Food

I. Love. Food.
I used to be the PICKIEST eater. ALL growing up, my mom and dad did their best to try and get me to eat anything other than mac&cheese and Top Ramen. Most everything with vegetables made me gag. The smell of steamed cabbage- uggghhh...made my stomach turn. It was bad.
Then I got married and something happened. Spencer introduced me to a WHOLE new world of veges. It all started with that "California mix" of frozen veges from Sam's club. I realized that broccoli was actually GOOD when it wasn't steamed to death and all limp and nasty.
Anyway, fast forward to today. I could be a vegetarian. In fact, in the summer, I mostly am. I LOVE my garden. We are blessed to live on a big lot and we get a LOT of vegetables. We also have a plum tree (see previous posts) and for a while, we had a LOT of plums. Probably over 400. That's a lot of plums. So we did a lot with plums. Here are a few of the things we did with them...
Canned plums (16 quarts!)
Plum juice (canned it as well)
Plum fruit leather
Frozen plums (2-1 gallon bags for winter crisps!)
Grilled plums
Plum/blueberry upside-down cake (was FANTASTIC)
Plum crumble
Blueberry/plum syrup
Levels it. And we ate a whole bunch.

We were very regular, to say the very least.

Plum crumble a la mode


Upside-down cake


Syrup


Grilled plums with sour cream/honey in the middle (I was the only one who ate these)

Anyway, I've taken a few more pics of the things I have made lately. I have officially not turned my oven on since June. It heats up my entire house. My grill is on almost every night. Grilled squash, grilled corn, grilled chicken, fish, onion...whatever can go on the grill. Which brings me to my next topic- do you love sweet potatoes? (Yams?) Yes, I am a dork and have looked up the actual difference between the two. What it comes down to is that it doesn't matter. Eat the orange ones. They are awesome for you and the taste RULES! I was addicted to them in the winter- loved to put them in the oven. Since I don't turn the oven on, I tried them this way.

They are FANTASTIC. Peel 'em, cut 'em in chunks, toss 'em in olive oil, wrap in foil (looks like a tinfoil dinner) and put it on a medium-hot grill for 7-8 minutes/side. That's it! My first time they burned a bit but we didn't mind. They were awesome.

Also, I made some fab taco/fajita things with rotisserie chicken one night. Added sauteed veges, cheese, dab of sour cream, LOTS of cilantro (how did I only discover cilantro like 3 years ago?? Where WAS it?) It was a super-fast dinner. Also, a trick I learned from Spencer...He does this, I don't bc I usually don't add a lot of cheese- but it's super good...Heat a pan, add jack/cheddar cheese blend, melt, and then put a tortilla on top and let the cheese stick to it. It's done when it comes clean off the pan. MMMmmmmm...