Zucchini frittata with dill sauce—and more!

Dinner tonight — Zucchini frittata with dill sauce and cucumber/onion salad. Those red things are our first tomatoes! but not at all essential to the recipe. Tomatoes are still a couple weeks away from ripeness.

Every year we have zukes to burn. Actually, we give most of them away or chop 'em up for compost. Used to be, in the old days, we fed 'em to the hogs. But now that we have only four zucchini plants (and zero hogs) and three of our zuke plants are sub-standard, thank god) I'm attempting to use more in dinners-for-two and perhaps even freeze some for winter. (Plus hauling burlap bags of them, along with multiple cukes, to the Community Center Food Bank.)
So here's a surprise experiment that turned out very well. I'm home alone tonight, but this could easily be doubled or quadrupled for the main dish—or used as a substantial side. As always, my recipes are "soft" in that I don't measure precisely. But this one is more measured than most. Here's a hint about real foodies: we cook without an audience (or a partner present) and relish every bite.

Zucchini Frittata
2 T olive oil
4 small to medium zukes, cut into like-sized pieces (think 1/3 inch thick and about the size of a quarter)
1/3 - 1/2 medium onion, finely sliced
1.5 T minced garlic
1 sweet or mild green pepper, sliced but not diced (optional—it happens that our peppers are coming on strong.)
2 beaten eggs (maybe some day we'll raise chickens again!)
1/2 to 3/4 c shredded fresh basil, loosely packed
1/2 c shredded Parmesan cheese (Feta cheese would also be good.)
salt and pepper to taste
pepper flakes to taste
dill sauce (recipe follows)

Directions
Saute the zukes in the olive oil until crisp/tender. This could take 10 minutes.  You don't want them mushy, just starting to become translucent. Add the onions and saute a couple minutes or so. Add the pepper and garlic and stir fry for a couple minutes til the garlic is intoxicating. (Don't get drunk, but do enjoy some wine while cooking!) Add the beaten eggs and fold into the veggies. When eggs are almost set, top with shredded basil and Parmesan cheese. Cook over low-medium heat a few more minutes until cheese is nearly melted. Remove from heat and let it rest for a few minutes. In the meantime, get the dill sauce ready to serve.


Dill Sauce
This is a staple in my kitchen while dill weed is running rampant in the garden. This year I've dried a lot of dill and will attempt to replicate fresh dill in winter. I think it can be done. Dill sauce is spectacular with dishes such as zucchini frittata, anything with potatoes, any fish, and much more. Plus it is simple to slap together and keeps a long time. If you have fresh dill, more power to you! If not, see what happens when you use dried dill that still exudes essence of dill. If dried dill doesn't smell like dill, use it for compost.

Ingredients
1/4 to 1/3 cup fresh dill, minced, or 3 T dried dill
1/3 c plain yogurt
1/3 c sour cream
1/3 c mayo
3 T fresh lemon juice (can substitute lime)
Optional: 1 T lemon zest; 1 tsp Tabasco

Directions
Combine ingredients and mix well. Taste. Adjust dill and lemon to taste. Cover and refrigerate. Keeps up to a month, but is so good it won't last long.

Cucumber/onion salad
When it comes to fresh garden cukes and onions, this is a super simple recipe that never fails to please.
Double or triple as necessary. The salad keeps well, refrigerated, for several days.

Ingredients
2-3 medium cukes of any variety. Don't use super big ones that will have lots of seeds and bitter rinds.
Test to see if skins are bitter. If so, peel with a potato peeler. If not bitter, just cut off the ends. If you like, fancy up the recipe by striping the cuke with a peeler. If the cukes are large, you will  need to seed and peel them.
1/2 large sweet onion, thinly sliced
1/3 c rice vinegar
1/3 c sugar ( or substitute Splenda)
salt and pepper to taste

Directions
Combine ingredients and taste. Adjust seasonings. Serve immediately or refrigerate. Seasonings may need to be adjusted later as salt extracts water from cukes and onions.

Garden photos follow, if you like.

Overall early August garden scene.
 Plants encroaching on house. Residents preparing to flee.

Messy  entwined dill, green beans, and marigolds.
Still, it appears all co-exist to mutual benefit.
Can they please send a message to Congress?

Innocent-looking yellow six-inch zuke. Tomorrow? Twelve inches! Run!

Standing guard over the garden, youthful sunflowers are at their most audacious, tempting birds and bees with flagrant displays; They don't actually dance, except with the wind, but they don't need movement
when color and size and in-your-face life force are so outrageous. In a couple months they'll go to seed and be totally ravaged by birds. I won't forget their youth and beauty. (Or my mother's.) 

Happy @ 95.8

Here's LaVone, on the right, intent on bingo at her new digs, Morrow Heights,
an assisted living facility close to  my home in Rogue River, Oregon. 

