Camp, cucumbers, and cooking with Jagger
Yogurt sauces + spicy pickles + a garden-hose endorsement
I dropped off Jagger at his first session of summer day-camp today, which led me to look wistfully through my camera roll at pictures of him, which led to a fresh Tiny Seeds. Welcome back!
Jagger and Teri planted some colorful new flowers in the garden this weekend, along with honeydew and watermelon plants (Terrain had a 30% off sale).
We’re getting lots of shishito and jalapeño peppers lately, with sweet lunchbox peppers still taking some time to ripen. The shishitos so far have been pleasantly mild — no one-in-10 spicy surprises yet — and we’ve just been blistering them in a rocket-hot cast-iron pan with a little oil and salt, then dipping them into soy sauce or a cool yogurt dressing.
Speaking of yogurt, we’ve been making use of our bounty of herbs by picking a bunch of different ones — sage, basil, thyme, oregano, parsley, rosemary, culantro — and blitzing them in a VitaMix with Greek yogurt, lemon juice, salt and pepper, maybe a glug of olive oil or a block of feta cheese. We’ve used that fresh, tangy, beautifully pale green sauce as salad dressing, over avocado, on grilled chicken, with rice — everything. A great way to use up any extra herbs you have on hand.
We’re also getting a steady stream of cucumbers. Jagger usually has a few cucumber coins with peanut butter at dinner so his parents feel like they are giving him vegetables. And most of the rest of the crop becomes pickles. The nice folks at the South Philly Food Co-op asked me to share some pickle recipes to celebrate National Cucumber Day and the co-op’s new in-store pickling display, so you can click that link to see a recipe I love for spicy pickled cucumbers. (That recipe is modeled after this one for spicy MSG pickles, which I highly recommend!)
Two garden-related endorsements: 1. We replaced our rubber garden hose with one of these expandable fabric hoses, and I love-love it. Never going back to a rubber hose again. 2. We haven’t had many (read: any) ripe blueberries from our two blueberry plants yet, but Jagger and I did make blueberry hand pies from the latest issue of his Highlights magazine, using sweet, plump New Jersey blueberries from a farmer’s market. I wish I could link to the Highlights recipe but it isn’t online (this blogger’s recipe is a close approximation), because it was so clear and concise and easy to follow. I’ve spent so much time poring over professional cookbooks for recipes that I was seriously impressed with how approachable Highlights made this recipe for kids — no tweezing or brunoising required. Jagger loved making and eating the mini-pies. To recap, Tiny Seeds endorses fabric garden hoses and children’s magazine recipes.
Until next time — thanks for reading! 🫐