Baked Cinnamon Oatmeal with Carrots and Zucchini

 My cousins, Andy and Chris, were fantastic athletes back in the day, and my Aunt Laurie used to swear by her baked cinnamon oatmeal recipe to keep her boys full of energy for swim meets. My mom got her recipe, and my sisters and I would beg her to make it before all of our sporting events, so we could go into our sports meets fueled on great food like our cousins... And maybe even obtain some their awesomeness too!

Over the years, this recipe has become a family favorite, and I started throwing in leftover nuts and shredded veggies or fruit to use up things in the fridge and pantry, as well as up the nutritional content.

Baked oats, chocked full of shredded carrots and zucchini from our garden, has become one of my favorite summer breakfasts. I even freeze bags of shredded carrots and zucchini to make this recipe throughout January and February, to bring a little sunshine and summer to dreary winter mornings.

Here's what you'll need-

3 cups rolled oats

2 teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoon of cinnamon (if you are allergic or don't like cinnamon, this is also great with nutmeg, apple pie spice, chai spice, etc.)

1/2 teaspoon of salt

2 eggs

1/2 cup of sugar

1/2 cup of brown sugar

1/2 cup of oil

1 cup of shredded carrots, loosely packed (about one large carrot)

1 cup of shredded zucchini, loosely packed (about 1 small zucchini or 1/2 of a medium one)

1 cup of pecans (or any favorite nut)

I also love this recipe because it's easy! You throw all of the ingredients into the same bowl, stir it thoroughly, and put it into a greased 9x13 glass dish. This is also great for serving a crowd!

Bake at 350 degrees for 35-45 minutes.

The biggest decision left is, "How to top it?!" 

I'm like my dad and like it with lots of milk. My sister, Mollie, always loved it spread with butter and drizzled with maple syrup. To really dress it up, you can top it whipped cream or cream cheese frosting! The choice is yours! Yum!

Garlic Scape Pesto

 If you walk into the farmers market right now, you will see garlic scapes at almost every booth! They are the shoots that shoot up from hardneck garlic. It takes nine months for garlic to mature in the garden, and the scapes are a flavorful bonus as you are waiting for your garlic head to finally be ready.

The first time I heard of garlic scape pesto was when my friend, Aubrey, from Heart and Soul Farm brought me a jar and told me that I needed to find a way to grow garlic scapes. We tried it and were hooked on it's punchy garlic flavor, and immediately ordered a package of three organic hardneck garlic heads to be planted in the fall.

Nine months later, we had a few plants with scapes. We shared some with the Dietrichs, saved the garlic heads, and replanted everything again in the fall. Now we are harvesting that patch this summer and we are so excited to be able to bring garlic scapes to market and provide them for our CSA members!

                                                   

Ingredients-

3 garlic scapes, roughly chopped

1/4 c walnuts (you can also use pine nuts if you are feeling fancy)

1/4 c parmesan cheese (we always add "a little" extra)

1/2 lemon zested and juiced

1 t salt

1/2 t pepper

3/4 c olive oil (we like to be able to drizzle ours, if you want a thicker pesto, you can reduce the oil to 1/2 c or even 1/4 c)

Put the scapes in a food processor and pulse 10-12 times. Add the walnuts and pulse 10-12 times. Add the parmesan, lemon zest, lemon juice, salt, and pepper. Pulse 10-12 times. Turn the food processor on low and slowly drizzle in the olive oil until everything is fully combined.

The final product!

Store in a jar with a lid for up to 1 month in the fridge or 3 months in the freezer (don't forget to use a freezer safe jar!) We love to eat this with any kind of bread or with pasta. Below you can see that we made breakfast sandwiches with homemade biscuits, scrambled eggs, arugula, and garlic scape pesto. Hope you enjoy!

Napa Cabbage Salad

 We've officially hit the season on the acre where our spring vegetables are growing in abundance, giving one last push before the summer vegetables come into full swing.