My somewhat-older sister and I often discuss the probability that we will live into our nineties. Our father died at 93 and our mother is 95.8 and going strong. However, we've sorta decided we don't want to go there. What we'll do to prevent it, I don't know. I've told her I'm not going to be the one to do her in when/if she decides to check out. But I'm still in disbelief that I'm approaching 70, my sister, of course, is somewhat older. Age denial began decades ago and continues. Stupid, I know, not to "be here now", and sometimes I can be. But other times I look in the mirror and say, Who, me? My mother doesn't look in the mirror (she can't really see that well) and that's a lesson. She just IS here now, almost free of vanity* and distilled to her most essential needs: eating—her appetite is keen, seeing me, and playing games. Bingo every day! Yes! And dice two or three times daily and also a plastic-wand themed noodle-cize class. Between these activities and eating, showering, physical therapy,and pushing herself around in a wheelchair, she's occupied and has found her own elderly version of happy. I do not doubt that she is enjoying life, despite all the crappy details.

She forges ahead despite being almost deaf, nearly blind, stooped with severe osteoporosis, and having endured a recent pelvic fracture, a brief hospitalization, and 21 tortuous rehab days in a nursing home. Now she's installed in her fourth "home" in less than three years, and what does she do? She scrutinizes the activity schedule and jumps into every slot that will accommodate her. She's found her place, and I hope she never has to  move again. I'm learning from her. I don't know if I want to BE her. I'm not big on bingo or dice. But her ability to find pleasure in what some would consider a very thin medium is instructive and even inspirational. You go, LaVone. When (and if) I become 90, I will remember your example. Maybe my sister will too, and we won't have to deal with the messy details of euthanasia.


*While in the nursing home, she took my hand one day and implored, How do I look? Are my wrinkles really deep? I told her the truth. She is still attractive. Good bone structure doesn't lie. Her back may be stooped, but her cheekbones are still proud. 

LaVone a couple years ago, only 93, going with the flow.

The Edible Fence

It's late August and time to harvest blackberries, or at least a fraction that are dripping from the thorny hedge that forms a fence between our little farm and the gravel road. We take them for granted. We didn't plan them, and do nothing at all to encourage them, yet they thrive as the invasive weed that they are. As opportunists, we enjoy them all winter with yogurt and granola, in smoothies, and even an occasional cobbler. Before I gave up sugar, I made blackberry jam and jelly.
 Blackberries are considered a scourge in Oregon, at least in the southern part of the state. They'll gladly take over your property, if you let them. But they are pretty good to eat, and they're free for the picking. So we arm ourselves with sturdy clothing and harvest buckets for the freezer. (PK mostly does this prickly chore.)

Berries ready to be frozen. Later they'll go into freezer bags.

The blackberry fence from inside our property.

Blackberry poop, probably raccoons, litters the fence line. Apparently they eat and poop within about four feet of the food source, then go back for more! 

The edible fence on the outside. 

Nasty conditions out there for berries: dust, direct sun in the late afternoon.  But still people pick them from the road.

A small bucket of berries worth about 2.5 frozen quarts. 

Tonight's dinner

Around the plate, chard sauteed with onions, garlic, and lemon juice topped with Parmesan cheese; cooked beets sauteed in butter with sweet red onions; the first green beans of the season lightly steamed and seasoned with butter and salt, pepper; two broken eggs along for the ride; Sauce on the left is garden chipotle and on the right, garden dill.

PK is outta town for a few days, and you think I'd take a break from cooking. But no. The garden screams. Chard! Onions! Garlic! Beans! Beets! Eat!  This is why we garden.

Garden Show & Tell

A morning's catch from the berry patches. Remember "show and tell" in elementary school? I think we never got over it. I've heard numerous recent commentaries about how social media is such an ego trip. We post our photos, our words, our links to stuff we think is worthy in hopes of communicating with people we know,  or people we've never met but want to, or people we can't imagine, and so don't care about, but who we want to reach anyway. The need to communicate is strong and so we do it. Facebook and other social media has made it possible, pervasive, and acceptable to "show and tell."  I got over my ambivalence about being a senior citizen on Facebook, and I  don't care that some are profiting mightily on my (our) ego trips. I'm glad Facebook is part of my life because for some reason, I am compelled to take photos and write this blog, which 25 or 30 people look at, mostly because I broadcast the posts on Facebook. This lets me know that I'm not "showing and telling" to a vacuum. Hey, 25 people! Hello! Thanks for checking in. The snarky commentators, who all confess to using Facebook, dis people who subject others to their children or grandchildren, their travels, their hobbies, and so on. I've learned to be a discerning Facebook user. Seriously, there are some sketchy communiques. The thing is, I don't have to look, and "friends" who habitually post boring or self-aggrandizing crap warrant a click on "hide." I have yet to "unfriend" someone, however. Mostly, I enjoy show and tell by people I know, and I do it myself. (Especially since I won a camera! and have decided, despite an earlier post to the contrary, that there's no such thing as too many photos.) So here is a show and tell about our voluptuous Southern Oregon garden. This is really nothing more than boasting, as the commentators would observe, I am bustin' my buttons in Rogue River, Oregon.

Lily in the front flower garden.

Day lilies, woodruff and climbing roses along the garden fence.

Garlic is about ready to harvest and will keep us supplied for a year.

Early summer 2011. Tractor isn't used in the garden, but PK uses it for hauling and mowing.  Yesterday he attached an auger to it  to dig post holes  for fencing a soon-to-be pasture. Livestock may be in our future. 

Roses with hills reflected in living room windows. 

Day lilies and climbing roses.

Lily and purple yarrow.

So-sweet beets.

Beets before harvesting. Roughly a third were taken.

Stir fry tonight!

Onions and lettuce.

Home sweet home.