Playing in Dirt: Adventures in Urban Gardening: Chapter 2

HERBS! What makes dishes delightful!

We have most herbs growing in the one window in our apartment that has enough sunlight to support many flourishing plants.  Clearly we utilize the little growing space we have.  My crafty husband strung this set-up together.  We had too many summers of our pesky cats chowing down on their herbs of choice: cilantro, chives, and dill.  After basically arguing with the guy at the hardware store, we bought over 40 feet of decorative chain for hanging all of our in door plants.

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Balsamic Eggplant Bake

Sultry slow cooked eggplant with plump tomatoes and booming balsamic flavor, who could ask for anything more?  I couldn’t especially since I have been on a kick of making all veggie meals. Eggplant is one of those vegetables that is never in short supply during the winter so it is nice to make a new dish with it.  This dish has so much going on and while it takes a while to cook it is not very labor intensive.  So give yourself a weekend afternoon to make it but go about your day while it is slow roasting, the result will be a delight. 

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Winter Plants

Luckily we just survived SNOWPOCALYPSE!!!  So I thought I would take this opportunity to brag about our winter plants which are not just surviving but thriving.  Yes, all of our basil and dill died in the fall but so many of our plants are still producing for us.  It makes me so excited to plant again in the Spring.

Just as a reference point, this is what our windows looked like this past week:

But some how our Parsley is like a forest and the Oregano has been going strong for over 2 years.

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Pizza Pizza Pizza….made easy

I loves me some pizza.  I started making homemade pizza as a kid on camping trips.  It was so fun warming it up over the camp fire and even the times I ate it when we did not have a fire to warm it on.  When I got a bit older, I brought the homemade pizza into the kitchen and my mom made me make it every time I came home from college.  Some times we get very fancy with homemade crust.  But I think I like it more when I eat it on pitas as if I was a kid again camping in the Northwoods.

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My Big Fat Greek Salad

Okay this salad is not that fat but it is tasty.  We have tons of lettuce from the CSA this time of year so we have to keep chowing down on salads.  This post is really for the dressing I made for the salad because how can you go wrong with ingredients for a greek salad.

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Tomato Basil Pie

This dish was given to me by an old friend at Camp Jorn many years ago.  When our farmers gave us a huge bag of green tomatoes and we had a potluck to go to, I knew that this would be the dish to make.  First, I usually use red tomatoes but the green ones work out great.  Second, this is perfect for a potluck because it is dangerously good, like you could accidentally eat at least half the dish over a bottle of wine and want to go back for more.  So it is best to share it with friends since as you will see below it is one of the least healthy things I will ever make.

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Supreme Sauce

We got lots of tomatoes from our CSA and the Italian herbs in our window garden were calling my name.  So I decided to make some awesome sauce with a little help from our delicious CSA beef.  The result was a hearty and filling dish.

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