Lafayette garden report: squash gone wild

Why do they sell packets of dozens of squash seeds when any normal family would be satisfied with just two or three squash plants per summer? I couldn't bear not to plant at least a handful after purchasing the packets. Even though wise people warned me that a whole row of squash could be dangerous, I planted two anyway: one of yellow zucchini, one of butternut. I thought that since the butternut (or as Mr. Tart trepidaciously called them, "those big, funky, strange-shaped squash things"), a winter squash, wouldn't mature until much later, it would stay out of the way. (It didn't.) As for the yellow zucchini--one of which turns out to be green, a pleasant surprise--even after I mercilessly yanked out several of the half-grown plants in July, it's still trying to take over the yard. Not just the garden, but the whole yard. I have to trim it back to keep it from spilling onto the flagstone walkway. And now these long green tentacles with leaves bigger than my head stretch out over the rock almost to the fence--but that's fine since they're not in the way. One vine attacked a basil plant minding its own business a foot away and a foot above on a different level of our terraced garden.

Yes! Our terraced vegetable garden! After several summers of trying to garden on a slope, and watching every afternoon rainstorm and every winter snowmelt send valuable topsoil whooshing down into the rock, providing a fertile home for all sorts of noxious weeds, while our tomatoes struggled to survive mere inches away, Mr. Tart decided to save our garden! He hauled in bricks and new bags of topsoil and built up the bottom part of the sloping hill to level it with the rest of the garden.

Maybe that's why the squash has spent the whole summer partying.

But as you can see, the vegetable garden is an overcrowded, verdant explosion producing more herbs that we will ever use (thyme, sage, chives, tarragon, parsley, rosemary, cilantro, several mints, and lemon balm, with the latter two in "time-out" planters after their previous attempts to overtake the vegetables),

the aforementioned zucchini and butternuts (bringing with them, fortunately, their stuffable blossoms),

adorable baby cantaloupe which aren't sure if they're ever going to finish growing and ripen into edibility,

our favorite green beans ever, the thin, sexy, French haricots verts,

new-to-the-garden-this-summer edamame beans (still too little to pick, but oh-so-fuzzy),

plenty of feathery carrot tops,

and a few tomato plants that are still deciding whether or not they want to produce anything. Oh, and a volunteer tomatillo plant--growing in the rocks--which is bigger and healthier than any of the tomato plants eeking by in fertilized soil, go figure.

Summer 2007 promises our most bountiful harvest yet--but we're rapidly tiring of chocolate zucchini cake.

the Lafayette garden report; or, last year's leeks

Mr. Tart and I were slow to put in our vegetable garden this year. I feel sheepish admitting this, but we didn't get around to cleaning up the detritus from last year's garden until recently. You see, we figured that we'd have some mild winter weekends that would allow us to go in and yank up the old stuff, check on the radishes and spinach planted at the last minute, and keep harvesting the herbs that survive. But no, this was a snowy, snowy winter here in Lafayette, Colorado, and for months the dessicated tomato plant carcasses swayed in the wind, mesclun greens poked feebly through the snow, and the radishes refused to sprout.

Finally, a couple of weeks ago, we took stock of our sad little garden on a slope. We pulled out the dead plants (and all the new weeks, flourishing after all the snowmelt) and decided that it's silly to plant on a slope; every time it rains a layer of topsoil washes away into the rock beside the garden. Our plants gasp and struggle to grow in the remaining clay, while the weeds have a field day in the rock with its rich earth. So Mr. Tart bought retaining wall bricks and many bags of manure and top soil and turned our slanty plot into a series of upstanding raised beds!

But that's another story--I'll post about that (with pictures) and what we planted a bit later.

What I do want to say is that we found dozens of leeks under all the dead plants. None of them actually grew very big (which is probably why I never dug them up last fall), but they were still alive in April, so I pulled them all up, gave them several baths, and then stared at a huge bowl of smallish leeks: And then put them in a gallon zip-lock bag at the bottom of the fridge.

Several weeks later, investigating a funky fridge smell, I re-discovered them and decided that it was time. I had put too much effort into reclaiming those leeks to let them rot away! So I stripped off the slimy bits, washed them again, sliced the larger ones in half, and threw them all into a baking dish with some half and half, a little butter, and salt and pepper. I roasted them until they were tender and glistening, and Mr. Tart and I ate them all in one sitting (they had shrunk considerably in the oven). And they were good--but not that good.

there's even tomatoes in the dessert!

Mr. Tart and I recently had a delicious Supper Club dinner with our foodie friends Cynde & Todd and Katie & Aaron. We try to get together every few months for an Iron Chef-inspired meal, where we all contribute dishes using the theme ingredient. In honor of late summer's bounty in our gardens, this time it was TOMATO.

The appetizer was my perennial favorite, fried green tomatoes. Thick and tart with a spicy cornmeal crust, they just say "summer" to me. Our first course--as you can see above--was a tiered chilled soup of avocado and chicken broth and sour cream, topped with fresh tomato puree, decorated with chopped cucumber and shallots. My mother-in-law found the recipe in Sunset magazine and shared it with us (the long chives masquerading as straws were a last-minute inspiration).


The main course consisted of Cook's Illustrated extremely-picky-but-quite-successful ratatouille recipe. I spent much of the afternoon draining and pressing and roasting and pan-frying each type of vegetable separately, but when they came together, each one asserted its own flavor and texture instead of turning into Provencal mush. We served it with polenta (made from corn meal) with four ounces of goat cheese and some sun-dried tomatoes thrown in. Cynde brought a side dish of tomatoes baked with couscous, raisins, and cinnamon--adding to the Mediterranean feel of our meal--and a green salad with tomatoes.


Katie had the night's biggest challenge: dessert. She prepared crepes with a sweet, creamy filling and topped them with homemade tomato preserves which had been cooked with sugar, ginger, and lemon. Mr. Tart and I confessed later on that we were a little suspicious of the idea of sweet tomatoes, and Katie grimaced as she ladled them out, telling us we didn't need to eat them if they tasted nasty--but once we tried them, we all were hooked!


And Katie was kind enough to give each couple their own jar of tomato preserves, suggesting that we use it as a glaze on meat as well as on top of desserts. I'm thinking it might also go well with a quiche (my mom always serves a sweet raspberry salsa with hers). We'd welcome other suggestions from loyal Three Tarts readers!

Iron Chef a la Colorado

Remember adorable Noah, the budding three-year-old gourmet? Well, he's back with zucchini!

Cynde, Katie, and I--and our hubbies--decided that our next group Supper Club effort would be a Harvest Dinner to celebrate autumn in Colorado and that all dishes had to include the theme ingredient of ... squash! Both winter and summer squash would be acceptable. Here's what we came up with:

Appetizers: Breaded and baked zucchini and yellow squash rounds with three dipping sauces: ranch, pesto, and tomato sauce. (This has turned into my favorite recipe for summer squash--it gets me my fried food fix without actually counteracting the benefits of fresh veggies by deep frying them. Thanks, "Cooking Light" magazine!)

Main dish: Savory flan made with winter squash. (Cynde, you'll have to remind me which squash it was and what its delicious but funny-sounding sauce was called.)

Side dishes: Zucchini bread and summer squash ribbons.

Dessert: Pumpkin custard. (Ack--no photo! Sorry, Katie.)

So was the harvest meal a success? Let's ask Noah!

Noah, pre-zucchini bread:

Noah, post-zucchini bread:

Next up: a dinner in December with ginger as the theme ingredient. Stay tuned!