An Actual Dinner Conversation

Mark: Honey, could you clean up from dinner tonight, since I cooked it, and, um, grew it?

Alana: Silence. What could I say? I wanted to say no, but on what grounds?

Mark: Does Vanessa have a garden this year?

Alana: Yea, a pot garden.

Andy: Vanessa's growing pot?!?!?

Alana: No. fruits and vegetables, in pots.

Andy: Oh. I thought you said it rather calmly.

You can't fake stuff like this.

Tonight's dinner was a vegetable garden feast. I'd show you a picture of it, but it was too late. Here's some precooking shots. First, a general garden shot. I'm excited because all my previous merged photos were made by Rob, but this time, I did it myself.



Mark harvested his potatoes today. He says he's disappointed in his barrels of potatoes. He thinks the weight of the soil retarded their growth. The yield was the same as the plants in the ground. Both sets were delicious. He picked out the smallest of both kinds, boiled them with salt and put margarine on them. Mmmm........ He said at one point, "Oh, this is what potatoes are supposed to taste like!"



Mark also made a stir fry with zucchini and banana peppers from the garden. He used a seasoning pack from the Asian Grocery Store -- pepper chicken. It was good.

This is the first red pepper we've gotten since a year and a half ago when I bought pepper seeds and announced that I would grow a garden so I could have roasted red bell peppers on the grill every night in the summer. (Last year the peppers didn't really grow till late September, and were green the night before our first frost. This year we accidentally bought banana peppers instead of bell peppers.) This red pepper is from one of our two or three pepper plant rows that aren't banana peppers. A few are Italian Roasters. They are HOT but very good. Mark cooked some on the grill and we bit right into them and discovered they are too hot to just eat. This one is a Hot Cherry Pepper. Great. You can only eat so many hot peppers.

We have about 200 tomatoes that are getting bigger and bigger. Two hundred. Sigh. I still can't get a red bell pepper on the grill, but I've got 200 tomatoes.