The Danger Zone: an update

After our time away in Florida for a week, we were welcomed home by tons of vegetables waiting for us at the farm. Shown above are cucumbers, green beans, and collard greens.

It rained a good bit while we were gone, and so the cucumbers in particular had time to thrive. They were huge! We made pickles (I hope these are good, because I love snacking on dill pickles), cucumber mint sorbet (very weird...very, very weird), and tzatziki dip (NOTE: dice the cucumbers - do not food process them, or your dip will be very runny and require much more yogurt than otherwise necessary).

The green beans were by far the best fresh green beans I have ever had. We ate some of them sauteed with a little salt and pepper, and then took some to my parents' house to share with them.

I have discovered during this gardening process that I really like collard greens. Last night David put some in an omelet with bacon and swiss cheese and it tasted amazing.

Next up are cantaloupes, which are getting pretty big! We have 9-10 growing at the moment. But despite our successes, there have been some disappointments in recent days. When we got back from a long weekend in Butler/Pittsburgh, we discovered that most of our cucumber plants had dried out (or were on their way to drying out). Though it had rained over the weekend, it was not enough water for them to survive. Also, our pea plants suffered a cruel destruction by the hands of birds/animals. This was probably our biggest letdown to date because we only got one pea before the animals took them all (and it was a very good pea)! There are so many things we will have to do differently next year, and one of them will need to be keeping our yummy peas away from farm critters.

Chobot Family Vacation

Two weeks ago, David and I joined my parents and sister in Walt Disney World for a week of fun! Here are some picture highlights from our trip:

Some girls dream of their fantasy weddings and what they will wear, but as a child that spent many a summer vacation in Disney World, I always dreamed about the day that I would get to walk around the parks in the wedding Mickey Mouse ears with my husband. Since our first anniversary was only a few weeks prior to the trip, I managed to convince David to wear the groom hat for a day. The above picture was taken in Epcot, in Paris.

Though Pooh is my favorite, I like this picture of David and me with Eeyore, taken during our character breakfast at the Crystal Palace in the Magic Kingdom.

Me, with Donald in Frontierland.

The five of us at our favorite restaurant, Sanaa (located in the Animal Kingdom Lodge). The food here was really amazing, though I think it was David's favorite because the waitress flirted with him shamelessly!

My sister got a really fantastic mojito drink at Sanaa, and my mom fell in love with it. This was her face when my sister asked for it back.

The best chocolate mousse I have ever had - my dessert when we ate at the steakhouse in Epcot's Canada.

David, with (his favorite) Pluto.

Kermit and Piggy during the Dreams Come True parade

Our dining plan included more snacks than we could ever eat, so at the end of the trip, we raided the Disney bakeries for goodies to take home with us. Here are two cookies I brought with me (they looked significantly better than they tasted).

It was hard to leave all of the fun, excitement, family, and good food! We rae looking forward to the next family trip in the years ahead.

An abundance of fun and crops!

Last weekend David and I went to Westborough to visit Brian and Jane and see The Offspring (David's favorite band) in concert. We really enjoyed our visit.

Jane and I made ice cream cone cupcakes on Saturday and they turned out really well. They were beautiful AND delicious. I think I am going to make these for my next group meeting presentation. (I may also make them for David's next group meeting presentation too.)

Our visit with Jane and Brian was really nice because it was so relaxing. We mostly sat on the couch and hung out (though Jane and I did run a lot of errands while the guys brewed beer on Sunday). While we were there, David and I got hooked on a new game for my iPod/iPad called Angry Birds. It is ridiculously fun. Reason #682094 that I love my iPad and iPod touch devices.

The Offspring concert was a disappointment for the most part. Our tickets said that the concert started at 7:30, so our plan was to arrive at 7:30 because we did not really care if we saw the opening band (Pepper) or not, and we figured that 311 (the other play co-headlining the Unity Tour) might even play second. However, when we got to the Comcast Center at 7:30, we heard The Offspring playing in the background! Apparently the time of the concert changed to 7:00, Pepper played then, and The Offspring started playing right at 7:30 sharp. We missed two songs, including one of the best songs from their new album. The band sounded amazing, but they only played for one hour :( The entire concert experience just fell flat, especially since we missed a portion of their very short show. We stayed until 311 played three (awful) songs, and then we called it a night.

When we arrived back at Ithaca on Monday, we discovered that our farm had flourished in the time when we were away, most likely due to lots of rainfall in the Ithaca area over the weekend. We got an abundance of crops, as well as fantastic peas that will be ready to eat on Thursday. Shown in the picture above is a zucchini, cucumbers (that will be made into pickles tonight), mint leaves, dill (also for pickles), one pea, and a swiss chard leaf from the huge swiss chard plant that we picked. Since we only had one pea plant, we ate the peas inside to see how they turned out...and they was phenomenal. They were by far the best peas I have ever tasted :)

This week we will be giving our garden some extra love because we will be leaving it for one week while we relax / play in Walt Disney World. We leave in just 4 days! The entire Chobot family (plus Hokanbots!) will be staying in a Wilderness Lodge Villa for 7 days. I can hardly wait.

The Danger Zone - a two month progress report

We have been "farming" for two months now, and so I thought I would post pictures of all our plants to see how much they have grown since we started.

cantaloupe

cucumber

collard greens

broccoli

beans

sweet peas

swiss chard

tomatoes (from Ifat, a post-doc in David's lab)

cucumber (from Irina -another post-doc - planted after we planted our row)

zucchini

Our spice garden is growing out of control. Here are two of the herbs we have grown:

mint

sage

We are having so much fun with our garden (farm) and I can't wait to eat the rest of the yummy crops that are blooming during the months to come :)

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.)

Happy anniversary!

Can you believe it has been one year already?

David and I are celebrating our one year wedding anniversary today by having dinner at Sheldrake Point & Simply Red Bistro (the place we got married) tonight. The big dork inside of me wants to grab my veil out of the attic and wear it to dinner, but the person inside of me that wants to fit in with society is telling me that perhaps my veil is best worn at home :)

I insisted that we keep one tier of our wedding cake to eat on this special day, and so I had cake as a midnight snack, David had cake for breakfast, and we will both be eating cake for lunch. I was very nervous to eat something that had been in the freezer for one year, but I was surprised to find that I actually like our cake better today than I did one year ago. I had very high expectations for our wedding cake last year and was completely let down - it was as dry as sawdust! Maybe the key was to have really low expectations (I was expecting it to be moldy when I opened the Tupperware last night at midnight) and then it will seem delicious by comparison. Or maybe it somehow gained moisture in the freezer.

First year wedding anniversary gifts are supposed to be paper goods, so I made one of our favorite wedding photos into a jigsaw puzzle for David. David got me tons of movie ticket certificates so that we can have movie dates! It looks like we will have lots of fun things to do together during our second year.

A blossom!

More updates from The Danger Zone:

Our first zucchini blossom! It is so beautiful and vibrantly colored (which may be hard to appreciate due to this blurry photo). We wanted to pick it and cook with it...but then we found out that this male blossom will pollenate female blossoms (and those will turn into actual zucchini). Might as well wait for the finished product!

David, weeding the herb garden. He is so much more patient while weeding than I am. I find that I tend to get bored. I think we need to start bringing some sort of battery operated music device (that isn't ridiculously expensive and made by Apple) so that I can jam to some tunes while I weed.

Proof that I do help David garden (and do not just take the pictures / watch him work). Here I am sitting among the herbs after watering all of the plants with our large watering can. Thankfully, this watering can is now somewhat obsolete, since we have finally made friends with a hose-owning garden neighbor.