Thursday, March 19, 2015

Garden Greens and Ham and Cheese. Jeez! Low carb, too.


HEAL!!! And it will, after a month of neglect as we traveled. And, of course, it was winter. All things considered, the garden is doing fine after our absence. Yes indeed. Feed us, please. The is the first winter/spring  in a long time that we haven't relied on a cold frame. Cold frames bring on the greens earlier and in greater amounts. We knew we'd be gone during prime harvest, so didn't bother to put the heavy frame in place. Maybe next year.

Sweet little harvest of lettuce, winter spinach, garlic chives, kale flowers, kale, asparagus etc. Make you hungry for a dinner salad? Me too.
This is how our main garden looked today.


This is how it looks in mid-season,  mid-July. But even the tiny piece of productive land currently producing supplies us with greens several  times a week. Most years we use a cold frame, which allows way greater production than open-air planting. The message: no matter where you live, with protection and sun exposure, you can grow spinach, lettuce, kale, etc. etc. during late winter and spring. In most climates. Those same crops do not do well in summer, as heat makes them bolt and get bitter and ask, Why don't you  just grow tomatoes?

The message: no matter where you live, with frost protection and southern sun exposure, you can grow spinach, lettuce, kale, etc. etc. during winter and spring. In most climates. 

To make a dinner salad, chop kale, cabbage, chives, broccoli, etc. That cabbage? Gotta confess. Green Giant. They have apparently dropped "jolly" from the name, leaving that to Santa.


Grate Swiss cheese and cut up ham. The ham has a story.

The ham was not procured from the grocery store, but resulted from a barter between our doctor friend and a patient. He often barters services for meat and such. The doctor and his wife couldn't see consuming an entire hog, however, and offered to sell us half. We accepted. The hog was butchered and smoked locally. We baked the ham when my sister and her husband visited a few days ago. As a result, we sent them along with ham sandwiches, enjoyed together a delicious ham and scalloped potato dinner, ham and eggs for breakfast, a huge batch of ham and bean soup (several meals in the freezer) plus our dinner salad. And more.
Assemble veggies and top with ham and cheese and dressing of choice. I use our go-to dressings:
Laurie's sesame dressing and chipotle sauce, mixed.
Laurie's dressing is here.http://ordinarylife-mk.blogspot.com/search?q=laurie%27s+dressing So good!

Thanks for checking out this post. Other low-carb entries— every post I ever wrote about diet and food—is probably contained in the link below.

However! Google Blogger does not seem to care about preserving photos, which annoys me. I am going to see about migrating to another blog host, perhaps WordPress. In the meantime, if you feel like looking back on a low-carb life, photos or not.....here you go.



2 comments:

  1. I could have grown a lot of greens this winter, it's been so mild. I've got one hotbed with a lot of beets growing. I can never get them to mature here so I thought I'd see what they'd do over the course of two summers. They'll probably be woody but they are sending out lots of new tops. I try but I just can't make myself like kale other than the Italian kind, small, raw in salads. Your chef salad is making me so hungry I think I'll start dinner--rack of local lamb (the best I've ever had) and a Greek salad.

    ReplyDelete
  2. About beets: I like the young greens as well as the beets, cooked or raw. We won't grow them this year as we'll be traveling (your way!) in June.
    About kale: i only like it in winter and spring, when it's sweet. I'm making a kale salad for a potluck tonight. Reminds me... I need to roast some walnuts for that purpose. And chop, chop, chop kale and other veggies.

    ReplyDelete