This is a salad that we love and that we've adapted over the years from Trisha Yearwood's Thai Cabbage Salad that you can find on Food Network. It's a great way to use up your spring vegetables and it's cool and crisp to eat on a hot day.

Salad Ingredients:

1 head Napa cabbage, roughly chopped

2 green onions, diced

10-15 sugar snap peas, roughly chopped

3 Hakurei salad turnips, diced

3 radishes, diced

2 carrots, diced

1 small cucumber, diced

Dressing Ingredients:

1/2 c oil

1/8 c sugar

juice of one lime

1 teaspoon garlic powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon pepper

optional- pinch of red pepper flakes or dash of hot sauce to add heat

Some spring favorites include sugar snap peas and spring onions. Napa cabbage isn't as popular, but we hope you learn to love it too after tryng this salad!

Roughly chop your Napa cabbage. We always tell customers to wash their head lettuce because dirt gets stuck in the layers as you can see in this photo.

We use both the bottoms and tops of our spring onions in this recipe. The blushing onions add a fun pop!

The nice thing about this salad is that you can change up the vegetables! The original recipe called for carrots and cucumber, and we started adding in any extra vegetables we had left over from market. Some of our favorites to add in are salad turnips and radishes for their great texture!

We also started adding in sugar snap peas for their sweetness and crunch.

Throw all of the vegetables into a bowl. They look pretty layered (our daughters joke that it's like eating a vegetable trifle) or toss it to mix everything up.

Pour the oil, sugar, lime juice, garlic powder, salt, and pepper into a canning jar. Put a lid on and shake vigorously. Pour over your vegetables. You can eat it right away, but we like to cover it and let it sit in the fridge for a couple of hours to let the flavors come together.

Enjoy!

Vegetable Scrap Broth

 If you are a member of a CSA or purchasing vegetables from the farmers market, don't let your money go to waste by throwing out those valuable vegetable scraps!

We save our scraps and freeze them to make a vegetable scrap broth that we use to cook our rice and other grains in, as well as for soups, stews, pasta, and more. This adds lots of flavor and nutrition to our meals, and is a great way to save money on broth purchased at the grocery store.

Lately I've been saving scraps from spring vegetables, including asparagus ends, turnips tops and ends, onion skins, radish ends, carrot peels, leftover herbs, sweet potato pieces, leftover greens, and lemon peels. Anytime I have scraps, I throw them into a freezer safe quart size canning jar, write the date on the lid, and put it in the door of my freezer.

Once I have 4-5 of these jars saved up, I will throw the contents of them in a crockpot, fill it with water, add 1 teaspoon of pepper, 2-3 teaspoons of salt, and 1-2 bay leaves. I typically start my broth on low in the evening and let it simmer throughout the night. In the morning, I turn the crockpot off and once the liquid is cool, I either use it in a recipe or I freeze it in a canning jar to use for a later time.

*If you have meat bones leftover from a meal, you can also throw those in with your vegetable scraps to make a bone broth. To extract all of the nutrients from the bones, you will need to cook it in a crockpot for at least 24 hours.

Enjoy!

Wither and Die, Water and Life

 This is a sad story for me to write, but it is a part of our farm’s story, and hopefully we will look back and see God’s glory working through it.

We are coming off of some hard weeks. A few weeks back, the transmission on our farm truck went out. After weighing our options, we decided to have it rebuilt. This was followed by a propane leak under our old farmhouse (yikes!), which thankfully we were able to get taken care of right away.

In the midst of all this, we were having issues with our water acting up, with it quickly getting worse and worse. Over the past week I’ve felt like we’ve had a water triage going on, where we were having to designate what things are the most crucial for the use of water in our home and on the farm.

This week we got bad news. Our well is running dry. Think of someone slurping that last little bit of liquid in their cup from a straw, and you’ve got our water problem.

