Our first crops!

After weeks of watching our plants grow, I am thrilled to report that we were finally able to pick our first crops - swiss chard and zucchini.

Our first harvest of swiss chard was ready last weekend. One interesting thing we noticed after we harvested them was that we had a mix of green and red swiss chard plants. We picked two bunches and made two delicious dishes out of them.

Our first dish was braised swiss chard with garlic, bacon, and zucchini blossoms (also from the garden). I liked David's presentation with the swiss chard leaves. This dish was very good, but as we Hokansons tend to do, there was a bit too much bacon added and that flavor was overwhelming. Our second swiss chard dish was a white bean and swiss chard soup. (Sorry, I do not have a picture of the soup.) This soup was pretty bland the first day we ate it, but it improved in flavor as we ate it for leftovers. My favorite part about this soup recipe was that it called for cheese rind, so we were forced to stock up the cheese / chocolate drawer of the fridge (yes, I do indeed have an entire drawer of the fridge devoted to two of my favorite foods) with yummy parmesan-like cheeses.

We picked our first zucchini yesterday and ate it with some french onion-fennel dip. Above is what the zucchini look like after they are pollinated by a zucchini blossom and begin to grow.

This is the zucchini we picked, in its natural habitat.

Here is a terrifying photo of a very excited Farmer David. I tried to get him to act normally while I was taking this photo, but he refused to damper his crazy over our first zucchini. (I suppose this is only fair, since I live my life crazy with excitement over most things.)