Crystal Madrilejos

Before committing to the Whole30, one of the things that I was feeling really reluctant to change was my coffee. I love coffee, usually with cream and sugar, early in the morning when the house is quiet and everyone else is sleeping. It was my little sanctuary. My little calm before the storm, not to mention it’s delicious! Since sugar and dairy are not allowed on the Whole30 and I don’t enjoy my coffee black, I decided to at least figure out a compromise without feeding my sugar craving. I’d heard about using canned coconut milk as creamer, and in my research came across this recipe for Primal Non-Dairy Coffee Creamer and I have to say that it’s pretty wonderful stuff.

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When we first started our garden, there were only a few things that Andrew was dead set on growing. Lettuce, potatoes, corn, and strawberries. Lettuce, check. Potatoes, check. Corn and strawberries, eh not so much. Every single year, something went awry with our strawberries. Until this year! We finally have a bumper crop – if we can manage to keep the animals and bugs (and little kid fingers) in check.

We’ve managed to keep the animals and kids at bay with fencing and netting. However, slugs are a problem. I see them everywhere leaving their disgusting foamy slug trails! How rude! A friend on Facebook suggested beer traps, which I have yet to try since we don’t have beer readily available in our house and I can never remember to get some. Andrew used to work/live on an permaculture homestead out in Washington state, and they have HUGE slugs out there. Like, cartoonishly big. Like if you accidentally stepped on one it would make a pop/crunch sound! Yuck. The people he lived with would crush up egg shells and sprinkle them around each strawberry plant because apparently the slugs don’t like to crawl over them – a similar concept to Diatomaceous Earth I suppose. Our strawberry patch is way overcrowded to do that, which probably isn’t helping our slug problem either. Too many plants in one area give slugs lots of hiding places! (more…)

After my 40 Days of Being Active, I’ve felt a lot of motivation to keep the momentum going. So, I’ve decided to spend the next 30 days following The Whole30 program. After a week of preparation, I kicked off the 30 days starting yesterday. I’d heard a lot about The Whole30 through different blogs I read and through people I follow on Instagram but never really felt the need to try it, until now. We usually take a common sense approach to eating in our house, and to use the phrase coined by Michael Pollan, we “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” and this has worked for us. (more…)

Potatoes have been one of our favorite veggies to grow since we started our garden because they are so fun to harvest. It’s like digging for treasure! Up until this year we’ve mainly done one big harvest at the end of the season for storage potatoes. But our storage set up hasn’t been ideal and we seemed to end up with lots of sprouting spuds – okay for seed potatoes but not great for eating. This year we plan on harvesting as we grow (it’s a sign that potatoes are forming below ground when the plant starts to flower.) We’ve tried a few different growing methods over the years – planting in-ground and hilling the soil around the plants as they grow, a build-as-you-go bin, and last year started growing in a few different containers. I can’t say so far whether one has been more successful in terms of the amount of yield, though bins are less time consuming but a lot of soil is needed on hand to keep filling as the plants grow. (more…)

Years ago when we started our first garden we jumped all in and grew pretty much anything and everything we could, even if we had no idea what to do with it. Back before Kale was all the rage, we grew it because we were young and ambitious and wanted to just grow the weirdest things we could find (Kale being one such “weird” thing) and when it was time to harvest we were like, “Now what?” – we literally had never made anything with Kale. Fast-forward to our current garden. We’re a bit more selective in what we grow due to space and time restrictions, years (it doesn’t take many) of gardening toil have made us a bit less ambitious in certain ways and a bit more humbled by the force that is nature (aka the damn deer, the groundhogs, chipmunks, birds, bugs and the weeds). But Kale… good ol’ Kale… has become a staple that goes into everything from smoothies and fresh juice, to breakfast scrambles or kale chips. Plus, not only is it really healthy, but it’s a workhorse during our zone’s colder months, a superfood in more ways than one! (more…)

A little recap from week one of maple tapping season 2014! We started tapping our trees on March 9th and between then and the day we boiled (last Sunday, March 16th) we got about 20 gallons of sap. The weather hasn’t been ideal, with only a few days going above freezing, but it was enough for us to get a decent batch. Since we knew we were only going to be able to boil on the weekends, we had to store the sap in the meantime and were a bit thankful for the cold weather. (more…)

Last year was the first year we didn’t do any summer squash (zucchini or yellow squash.) Despite these being the most prolific of veggies and something I would definitely recommend for any novice gardener to plant because they give a lot of bang for the buck, we didn’t plant them for that exact reason. Every summer we drowned in zucchini, like we couldn’t GIVE these things away, and you have to be diligent checking your plants or you run the risk of huge mutant squash. Plus, we belonged to a local CSA last year and we knew we were going to have a fair share of summer squash already.

Since we didn’t have those massive zucchini plants taking up space, we were able to plant more winter squash and also some watermelon, all of which were a great success. (more…)

Tomatoes haven’t always been the most successful plants in our garden. Yes, there are factors that are not within our control, like the weather but a lot of attention goes a long way with tomatoes. They aren’t like some plants where you can just let them go wild and they are the better for it. Tomatoes crave attention. This past season, I made the tomatoes into my own little pet project. I was determined to have a big and healthy haul and I can say that it was our best season yet. Our goal is to grow and perfect a canning process that is suitable for the type of sauce Andrew makes for his pizza.  (more…)

Andrew’s Mom started the tradition of baking cookies for Andrew and his brother every Valentine’s Day for as long as he can remember, and last year Andrew decided to make this a tradition for our little family as well. He found two little red metal mailboxes into which he puts the cookies for the kids to find on Valentine’s Day morning. He’s been tinkering with his cookie recipe for awhile now, but this year’s cookies were, really, really good. Maybe even his best yet. So I thought this would be a great post to kick off our new series called The Kitchen Tinkerer, but more about that later in the post. First, these cookies!  (more…)

I think I’m on to something. Recently, at Dewey’s Pizza (a local pizzeria) I had the seasonal Harvest Salad that has a soft cheese, candied walnuts and figs as three of the ingredients. And it was amazing. It inspired me to mix things up when it comes to salads, since I fall into the rut of making the same one over and over, then getting sick of it, then not having any desire to eat salads.

So as the title of this post reveals, the three things that have been taking my salads to a new level lately are: Goat Cheese, Dried Figs and Candied Walnuts. (more…)