Last week Saturday, my wife and I had just gathered a significant amount of produce from our garden, some of it the last of the growing season, including a great deal of the gardener's bane--zucchini. The question arose as to what to do with all of it. An evening or two before, we had zoodles, noodles made out of zucchini, with pesto and chicken. I suggested that a recipe be found that would use both eggplant and zucchini, which we had in abundance. I am not sure if the comment had been brewing in the mind of my spouse or if it was a simple reaction to my comment, she verbalized the following: "Maybe you should do more than devour the food." Wow, devour? Is taht what I do when I eat? The meaning of the word was only outdone by the zeal and demonstrative nature with which it was verbalized. I think what she meant was that I should do more of the cooking.
My wife likes to cook and bake. She does such a good job at it that who I am to take over the kitchen? Just last Saturday, for example, she needed to find something to do so she made not just one, but two types of zucchini bread. I noted that I would cook dinner that Saturday, and that would require finding a suitable recipe using zucchini and eggplant. She suggested using Pinterest to find a recipe, but Pinterest is not on my radar, so I said I would simply use a search engine and enter in zucchini and eggplant meals. A number of dishes came up and after looking at two, I chose the second and transcribed the recipe to a piece of paper. Most of the preparation involved cutting the vegetables into hunks. Besides zucchini and eggplant, the recipe called for tomatoes and onions. I also added peppers and mushrooms to the dish. Most of the vegetables used in the dinner were grown in our garden. It was a good way to use some of our garden produce, including some zucchini which seems to multiply overnight.
We enjoyed a large vegetarian meal and have sufficient leftovers for another day. I did not devour all of the dish. Devour is a pretty strong term; Merriam Webster defines it as "to eat up greedily or ravenously. Now, I will admit, from what people have told me, that have a decent appetite. I also know I tend to eat rather fast. But devour? It was not like she said, "you eat your fair share", or "you eat most of the food". The online version of the Merriam Webster dictionary lists related words for devour and they all tend to have negative connotations. The list is long, but a few related words are descriptive: deplete, exhaust, annihilate, decimate, wipe out.
We had not yet decimated the garden produce. After doing a great deal of canning of tomatoes in August and giving away a good amount of tomatoes, for example probably near 40 pounds to a former coworker who saw her tomatoes rot on the vine, the tomatoes have pretty well had it. Over the summer, in addition to tomatoes, we gave away patty-pan squash, some cucumbers, eggplant, and of course zucchini. It got to the point if you were going to get some tomatoes, eggplant, or patty-pan squash, you should be required to take a zucchini. As the garden sees shorter days, I have tried once again a second planting of some cold weather crops to see how they may produce in the days of longer nights. I have yet to pick the butternut squash, but two on-going crops remain in abundance in the garden: arugula and Swiss chard. The two varied plantings of kale were, well, devoured, by the furry small mammals that are present in the yard.
In addition to rabbits, the weather makes gardening unpredictable. Unfortunately the heavy rains did a number to some of the pepper plants as they became up rooted due to the saturated ground. Also, a ground hog got to our brussel sprouts and I see few if any good sized sprouts remaining on the plants. Japanese beetles eat the raspberry plant leaves and move into to suck on the raspberries themselves. What has made, and continues to make, tending the garden difficult this year are the number of mosquitoes. Even bug spray cannot keep them all at bay. As the garden produce is now at a trickle, that means purchasing more greens and vegetables from the store. Of course, this food will see the same fate as that from the garden--it is destined to be devoured.
My wife likes to cook and bake. She does such a good job at it that who I am to take over the kitchen? Just last Saturday, for example, she needed to find something to do so she made not just one, but two types of zucchini bread. I noted that I would cook dinner that Saturday, and that would require finding a suitable recipe using zucchini and eggplant. She suggested using Pinterest to find a recipe, but Pinterest is not on my radar, so I said I would simply use a search engine and enter in zucchini and eggplant meals. A number of dishes came up and after looking at two, I chose the second and transcribed the recipe to a piece of paper. Most of the preparation involved cutting the vegetables into hunks. Besides zucchini and eggplant, the recipe called for tomatoes and onions. I also added peppers and mushrooms to the dish. Most of the vegetables used in the dinner were grown in our garden. It was a good way to use some of our garden produce, including some zucchini which seems to multiply overnight.
We enjoyed a large vegetarian meal and have sufficient leftovers for another day. I did not devour all of the dish. Devour is a pretty strong term; Merriam Webster defines it as "to eat up greedily or ravenously. Now, I will admit, from what people have told me, that have a decent appetite. I also know I tend to eat rather fast. But devour? It was not like she said, "you eat your fair share", or "you eat most of the food". The online version of the Merriam Webster dictionary lists related words for devour and they all tend to have negative connotations. The list is long, but a few related words are descriptive: deplete, exhaust, annihilate, decimate, wipe out.
We had not yet decimated the garden produce. After doing a great deal of canning of tomatoes in August and giving away a good amount of tomatoes, for example probably near 40 pounds to a former coworker who saw her tomatoes rot on the vine, the tomatoes have pretty well had it. Over the summer, in addition to tomatoes, we gave away patty-pan squash, some cucumbers, eggplant, and of course zucchini. It got to the point if you were going to get some tomatoes, eggplant, or patty-pan squash, you should be required to take a zucchini. As the garden sees shorter days, I have tried once again a second planting of some cold weather crops to see how they may produce in the days of longer nights. I have yet to pick the butternut squash, but two on-going crops remain in abundance in the garden: arugula and Swiss chard. The two varied plantings of kale were, well, devoured, by the furry small mammals that are present in the yard.
In addition to rabbits, the weather makes gardening unpredictable. Unfortunately the heavy rains did a number to some of the pepper plants as they became up rooted due to the saturated ground. Also, a ground hog got to our brussel sprouts and I see few if any good sized sprouts remaining on the plants. Japanese beetles eat the raspberry plant leaves and move into to suck on the raspberries themselves. What has made, and continues to make, tending the garden difficult this year are the number of mosquitoes. Even bug spray cannot keep them all at bay. As the garden produce is now at a trickle, that means purchasing more greens and vegetables from the store. Of course, this food will see the same fate as that from the garden--it is destined to be devoured.
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