Favourite recipes

Hello everyone! I love connecting my two passions together: cooking and gardening. What I mean by that? I grow lots of vegetables and fruits and then I love to use them in my kitchen. My favourite dish is of course salad. I can prepare them in many ways so it is not boring and always tasty. One of my favourites it with lettuce, radish, tomato, cucumber, corn (unfortunately not from my garden:( ) and a bit of dill. I called it the 'spring salad'. What are your favourite dishes? Do you prepare them with your crops?

Hi Ann, I also love cooking. My salads tend to be seasonal. So, for example, in winter I do a fennel/orange salad with olives and goat cheese. Autumn, I like apple or asian pear, blue cheese, walnuts and like a honey mustard dressing. Spring, I do raw asparagus slivers, croutons and a goat cheese dressing. Or when peaches come in, I like peaches, almonds, crispy prosciutto, feta and peach/thyme dressing. And summer, I eat a lot of tomato salads.

I use my own crops whenever possible.

Maybe my favorite dish, which is fortunately becoming more well known, is roasted cauliflower.  That's just cauliflower tossed in a bowl with olive oil and sprinkled with salt, roasted on a cookie sheet until browned and there are crispy bits.

I make it with my own cauliflower when I can, but I'm not the best at growing big fat cauliflower heads.  I'm more successful with kale.

I used to love making massaged kale salad, which is where I slice the leaves thinly (chiffonade) and massage with oil, then dress with vinegar and honey (and add other things, like carrot and fennel).  However, these days, raw kale is not my friend.

I need some cooked kale recipes!

one of my favorite dishes when we have an over abundance of winter squash in the fall is a savory squash pie. You make it just like a pumpkin pie, but instead of sugar and cinammon and nutmeg you puree it with savory spices like rosemary, garlic, thyme, oregano, cumin, curry, etc... It is such an easy and tasty way to turn squash overload into meals a plenty. You can do stuff like top it with carmelized onion, mix in stewed greens, 'shepherd's pie' it by throwing some roast brassicas/corn/peppers/mushrooms/your favorite goodies underneath the squash layer. I even have a scheme to make one this fall that is either blended with a savory cheese cake type blend or has a layer of savory cheesecake on top of the layer of savory squash. The possibilities are enormous. That's a ways off though

I love to cook.  I have an award winning desert, and I make some killer bbq.  My favorite kitchen appliance is the instant pot, and I love making dog food with this.  

One of the favorite things that I enjoy cooking with, is essential oils.  I want to share my favorite vegetable recipe.

I love to saute broccoli with basil essential oil sauce.  You have to do this in a specific fashion, or you will lose all of the benefits from the essential oil.  I start off by adding coconut oil into my saute pan.  I then add in my chopped onlon, and saute that to a nice golden, before I add in some finely minced garlic.  The onion and the garlic give the coconut oil a fantastic taste.  Once the garlic is cooked, I then add broccoli flourets that have been lightly steamed.  This gets finished cooking in the saute pan with the coconut oil, which gets spread all over the broccoli.  Once this mixture is done cooking, it is important to gauge the amount of coconut oil in the pan.  You want approximately a tablespoon or half of a tablespoon of coconut oil in the pan for this next step.  If you don't have enough of the oil, add some and let it come to temperature so that it melts.  Remove the pan from the heat, and add a few drops of Basil essential oil directly into the coconut oil, and mix up the oils.  Then, mix this oil mixture over all of the broccoli.  

I developed this recipe by accident, and found that the basil oil worked perfectly with the broccoli onion and garlic.  You just don't want to cook the basil oil, because you lose the nutrients of the oil.

I hope that you enjoy this recipe...... tasty eatings.