The Case Against Waiting for Peak Ripeness

I had this bizarre garden stress lately.  I looked around my garden at the beautiful lush foliage and lamented the fact that there wasn't much to harvest.  It's the awkward feeling of being between seasons and not having much to show for it on the dinner table.   (At the same time, I feel a slight panic that come a month or two from now, everything will be ready all at once and we won't be able to eat it all or have time to process or preserve everything and all of the effort will feel like a big waste.)  I know this seems like a silly thing to worry about... but worry rarely listens to reason.

The bean plants, though amazingly tall already, have not produced any pods yet.  The tomato plants, even though they are leafy and big, have only a few (mostly green) tomatoes on them.  The peppers are really promising, but they are still green, and the kids like sweeter peppers, so we need to give them time to ripen.  Of the 3 broccoli plants, maybe 1 will produce a head the size of an apricot. (The other two are not long for this world...)  The carrots have a few weeks to go, I think.  The cucumbers (if they are even there) are hiding behind a mass of leaves.  We have a ton of onions... but that's not really a meal.  There's a lot of green all around, for sure, but what have you done for me lately, plants??

So I had to break myself out of this funk and take a closer look for some inspiration.

 I started with baby steps.  We had picked a couple of zucchinis earlier this week -- and truth be told, no one here is that crazy about zukes.  I basically grow them for zucchini bread or juicing.  I had used half of one to make zucchini muffins.  I decided to use what I had left to make zucchini latkes. I could incorporate some of our onions and basil that we had leftover from a previous meal.

Ta da.  Zucchini latkes.  (In the background, bacon wrapped hot dogs because... children.)

Well that wasn't so hard now, was it?  It's a meal (or at least part of one) from ingredients I wasn't previously that excited about.  What else ya got?

Well, my dill plants are looking really great.  My dill usually fizzles out 10 minutes after it pops out of the ground, so I feel compelled to do something with it.  But what?  Hm. Dill pickles are awesome.  I just know there has got to be some usable cucumbers behind that jungle of thorns.  I'm going in .... 

I manage to snag a few beauties. Normally I would wait till they got bigger before picking.  I think I'm still kind of wedded to the size that produce is when you buy it at the grocery store.   But I just have to get over that and recognize that if it looks good, eat it!   I happen to have a few more ingredients on hand that would go well into the pickle jar.   I add some garlic that I pulled straight out of the ground -- whose got time to let it cure, right?, and a fresno chile pepper (pictured way up above).  Then I combine those ingredients with peppercorns and a hot apple cider vinegar brine.  These will be refrigerator pickles - ready to eat in 48 hours.

Now we're talking.  Who is hungry for dinner?  The cilantro looks great and needs to be used.  We have half a hot pepper. We only have 4 orange cherry tomatoes ready to eat -- that's not going to work for salsa, but we do have some store bought grape tomatoes.  We also have more onions.  We have green peppers.  Fajitas it is.   I like to marinate the onions and cilantro with white wine vinegar and salt.  Next, the salsa, incorporating the grape tomatoes, cilantro, and hot pepper.   Next, I sautée the unripe green pepper with onions.  (Now, normally my peppers turn out thin and papery... this one was thick and crunchy!)  

Dinner (rounded out with avocado, and amazing skirt stake, seasoned by a homemade southwestern rub) was scrumptious.   I feel embarrassed that just a day or two before I roamed the garden, essentially complaining that there was nothing to eat.  

My takeaway is to seek inspiration in the small morsels and build meals around that.  The bushels can wait.