Garden Tomato Sauce with Pasta

One of my new favorite recipe blogs is called Gina's Skinny Recipes. My friend Rebecca introduced me to the site. Gina features a lot of low fat recipes that happen to be Weight Watchers-friendly. Even though Adam and I aren't technically counting points, her recipes help us make flavorful foods without all the calories.

This year our garden wasn't as fruitful as we had wanted. Because of the wedding and honeymoon, I expected some of the plants wouldn't get as much attention as they needed. However, our green beans, basil, sunflowers and yellow pear tomatoes were the stars of the garden! I used some of the yellow tomatoes for one Gina's recipes.

Easy Garden Tomato Sauce

1 Tablespoon olive oil
6 cloves garlic, chopped
1 1/2 pounds grape tomatoes, halved (we used mini yellow pear tomatoes)
salt and black pepper
1/8 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
a handful of fresh basil or oregano, chopped (we used basil)


In a large pan, heat oil over medium-high heat. Add garlic and cook until golden, making sure not to burn the garlic.

Add tomatoes, salt, black pepper and red pepper flakes. Stir well and reduce heat to low. Simmer, covered, for 15 minutes. Add basil or oregano and cook for another 15 minutes.

Serve over your favorite pasta.

A Beautiful Afternoon

Saturday was my bridal shower. It was completely beyond lovely! My bridesmaids, mom and mother in law did a fantastic job of planning a terrific afternoon and I love every minute of it!

An afternoon tea party. Here is a silver tea set that I bought at an auction years ago and my mom put lots of time into polishing it!

The shower was at the Orris House Inn in Mechanicburg, PA. Each table was set with teacups and in each cup was a bundle of homemade sugar cube - some colored and in various heart and flower shapes. There was also a "hope" sign with questions Bec asked to both Adam and I - we were asked the same question and our answers were displayed for everyone to enjoy (What was your first date like? What was it like meeting Adam/Hope's family? What are your favorite qualities of Hope/Adam?).

We had a delicious lunch by C&J Catering. Sandwiches, salad and chilled strawberry soup.

And because I love cupcakes so much, we had pink champagne cupcakes. Notice the cute Alice In Wonderland theme?!..

Bec took the time to glue little hearts on to the tea bags!

We played a few games...

Kristin and Arielle collected kitchen tools that my mom sewed on an apron. Everyone then played a memory game to see if they could remember everything on my apron as I ran through the crowd. There were some tough ones - a jalapeno pepper corer and a banana slicer!

Finally, I received some great gifts including a cookbook called Hope in the Kitchen The Wedding Edition - a compilation of recipes from the ladies at the shower. I love it!

Thank you to everyone for making my day special! And thank you to Bec for these photos!

Garden Success

These are the flower beds at our place in May. Our moms gave us lots of plants and we just kept adding and adding anything we could find. Adams parents even made the beds wider and longer for us to keep expanding.

Even Baxter and Trapper helped with the tan bark.






Then fast forward to mid August. Our garden is quite wild and jungle-like! We learned what we like and what we don't like. So we will move some plants this fall - mostly group the same plants together like the various kinds of lillies.

May - August

To the far right are 3 tomato plants and a bell pepper plant. We have gotten several grape tomatoes but we're waiting for the pineapple heirlooms to ripen. Can't wait for those!

Fresh Salsa

So do you all remember my mom and I growing vegetable plants from seed? Well look at the fruits of our labor!!!:

We were pleasantly surprised to have a huge watermelon plant because we didn't plant it. We did plant yellow squash but none of them took off. But the Roma tomatoes, cucumbers and green peppers are magnificently abundant!

With all those tomatoes I decided to try my hand at some salsa.

The ingredients:

white onion
green pepper
garlic cloves
jalapeno pepper
Roma tomatoes
cilantro
lots of salt and pepper

First, I roughly chopped the ingredients (except the lime) and took the seeds and center from the tomatoes.

Then in a food processor, I added the onion, peppers, garlic, cilantro and just a handful of tomatoes and coarsely pulsed it all. I then put that in a large bowl and added the juice of a lime and salt and pepper. Next I filled the food processing bowl with tomatoes and pulsed them so they're a tad chunkier than the peppers and onions. Then mixed everything together and continued to adjust the salt and pepper.

The finished product! I think it will taste much better after it's refrigerated overnight.

We still have a lot of tomatoes left so I think my mom is going to make some tomato juice and as long as they last until next weekend, I want to make bruschetta for our Labor Day party.

