garden « Happy. Healthy. Homemade.

Caprese Salad

Good news, y’all! My cherry tomatoes survived. The plants mostly look like crap but the tomatoes are still getting ripe.. at rather an alarming rate. Last night, I went into the garden and picked this entire bowlful and then thought to myself What on earth am I going to do with all these tomatoes?!

Luckily for me, Tim wasn’t home from work yet and he had to run by the store anyway so I had him grab some fresh mozzarella cheese and whipped up one of my favorite things ever, Caprese Salad. It’s an excellent way to use up that overabundance of tomatoes and is so amazingly easy and quick to make… if you haven’t tried it, you really should. Unless you hate tomatoes. Then, you’re just a weirdo.
Caprese Salad

There are two ways of going about this. With cherry tomatoes, I just cut them in half, cut fresh* mozzarella cheese up roughly the same size, and chop up some basil and toss with balsamic vinegar, olive oil, salt, and pepper to taste. I often add chopped cucumber to this, it’s delicious. Especially lemon cucumber or English cucumber.

If you want to make it look a little fancier use large tomatoes, cut everything into slices about the same thickness and stack them up in whatever order makes you happy and then sprinkle the vinegar, oil, salt, and pepper on top.

*Really, fresh mozzarella makes all the difference. It’s not the texture of a rubber ball like that lump in the plastic over by the pre-shredded cheese in the store. Look for it in your fresh deli section, it’s often packed in water. It’s so much different in flavor, you’ll wonder how the two items have the same name.

NOOOOO!!!!

It quite suddenly has turned cold here. Very cold. It got down in the 20′s a couple nights ago.

Sadface

Which means, goodbye garden and all the hundreds of little green cherry tomatoes that will now never turn red.

Whoever ordered this weather: you suck.

One of those multi-topic things. Whee.

You know what sucks? When I don’t update in forever and then I have three million different and unrelated subjects to talk about.

Hailey started kindergarten last week. She loves it! She loves her teacher and she’s already made a couple friends. She’s doing really well, apparently. At least, the teacher hasn’t called me in and told me what a heathen she is. Yet. That’s good. Keegan either naps or complains about missing her while she’s at school. Hailey tends to come home somewhat crabby. I think school wears her out. In fact, she’s crabby right now and I’ve gotten up no less than 30 times during that paragraph, so if it doesn’t make sense, blame the heathen child.

Our garden is pissing me off. Nothing seems to be getting ripe very fast. We have like 934083240 million green cherry tomatoes that have been just sitting there not getting red for a month. Occasionally we’ll get one or two, and then they’re not even that sweet. I don’t know what the heck is going on. I’m not pleased. The peas and potatoes did ok, we’ve got some pumpkins and some broccoli almost ready, but the peppers and cucumbers were a fail. Sigh. We have been doing some research to figure out what to change for next year. For starters, does anyone have the phone number for who controls the weather? The below freezing temps we had in June really didn’t help, I’m sure.

As far as the surgery stuff- everything is fab! I’m not technically cleared to start really working out til next week- I’m supposed to be on light duty, but I did do my first ab workout today. I couldn’t do too many reps and it was hard, but I did it. I still need to find some sports bras before I can run. I don’t want black eyes.

I meant to take an updated belly pic but I’m fairly swollen today (I am sure the 2 lbs of cookie dough I just ate have nothing to do with that…. or the ginorm serving of boeuf bourguignon I had last night at dinner… also, PMSing. Yay.) so here is one I took a couple of days ago. It’s not really that red around the scar, that was just an impression from my pajama pants- but at least you get the idea. Tummy is flat, scar is not that bad. It’s purple but will fade. I’ve been using Mederma on it, per my doctor’s recommendation.

Yes, I still have stretch marks. Those used to be above my belly button. Turns out, when you’re 5’3″ tall and you gain 60 lbs during pregnancy, you get a lot of stretch marks! Who knew?

I do get a little pain to the left/slightly higher than my belly button when I do too much. And the swelling is funny, it decides on random when it wants to be there and when it wants to go down. That will last several more months, apparently- but I do have to say that even swollen, it still looks so much better than it did before surgery. I’ll probably do another vlog on it next week, since next Weds will be 8 weeks post-op. (wow! Its been that long?! Crazy.)

While I’m on the subject of surgery, I’d love to point something out:

THIS IS NOT WEIGHT LOSS SURGERY.

I mean, really now. It is actually pretty insulting when it’s assumed I did this to lose weight. Kind of minimizes the last couple of years I spent working out hard and getting in shape. A tummy tuck is to remove loose skin after the weight’s been lost. I’ve lost a grand total of five pounds since surgery. So. If you’re looking for weight loss surgery, tummy tuck isn’t what you need.

Ok then. I will now go see why my kids are being so quiet. Wish me luck.

The garden and yard

Despite my best efforts at ignoring it, my garden finally decided to take off. Since everything else was starting to grow, we went out and got a couple more tomato plants and planted them too, because what’s a garden without tomatoes? The issue is, the weeds have also taken off. They’re out of control! I should weed it more often, and better but it would seriously take hours. The garden space is huge and it’s just COVERED in weeds. It’s really bad. So we get out there once a week and just get the ones that are closest to the plants. Next year, we’ve got to do something different because it’s just ridiculous. We’re thinking of building boxes next year and planting everything in the boxes.

Anyway, here’s some pictures of my garden…

Look how cute they are!

Pumpkin plant looking pretty!

Potatoes grow great here. Uh.. so do weeds.

Pea plants! I don't like peas but they're so pretty!

The bugs are digging my broccoli.

So basically all that stuff and some onions are all we are getting. We’ve also planted bell peppers, cucumbers, and watermelons but none of that stuff is growing fast enough, so likely there won’t be any harvest of them before it freezes.

We also planted two raspberry bushes along the edge of the garden and we intend to put in a couple blueberry bushes next year.

Also, Tim built our pergola! We still need to lay the cement on the patio but we’re holding off til next summer. It looks so good though! We’re going to grow some sort of plant that will creep up the side and over the top for shade, we’re just not sure yet.

Pretty!

Also, we’re going to paint it dark brown.

The yard is really coming together and I am in love with it!

So much for the gardening thing...

Ok, I officially give up on the garden this year. It is nearing the end of JUNE and we still don’t have warm enough weather to make my stuff grow. There’s a couple things still sprouting so we will see how those go but I wanted tomatoes most of all… and they all died. I’m not even sure I want to re-plant at this point. I won’t feel well enough for a few weeks to even go out and tend to them anyway. I’m so bummed.

Oh well. We are talking about maybe building a small greenhouse sometime, so maybe we will have some lovely tomatoes next year and then I will can them and I will be rad with my home canned tomatoes. This year, I will be rocking the store bought canned tomatoes.

I am very much tired of this weather though. Here it is, June 21st and it’s not even 60 degrees outside right now. I need some warm weather! Sigh.

Caprese Salad

NOOOOO!!!!

One of those multi-topic things. Whee.

The garden and yard

So much for the gardening thing...

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