Gardening is hard. Every year I am learning new things, but it also seems that each year presents new challenges. My first year of gardening, the bunnies ate all of my peas. So, we put up a fence, and I had not seen the bunnies back until this year. The fence has kept them out of the garden -- or so I thought. Somebody had been eating my green bean plants, among other things, earlier this summer. At first, I blamed the deer (which may or may not have been munching in my garden -- I really am not sure). As I learned last year, the deer can just prance right over my little fence and start feasting. So, I covered my garden. At first, I just covered some of the plants with sheer tulle fabric. Then, my father-in-law set out this netting for me that covers almost my entire garden area. This has worked great, and I have found no evidence of deer in my garden since. However, something was still eating the green beans.
I decided to be brave tonight and try something new for dinner: Eggplant Parmesan. Some friends of ours made it for us not too long ago (although, a vegan version), and it was actually quite good. I wasn't sure that I had ever actually had eggplant before. For whatever reason, it just always sounded like something that would taste bad. After my first exposure, however, I realized I might actually like eggplant! I was at the grocery store today, not really sure what I wanted to make for dinners this week, when I stumbled upon eggplant in the produce section. I make Chicken Parmesan from time to time, so I figured I could just replace the chicken with eggplant and that could be dinner tonight! Eggplant is a little different than chicken, so here's the recipe I made up:
This past weekend, I got the chance to reconnect with an old friend of mine -- we were best friends when I was in elementary school, living in Texas, but it had been about 10 years since we last saw each other. She and her husband (who I'd never met) came over for dinner this past weekend (the reason for the blueberry pie), and it was awesome to see her catch up on life. They were visiting some family in Michigan and had gone cherry picking. Well, apparently the picked a BOATLOAD of cherries, and they ending up bringing us about 7lbs from their stash! That's a lot of cherries. I usually just eat cherries fresh, but there was no way we were going to go through that many just through normal fruit snacking. So, I started looking up cherry recipes. I've made a few so far that turned out pretty good!
Summer is in full swing, and you know what that means: it's berry season! I've actually made it to the farmer's market the past couple of weeks, and they just started offering blueberries there. We had some friends coming over this past weekend and I wanted to make a fun summery dessert, and I thought something with blueberries sounded good. I thought about pie, but I'm not a big pie fan myself, mostly because I don't like cooked fruit. My sister-in-law makes an awesome strawberry pie with fresh berries that I actually like quite a bit, so I thought about trying that recipe but swapping out the blueberries. However, in the end, I decided I wanted something with a graham cracker crust, and I found this recipe for Jan's Fresh Blueberry Pie on AllRecipes.com.