watered with an automatic system that pumps water directly out of the lake.

This year we also plan to add a potato box next to the full sun. The design isn't fully flushed out, but I've been leaning towards a rectangle box with a partition allowing us to grow potatoes on one side and compost on the other. One side of the box will have removable slats for each level so you can access the lower levels as needed. This way you can easily shovel compost from the bottom of your compost pile on top of the potatoes as you move up each level, and later remove the mature potatoes from each level in the same manner.

We're also going to add structures to keep the tomatoes, cukes, and squash off the ground better this year. I don't like the stakes or rounded wire enclosures so much, and we'll likely make squares with chicken wire this year that sit at a slight angle allowing the veggies to grow through the holes for easier picking. Haven't tried this before, so it is unclear how this will work.

I'll come back and add to this posts as I build out the structures and add some pictures.

Early Indoor Starts

We live on a peninsula jutting out into a lake in the Carolinas - if you follow the guidelines on the back of the most typical plants you'd want in your garden in this part of the country we're right on the line between zones 7 & 8, and we're right in between the mountains and the coast.

In terms of planting, we started 72 plants indoors in one of the starter kits from Lowe's. I've had poor success with these before, but if it gets us an early harvest it is a cheap investment. We started Prudens Purple Tomatoes, Purple Tomatillos, Cukes, yellow squash, zucchini, and red onions on February 5th, 2011. The vast majority will be ready for transplanting in 6 to 8 weeks, right in front of their typical outdoor planting period.

I'm not sure how the big squash seeds are going to develop, but I only did 6 of each variety so it should at least be interesting. If they grow too fast I'm going to remove the little cups around the soil in the starter kid and put them in a flower box for a few weeks before transplanting them again outside.

Breast of Lamb, Asparagus, and Pinot Noir Reduction

Unfortunately there are no succulent pictures of dinner from Friday night, but we had what I consider a top notch meal. Not everyone agreed.

I didn't follow any strict recipe and instead just used what we had on hand - rosemary, oregano, sea salt, a half glass of pinot noir at the bottom of a bottle and merlot, and butter. That probably violates some cooking law of mixing products, but there you have it.

For the main course, I bought a breast of lamb, and asparagus for the side.


I seared the meaty side of the lamb for 2 minutes or so in a skillet, then rubbed the sea salt on it and sprinkled it with rosemary and oregano. Then I stuffed it in the oven for around 2.75 hours at 375 degrees. It cooked a little faster than what I timed it for, so maybe it was 2 hours.

Next we sat around and talked about food for long time, and then in the last 1/2 hour I came back and prepared the asparagus by drizzling some olive oil on it and sprinkled it with lemon pepper, then wrapped it in foil and stuffed it in the oven.

For sauce, I prepared some hollandaise for the asparagus - and yes, I used a little pouch of powder to kick this one off. Baby steps.

For the lamb sauce, I threw some chopped green onions in and sauteed them in the skillet, next I mixed in the wine that was on hand (think it would've been even better if I'd just used Pinot Noir by itself) and any leftover oregano and rosemary, and reduced it - in hindsight, I should have reduced it further and longer until it was more syrupy, but it was close to being correct. I added a dab of butter and the juice that had kicked off from the lamb breast. It turned out really good.

A colleague of my wife, who doesn't eat lamb, and his girlfriend had stopped by while we were preparing and shared some of the meal. It got good reviews from her, but he didn't try it and my wife felt like it was too fatty. I loved it.