Our Garden and Other Homemade Goodness

We had an amazing garden this year! We planted seedlings right around Memorial Day and it's been great growing weather. We actually paid attention to the fact that it wasn't raining much and watered pretty regularly and it really paid off. It started with cucumbers and yellow squash and has been all about tomatoes ever since. Steve went to the garden center this year and came home with 8 tomato plants...a little more than required by this family of 3. Especially since Ethan doesn't like them. The plants have grown out of control and are bigger than the little man!

We also gave butternut squash a try and each humongous plant has 1 squash on it.

This was one of our early harvests. We were able to keep up for a while with salads and slices for sandwiches.

And then the volume got ridiculous!

I made 8 cups of sauce and 8 cups of diced tomatoes to freeze for this winter. I had no idea how easy it is to peel and seed these things.

Steve also made homemade salsa and we froze some of that too. There are at least 5 more out there now and the first picture I took was early August so they really do just keep coming and coming!

Another fun treat lately has been our ice cream maker. We got it for a wedding shower gift and have hardly used it. This was our first batch in at least 5 years and it was chocolate gelato. It sounds fancy, but it was basically the only recipe we had the ingredients for without a trip to the grocery store. We did use it again a few weeks later to make vanilla ice cream to go with the apple crisp I made after our apple picking trip. More on that later!

E is always happy to help with tasty treats.

One weekend morning I was inspired to bake blueberry muffins and I thought they were gorgeous! I love the sense of accomplishment that comes with cooking and baking and wish I had more time for it.

Unfortunately, after a few days, we totally forgot that they were in the basket by the table and this is what became of those delicious treats...about a month later. Quite the science experiment!