It's raining!!

It's July 4th. Probably the worst day to rain for most Americans. Well, the rain goes on all day here. Ruin most people's plan on having a big BBQ party.

For us, it was good. The garden gets the very needed rain. And we have the party planned for tomorrow, July 5th. The weather will be perfect tomorrow. The only problem we need to worry is that the ground will be soaking wet. Well, a little mud on the shoes is unavoidable.

For the party, we are going to try to serve as much from the garden as possible. David is going to dig out more potato tomorrow morning. Those will go straight to the grill. I have already made some pickled radish and carrot, Taiwan style. The tomato are not quite ready yet. We have lots of them, but all of them are still green. Including the green variety that I don't know how to tell that they are ready. Well, grilled green tomato will be the solution for that. I will also make some rice paper spring roll with the last little bit of lettuce we have left. We will also cut off the first cabbage tomorrow and make some cabbage roll with it. We also going to make two quiche with Swiss chard.

Swiss chard is one of the best summer vegetable. You only need to plant it once per year. It last all summer without bolting. It grows fast. Just a few plants are enough to give us enough green whenever we want, plus extra to give away. They also look very pretty, at least the variety I planted, Bright Light, has a beautiful array of colors. The only problem is, most people don't know what to do with them. In order to give them away, I need to provide a list of possible way to cook them. Normally I would suggest to use the green part as any way you would cook spinach, and cook the stem like celery. Here is one of our favorite, make a quiche out of it.
David will post the recipe in the next post.

Another summer favorite we have this year is oriental amaranth. I grow up with this leafy vegetable. It is very tender if you boil it. It has very mild flavor, which make it good to cook with light flavor stuff like fish. From the oriental seed company, EverGreenSeeds, I was able to get three different varieties of them, red, white(pale green), and red strip. It only germinates in warm weather. As long as it comes out, it will be ready for harvest in 30 days. And they are also good for the entire summer. I planted all three of them together. The colors are so beautiful.

To cook the amaranth, the easy way would be simply stir fry with some garlic and oil. Or you can make a Chinese style vegetable soup (David says it is more like broth.) with tofu or fish. Chinese don't really use it raw. But I find it quite tasty by itself. So you can use it to substitute lettuce in summer. I just seeded some more amaranth in the failing soybean bed.(Due to baby rabbits in the vegetable patch.) This time I arranged them in a square pattern. We will see how it turns out.