Mapgirl’s Fiscal Challenge

YUM!

Frugal Upstate, a blog I don’t read enough, has a post with suggestions on what to do with extra zucchini. Check it out. I added a comment with a zucchini soup a friend made for me. Very simple very easy stuff. Great if you have a garden full of them!

I love vegetables from the garden. My mom grew them a lot when I was a little girl, but it comes and goes. It’s hard work, but it can be very gratifying. My mom no longer has a formal garden. In fact, she’s a crappy gardener. The flower beds are always a mess and there is no central design principle. She plants what she likes. This includes her veggies.

My mom got it into her head a few years ago that she liked the look of squash blossoms, so she planted some in the side yard. Now she has monster Korean squashes. They’re pale green in color, a web-like pattern of white and green on the skin, with a mild flesh, just like zucchini. I like them, but they are monstrous. Like eggplant-sized. I cut them into disks and basically fry them like a green tomato. Dredge in some flour and egg and fry in oil till tender. Then I dip in soy/sesame/vinegar dipping sauce. (Sorry, the Korean word for it is ‘yang-yum’, but that’s also the word for seasoning, flavoring, or marinade. Not helpful, I know.)

Other stuff my mom likes are tomatoes. I personally HATE raw tomato. They’re a weird texture, so I only eat them if they are grape-sized, or else in some other stuff, cut up small, etc. My parents eat them like apples by dipping them in sugar. One year we went to Korea right during the time they needed staking. OOPS. Big mistake. When we got back from our trip, we harvested all the stuff just laying on the ground and quickly cooked it all into bolognese sauce. I froze my share of it and had it on hand for months in college. We still laugh about it. Funny thing is that my mom made pretty good sauce, though she rarely eats Italian food.

Gardening is a great way to save money on produce. One of my friends was trying to get her husband to try the South Beach Diet, but it was a time when they were both out of work. (Recent birth and a layoff.) She told me that it was hard to do the diet because produce was expensive. I agree. It can really bust your budget to buy produce and then throw it out a few days later. It’s why I almost never have veggies in the fridge unless I go to the market and make them the same day.

Some ideas for home gardening:

1) An herb garden. Why pay $2.00 for an enormous bunch of something, when you only need a snip of it here and there? These do well in window boxes. Basil is my favorite, but chives and cilantro work nicely too. I like lavender for the smells.

2) Tomatoes in planters. Move them with the sun if you have to, but they do ok being root-bound in a container. Means you don’t have to prepare an enormous bed for them. If you are in the suburbs, doing this means you can also keep them on your deck, away from deer. Deer will eat them. Yes, they will.

3) Lettuce. The bunnies will eat them though. They say marigolds around them will keep the bunnies out, but they lie. That never worked for us.

4) DON’T plant mint. Seriously. It will take over. Keep it in a pot on a windowsill.

5) Peppers! Often you can grow hot peppers year-round in the house in a pot. There are many kinds, so do some research. Good for garnish and for gifts.

6) Corn. Just for hanging up a scarecrow.

7) Cucumbers. Make your own pickles! Especially with #5. Hot sweet pickles! Yum. My mom gets a finger-sized Korean pickle with which she makes a special kimchee. I miss those. Cutting slits in them and stuffing with red pepper and radish mixtures.

Share cuttings and seeds with friends and neighbors. If someone likes your bounty so much, give them a plant! My mom and our Korean neighbor got some plants this way from friends at church. How I remember picking tall stands of green leaves for my mom to pickle. (Don’t know the English name for them, ‘gge-nip’. Good for wrapping around rice and popping into the mouth. One place says it’s sesame leaf, but I’m not sure. Linguistically though that makes sense.)

What about you? Got a garden memory of fresh summertime food? Gardening a small plot with mom and dad? Heaving sacks of manure onto flowerbeds? (Oops, sorry. Not the bucolic imagery I was shooting for.)

Handy tip: My mom gets the Korean veggie seeds from the Korean market. I don’t know when this started, but that’s where the squash came from. Don’t know the first origin of the cucumbers she planted, but later, the seeds were also from the store.