In the garden

The zucchini has been producing... sort of. For every 2 or 3 good zukes, we have 1 with Blossom End rot. It's a good thing we have 3 plants this year. So far the volume has been manageable.


Hit and miss

Last year we planted a jalapeno pepper plant and thought we'd have a salsa garden. Well, it didn't quite work out that way, our peppers and tomatoes didn't ripen at the same time, and the cilantro plant never took off. This year is different.


Salsa ingredients

After adding some white onion and lime juice, we had salsa in a matter of minutes.


Garden Salsa

Delicious!


Garden Salsa

The netting only keeps the squirrels and birds away from some of the fruit. They ate almost half of this nectarine. We kept it in place because it seemed that while they were able to eat this "forbidden fruit", they left the rest of the tree alone.


Sacrificial Nectarine

The very next day I checked on the sacrificial nectarine and this is what I saw.


That didn't work

I admit, I was a little frightened. I picked as much fruit as I could.


Garden harvest

It wasn't enough for jam, but I had plenty to try a new recipe, Apricot-Nectarine-Almond Clafouti.


Clafouti


Clafouti


Clafouti

It's basically fruit, custard, and almonds. It's quite good and we preferred to eat it cold with tea or coffee.


Clafouti

Then I made this quick and easy cobbler. Don't be fooled by the dark color, the biscuits are cooked perfectly in the middle.


Nectarine Cobbler

Remember these little beans?


Kentucky Wonder Bean

That was 20 days ago. Now they look like this.


Kentucky Wonder Bean

We fixed them a la Mark Bittman's Green Beans with Crisp Shallots recipe and they were fantastic! Good thing, we're going to have plenty more this summer.


Kentucky Wonder Bean