Clean Eating Veggie Fried Rice or Quinoa

Okay, so I have wanted to update y'all on our garden but our camera card is having some uploading issues so the next best thing? Sharing this awesomely yummy, very healthy, and clean eating easy to make meal perfect for summer when veggies are at their peek! We have made this with rice and quinoa and quinoa is our favorite, but rice is just as tasty and a little cheaper as the cost of quinoa right now is skyrocketing.

First I begin to cook my rice or quinoa according to the packages directions. There are 6 of us who eat this so I normally cook 2 cups of the grain with 4-5 cups of water and get about 5 cups when its all cooked. While my grain is cooking, I begin stir frying my veggies in coconut oil. You can use olive oil, but trust me, the coconut oil really compliments all the flavors in this dish. This particular night I had on hand carrots, peppers, zucchini, spinach, and some snow peas fresh from the garden.

Thankfully that's about how many snowpeas we have been picking every day and sometimes almost twice that. We have been freezing the excess we can't eat and will use those for stirfries when our pea season ends. I add some pepper to the veggies and just kind of stir them here and there. Did I mention how easy this is? It needs to be since I'm busy with this cutie pie who is into everything!

When it looks like your quinoa or rice is done, push all the veggies to a corner. Then in a separate side of your frying pan/skillet/ pot, crack two eggs and kind of scramble them up a bit. Let them cook till done and stir into veggies.

Add your grain to the skillet. Stir it all together. I add a nice heaping tbs. of sesame oil as one last hoorah and then we just eat it right up!

So there you have it-- quick, full of veggies, clean eating, kid friendly, and if you use quinoa it boosts the protein in this dish even more! I hope you love this and if you use any neat vegetable combination please share!

Summer Yumminess

We finally feel like we are on break... early morning wake ups with the sun and days packed with silliness, gardening, and together time. I've shared a lot about what goes on out back, but inside, we have been busy too.

We pickled radishes. The kids and husband liked them-- but whooo-weeeee--- they smelled potent! We've realized fresh radishes are much spicer and sharper then the ones in the store so they can really pack a punch.

We also picked our first small batch of lettuce and arugula and added in some store bought spinach and tomatoes to make a very yummy salad. The kids were so proud of their backyard lettuce and kept pointing out our red leaf lettuce with every other bite. We added in a few radishes but I must confess, I had to pass a lot of mine on to my son-- they are that spicy. Not spicy hot... just spicy flavorful spicy if that makes sense...

The kids also talked me into buying a watermelon this week at the grocery store. The 6 of us ate half of it in one sitting and then I made the rest into three jars of watermelon jelly and the last quarter into 12 popsicles. I just pureed with blueberries and a small dab of vanilla yogurt and the kids devoured them three nights in a row after dinner. That's one of the things I love most about summer-- all the fruit!

And speaking of fruit, this morning we were up and at 'em at 6:40 and at the strawberry patch picking away by 7:50 (and that patch is 35 minutes away.... I'm kind of bragging on ourselves a bit since we are NOT good typically at getting out of the door in a timely manner. It takes prep work and no one needing to use the bathroom right before we walk out the door which means everyone has to go... anyway).

We go to Weavers Orchard and they are so sweet there! We did plant our own strawberry plants but are picking the blossoms off this year to strengthen the plants for next year. BUT according to the weaver farmer one plant can give you about a quart of strawberries and we have 30 plants. I'm a little giddy about that.

If you go strawberry picking, wear a hat! You might feel silly, but we all had our hats on and were the only people not getting mauled by gnats.

The kids did awesome! Last year it was a disaster-- as soon as we got to the furthest par of the patch with all the other pickers my three year old had to pee. And the porter potty was about two football fields away across the patch. I ended up making three trips to the porter potty that day. Picked probably three strawberries due to the fact our little baby at the time did not care to be strawberry picking (or in our case, picking, hiking to the potty, then hiking back, and then repeating the process three times). This year all four of them were terrific! They picked their fair share and filled their bowls. Little guy ate a muffin the whole time and watched us. Noone ate a single strawberry. This is a personal family first-- we normally walk out of there drenched in strawberry juice. I didn't say anything about this a head of time (shoot, I wouldn't have minded a few on the side) but it was like an unspoken rule among the three of them.

When we got home and when the three littles were napping and my oldest was reading, I began our jelly. We picked 17 pounds of berries and ate about a pound or two just today (apparently the don't eat the berry rule at the patch gives way to the consume so many berries at home mom has to change outfits and mop the floor a few times... but its all in good yummy fun).

After three batches and several diversions we got our years supply of strawberry jam in 20 various jar sizes.

I can also tell its summer because we fall into bed at dusk exhausted, but filled with summer fun and yumminess.

My Mom's Macaroni and Cheese-- Healthified!!

I'm going to tell you something and just give it to you straight: My mom makes the best the most incredible mac n' cheese in the world! Back in the day when I was a tyke there was a church covered dish dinner. As the story goes, my dad stood up to share something and ended up going on and on about how good my mom's mac n' cheese was. I was in the crowd thinking, "well, of course it is!" My mom was in the crowd mortified. She never made it for the church again-- but lucky for us 4 kids, she kept making it almost weekly for us. Seriously, whenever I have a baby my mom will say what can I make for you. Mac n' cheese. Or she'll ask what we'd like when we come over for dinner. Mac n' cheese. There is one small problem-- my husband hates baked mac n' cheese. It pains me to say this, but he was raised on the boxed orange crap and won't eat mac n' cheese unless it's orange. I'm not gonna lie, it did cause some dinner time rifts earlier on in our marriage. BUT, we have reproduced and three of our four kids love baked mac n' cheese just like their mama(my daughter truly is daddy's girl... sigh). So at nights when Daddy has to work, I'll whip some up. It's no where near what my mom makes because she must add some love that's all her own and I also have to confess that for years I somehow managed to curdle the cheese and milk mixture which led to many, and I mean many, teary nights. But, I've got it down pat now and decided to up the healthiness factor of mom's mac n' cheese so it can be a one dish vegetarian meal. And it was gooooooooood. The boys and I devoured it. So, here's what you'll need:

