Backyard Farmgals

Glorious summer!  Part of the fun of the microfarm and CSA is that we get to eat all of the leftovers and weird looking veg.  Anything cracked or blemished, or that there is just too darn much of falls right onto the dinner table.  Today, I had leftover summer squash and some cracked heirloom tomatoes - still good, no reason for them to go to waste.  Plus my little farmhands are wild about tomatoes, they couldn't care what they look like, just as long as they get to munch on them. I came up with this super easy salad as a way to use up some of that wild zucchino rampicante that I told you about in an earlier post .  These squash can be up to 3-feet long, and the weird looking one that I had leftover surpassed that expectation.  I cut the neck in half and used a vegetable peeler to made long thin ribbons.  Kind of fun and ornamental, and the boys will really like it!  Sautéed, they are quite tasty, and this particular squash has a real crea...

Part of this whole Backyard Farmgals gig is that I get to misbehave... often!  Which really, misbehaving comes very easily to me... ask anyone, they will tell you!  I'm bad... I was greeted at the farm this morning by an obscene vegetable.  Really this is the most suggestive vegetable I have ever laid eyes on!  I will show you a picture... you can take it from here!!! An almost 3-foot-long zucchini!  I planted this very odd heirloom variety of climbing zucchini called Zucchino Rampicante which is a cross between a pumpkin and zucchini.  It is a glorious vine, it is covering a teepee trellis at the farm and one of the cattle panel arches over a walkway.  I had checked the squashes on the arch yesterday, they were getting big, but overnight, one of them exploded in length!  I quickly picked the zucchini and went to find Jules... Jules was cleaning Cluckingham Palace while I was supposedly weeding.  Boy was she going to be surprised! ...

Frozen cup of shredded zucchini - makes life easy and fast! I got a wild hair the other day.  I was looking at my out of control zucchini and was wondering how I could save some for winter.  It would be so nice to have fresh zucchini bread or muffins on those cold mornings.  I thought about freezing it, but the problem is how.  I could shred it and freeze it, but it's hard to measure when it is frozen.  So, I came up with this wild idea...it's radical...can you handle it???  I shredded some of my larger zucchinis in my food processor and then pressed them into a one-cup measuring cup and inverted it onto a parchment lined pan.  Very carefully, I lifted the cup to leave a beautiful little formed mound of zucchini.  I popped the pan into the freezer and froze them.  After they were frozen, I carefully placed the premeasured little zucchini towers into plastic bags and placed them in the freezer.  Now I can just reach into the freezer, ...