Without water there is no life, and this is especially apparent when you are trying to run a farm. Not only is our well not working, but the last couple of weeks the weather has been dry, warm, and windy, only adding to our dilemma.

We are watching our flourishing garden and plants wither and die.

The well is dry, funds are drying up, and we are feeling parched, drained, and exhausted by the weight of it all.

I walked around the yard with the guys who will be drilling our new well, who were admiring our gardens and asking a lot of questions about the vegetables we are growing, the farmers market, and our watering operation. At one point one of them turned to me and said, “I’ll be prayin’ to the good Lord Almighty that you’ll be gettin’ rain here for your plants.”

That filled me with hope. A complete stranger saw our need and was willing to send up prayers on our behalf. Bless him.

This morning I was encouraged by this devotion from Shauna Niequist, “I’m turning from fear to prayer, trusting that God can create new life and beauty from anything. I’m inviting the springtime around me into my own life, hoping it takes root and begins to show signs of new life in me, even small ones.” (Savor, On Springtime, pg 107)

We are praying for that springtime, for that rain that will revive and bring new life to our withered plants and dying garden, and the hope of living water that will revive our withered hearts and souls.

Frost and Flowers

My chickens spent the better part of March scratching the heavy layers of leaves off my flower beds, which means I spent the better part of March piling the leaves back on, trying desperately to keep my delicate spring flowers covered up until the right time.

Every time I donned my long sleeves and started covering up those pale greenish yellow shoots, this verse came to me.

“Do not arouse or awaken love until it so desires.” Song of Solomon 2:7

A string of warm days could force the spring flowers up early, and without any cover, a frost could easily damage them. I’ve definitely had years where the blooms died prematurely or the plants never even bloomed at all.

This verse in particular is about love. It’s about letting it “rest” and not forcing it until the right time. But as I was thinking about this verse and protecting my precious flowers, I thought about the things I’m yearning for right now. Fresh veggies straight from the garden, market season, and most of all, for the chance to get published. I’ve spent the winter working hard towards these things, and I’m yearning and dreaming to see the fruit of my labor come to life.

Every time I covered those flowers, it was a reminder of patience, that there is a time and season for everything.

Ashes to Dust to Growth Again

On March 16, 2020, I wrote in my garden journal that one thing that gave me hope through all the coronavirus stuff was that the garden would grow.

I walked around with my camera and saw little signs of life everywhere; bright green garlic shoots, blushing stalks of rhubarb just starting to pop, tender strawberry leaves unfurling from the soil, and blueberry and raspberry bushes coming to life after their winter hibernation. Every corner of the garden had something growing, something alive, something to look forward to. After a long winter, there was so much hope in the vibrant green beginning to emerge everywhere, and with uncertainty and worry building as the coronavirus hit our nation, stepping into the garden and taking a deep breath was my solace.

The next day everything changed. James headed outside to flame weed the asparagus bed. Between the dry leaves and several gusts of wind, he caught the garden on fire. What was left were charred garlic stems, blackened rhubarb stalks, and strawberries, blueberries, and raspberries burnt to a crisp. Not only that, but my tulips, daffodils, and lilies on the other side of the garden fence were ashes.

With smoke from the burning leaves curling up from the leaves like ghosts, it felt like a graveyard. All the signs of life and hope were gone in a matter of seconds.

After a good cry, all we could do was wait and watch and replant.

Over the last couple of weeks we’ve seen regrowth from the ashes. Some things will need replaced, but the garlic is pulling through, the rhubarb, a precious gift from my grandma, is as vibrant and blushing as ever, and we may yet have berries for jam.
It always amazes me how the cycles of the season and lessons from the garden reflect the creator, and in this instance, the magnificence of Easter. To celebrate Easter is to celebrate a God who specializes in bringing life from the dust and the ashes. Whatever it is you are facing this Easter holiday, today is the day to celebrate and know the promise of life from death, that hope can grow from ashes, and that God will make all things new again.