From Lawn to Garden-- Eating Our First Veggie

This week areas about 20 miles from us were hit with a massive hail storm. We were unsure if we would also be pelted so as fast as we could we rushed to cover as much as we could to protect it from the possible impending doom. We used jars, bowls, glasses, laundry baskets, and tarps to secure our little plants safety. Thankfully, we were spared and just as quickly as we covered everything, we had to uncover it once we knew the danger had passed since a humid warm front moved in and we didn't want anything to wilt.

Tonight as we were eating our dinner out back we noticed a radish poking its red root above ground and so with a little tug up it came. My husband was overjoyed and it fueled his excitement for all our gardening work.

We quickly cut it up into four small pieces and test tasted the first fruits of our labor--- and it was delicious! I've never liked radishes before but this was much better than any I've had from the grocery store (or that accidentally snuck onto my salad plate).

Thankfully more radishes will be picked later this week when we can get a decent amount all at once to make oven roasted radishes. After this first batch is done, we plan on planting more since they grow so quickly.

We also discovered that we have our first few pea blossoms on the snow pea plants!

The lettuce is growing but seems to kind of plateaued. I plan on researching some organic homemade fertilizers this week but would love to hear from you if you have a tried and true one that works.

The white and red onions are growing super fast! The chives have been doing well but my daughter shared with me tonight she picked a few slender whisps to eat since they smelled so good. Oh brother.

We have some little swiss chard shoots doing really well.

Our tomato plants have been taking off for the most part.

We have three pole bean trellises back near our shed and not all of our seeds sprouted so I'll go in this week and spread out the ones that did a bit more. Something small has been eating the leaves off these so I'll also be looking into grub pest control.

Zucchini and the regular cucumber plants have sprouted this past week also. About half of our cucumbers that we planted grew so I'm debating on whether to plant more or to just spread the current ones out a bit.

So, that's what is going on at our little Urban Daisy back yard vegetable garden. This week I did get a little discouraged because while doing some canning research I found that you should grow approx. an acre of food per person in your household! Yikes! We don't even have a half an acre of land! I had to take a step back and realize that, yes, there are people who can grow so much more than us or are more experienced and produce greater yields; however, we are doing more than noting. And sadly, nothing is what most people do. There has been so much joy in doing this project. So much excitement in tasting that first little radish. As we drive around seeing very few backyard gardens it breaks our hearts. To think that was us-- well, I'm glad we've changed and been encouraged to continue on. We are no experts. No gardening geniuses (that's for sure)... BUT if we can do this, anyone can! So can I encourage you to plant something this week?

From Lawn to Garden Week 12-- We have fruit!!!

Lots of warm weather mingled with some decent rain storms means that our plants took off!

We woke up to a beautiful morning! The first thing on the agenda was for my husband and three oldest kids to plant our blueberry pushes. They arrived from True Vine Ranch in excellent condition as promised. They are three year old plants and one of them already has at least 50 blueberries on it! While they prepared the ground and added peat moss and pine chips, I painted the kitchen ceiling. Finally. My little one year old played nearby with some containers as we checked a big to do item off our home improvement list.

After we finished painting and my little guy went down for his morning nap, I headed out back to join the others. I showed my daughter how to hoe in between the beds.

Our peas are growing nice and tall. We have homeschooling friends down in Virginia who harvested their first pea this week so hopefully in a few weeks we will join them!

Our radishes are doing super well-- they are an instant gratification seed! They grow so rapidly and we are really looking forward to them being done shortly but for now it's fun to see how quickly they grow. You can also see our carrots which are slowly but surely growing. I did plant a few more seeds today as we only have 14 carrot plants right now and we will see if they mature.

The lettuce plants are now about 4-5 inches high and growing quickly. We have them planted at all different intervals so they all aren't ready to be picked at once.

Newly planted this week and beginning to grow are our pickling cucumbers and regular pole beans.

We just planted purple pole beans and hopefully those too will begin to sprout and grow (Isn't my little helper adorable?!)

Behind the shed we were going to just fill the entire area with new soil since this area used to be stone driveway. However, when my husband decided to switch to an easier compost bin we had leftover lumber from my previous attempt that I never had time to finish. So, we hammered them into some awkward beds, filled with soil, and now peppers and zucchini are growing there. We still need to plant our regular cucumbers back there and that will be our last big thing to plant. The corn also got planted in between the one side of the shed and fence in a 9x5 seed rectangle and I am a little bit skeptical about how it will do. This is more of our year to learn how to grow corn and this is our trial run. If it works, awesome, if not, we will learn how to improve it next year.

The three year old grape vine has two little bunches of grapes! The kids are ecstatic! Well, honestly, mom and dad are as well! This is the first fruit of our labor that we can visibly see so far and it fueled confidence and excitement into our morning of work. The strawberry plants continue to do well and soon we will begin plucking their blossoms.

So there you have it... lots of growth and excitement! All of our seedlings that we grew over the winter are now planted. We have 40+ tomato plants growing and I planted a row of canning tomatoes today as well, ya know, just in case we need more. We have decided to call our little backyard garden the Urban Daisy seeing as the first summer that we lived at our home I planted daisies from seed and they come back every year so the name sort of pays homage to our first "grown from seed" plant.