PA Lavendar Festival

Two Saturdays ago I spent a lovely afternoon at the Pennsylvania Lavendar Festival in Fairfield. The skies looked ominous but I have been planning on going to this festival for months after I read a NY Times article about lavendar fields throughout the U.S.

The Willow Pond Farm is the host of an annual lavendar festival where you will find more than 2 acres of beautiful and wonderfully fragrant lavendar plants of over 100 varieties. The festival offered pick-your-own lavendar, workshops on lavendar and other herbs, cooking demonstrations, lavendar-related shopping, a plant shop, and most importantly, lavendar-infused foods such as lavendar blondies and lavendar lemonade. Bruster's Ice Cream was also there offering some delicious dark chocolate lavendar ice cream that was absolutely decadent.. the calming scent of lavendar with the rich flavor of dark chocolate... that's a great Saturday afternoon!

Everyone picking their lavendar.

Perfectly straight rows of lavendar.

After picking a handful of lavendar in a refreshing rain shower and sampling some lemonade, I attended the herbal tea workshop instructed by a master gardener at Penn State. For 90 minutes we talked about growing an herb garden, drying herbs, recipes for teas, and sampled 5 different herbal 'teas'. I put teas in quotes because we call it herbal tea but it actually contains none of the tea plant, camellia sinensis, but simply dried herbs steeped in boiling water so it's not technically tea.

The 5 teas we tried were fennel, ginger, lavendar, lemon verbena and peppermint. I was a big fan of the lavendar and peppermint. The ginger was just too overpowering.

We got samples of the dried herbs each tea was made from to taste and smell before we tried the tea: fennel seeds, ginger root, lavendar flowers, lemon verbena leaves, and peppermint leaves.

The tea was stored in mason jars for our sampling.

A recipe for herbal teas:

Put 1/3 cup dried herb in a big Pyrex measuring cup. Add 1 quart boiling water. Steep for 7 minutes. Put a fine strainer over a mason jar and pour tea through strainer into jar. Add sugar if desired. Let cool and refrigerate.

I bought lots of lavendar so I will definitely be making a lavendar brew soon! I also bought a lavendar plant and a stevia plant, which are both thriving well in their respective pots on the porch. As a side, stevia is a south American plant used as a sweetener. It was just approved by the FDA and is used in the sweetner Truvia. I still have to figure out how I will use my plant.

I will definitely be going back to the festival next year, if not before to visit Willow Pond!

Another Update - Testing our Green Thumbs

Our little seedlings were 3 weeks old yesterday. The squash plants have really taken off. I was getting nervous that the basil wouldn't sprout but it did about 10 days after the other vegetables and is now doing well.

We will probably plant at least the squash plants this week.

I have also planted strawberry plants in a hanging bag that I will hang at Greg's house after they take root in the bag. There are 10 plants but I think the unexpected frost got a few right after we planted them (the week after Easter) but just yesterday I saw at least 2 plants are growing well.

There are 4 rows of Roma tomatoes on the right, then the bell peppers, then the cucumbers, then the towering squash plants and finally the 2 rows of basil on the left.

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UPDATE: Testing our Green Thumbs

Here is the tray of seeds we planted. They are 7 days old!! All seeds sprouted except for the basil. I have to do a little research on what's wrong or if they just take longer. We still have seeds left so maybe I will try to plant the basil elsewhere.

The tallest so far are the yellow squash and cucumber. It's so amazing to watch them grow... you can see how they came out of the seed because the seed is still stuck on top of the little leaves.


You can see the sad, empty coirs that have the basil seeds in them.

Testing our Green Thumbs

On Sunday, my mom and I planted some seeds in hopes of beginning our vegetable garden. For the past few years we've done some container gardens on our patio and we hope to continue this year.

In these 72 little seedling coir disks, we planted Roma tomatoes, cucumbers, green peppers, yellow squash and basil. We are keeping the tray in the dining room in front of the bay window (not in it because the directions say to keep the trays out of direct light). Once we see little sprouts - hopefully by mid week next week, we can remove the clear plastic top.

Here we planted some cherry tomato seeds in a hanging basket, hoping one day soon we will have a cascading plant, providing us with lots of juicy little tomatoes!

We may plant a few pepper and Roma tomato plants in the ground but we hope to plant most in containers.

I'll keep you up to date on the progress of our little seedlings!