From The Garden To The Pot

The bountiful harvest from your garden is best enjoyed when cooked straight from the land to the pot. This not only saves money, but it is also healthy and relaxing. Cooking from your garden is a great way to get the most out of your bountiful harvest. Eating from your land is a wonderful way to experience all that nature has to offer.

Initially, you cultivate produce you wouldn't typically munch on. For example, I grew swiss chard because I was bewitched by the seed packet's vivacious stalks. Regrettably, when it came time to consume it, I discovered that I didn't care for it much. And additionally, no one else in my house enjoyed it either. It is excellent to experiment with new vegetables occasionally , however when first starting out stick to edibles you already know you relish .

The second reason is that most of us are used to grocery shopping in a specific way. Typically, we: choose several recipes for the week, write down ingredients for a grocery list and buy only what we need. When you have a garden, you must approach it differently. Produce ingredients are already picked out for you; then, you need to pick or create recipes from what you have on hand.

If you want to cook with homegrown vegetables, it takes a little extra effort to plan your meals. For example, when you see tomatoes and squash on the counter, you need to think about how to incorporate them into dinner. And if you've been eating them for a while, you might be sick of them! I have certainly been there before. The key is meal planning. Two years ago, my goal was to eat only vegetables from my garden for an entire year. We made it 10 months—which I do not consider a failure in any way! That experience completely changed my thinking about using produce from my garden and cooking in general."

This year, even though it wasn't one of my New Year's resolutions, I found myself relying more on the produce from my garden. It became a habit for me and my family to reach for homegrown vegetables first. I don't think that everyone needs or would be able to go an entire year off eating only what they grow themselves, but you could start small with a goal like committing to ONLY eating veggies from your garden during the summer months. Setting a lesser goal could jumpstart the process of getting into the habit of Always visiting your garden FIRST before heading to the store.

The recipe organization stage follows. I didn't make up my own recipes very often, and I had limited knowledge about it when I was grocery shopping for fruits and vegetables. Because of my lack of expertise, I opted to reorder the recipes that I already had.

As a result, I went through each of my favorite cookbooks and examined the vegetables used. Each recipe was classed according to the major or most utilized vegetable. Then, as a reference, I kept track of the source and page number for each dish. Last, I specified any additional ingredients required in the recipe.

By having multiple recipes available for each vegetable, I can switch up my meals so that I don't get bored of eating the same thing. For example, if tomatoes and squash are both in season, then I can go to my tomato recipe page and find a dish that also incorporates squash. If we only have cucumbers, green beans, and tomatoes in July, there's still 20 different meal options open to me. This really comes in handy when trying to be creative with what we have on hand.