Fast & Fresh Meals From Your Garden

Planting a vegetable garden is work – often a lot of work. Depending on the scale of your operation, you'll probably have your hands full during the growing season. What with planning, tilling, planting, weeding, watering, and more weeding, and more watering, there doesn't seem to be much time left over to relax and enjoy the results!

After all that work, when it's time to harvest, you want to get to the eating part fast! Let's look at a few ideas for dishes you can quickly prepare from both your summer garden and your fall garden.

Summer Garden Soups

You don't have to wait for the fall harvest to create soups! The summer garden provides ample opportunity to serve up big pots of satisfying soups. Cold soups are a great time saver, and so delicious and refreshing after a hot day spent in the garden. Pick ripe tomatoes, cucumbers, and green onions and you have the basis for a cold soup such as gazpacho. Blended sweet pea soup is another favorite. Get out your blender, or invest in an immersion blender, and throw your summer vegetables in to make creamy cold soups that are filling and ready in minutes.

Summer Garden Salads

(Image courtesy of Apolonia at FreeDigitalPhotos.net.)

Of course, salad ingredients are there for the picking right under your nose. But, don't forget some of the less obvious choices in your garden. Pea vines are becoming very popular in salads. They have a very delicate flavor and are so economical, and prolific! Also, those zucchini don't have to get gigantic before you can eat them. Pick tiny zucchini, and the blossoms, too, and use them in salads for a delicious and pretty addition to your meals. Walk around your summer garden and you'll find tender greens, blossoms, and all sorts of young sprouts to quickly pluck and add to your salad; ingredients like baby broccoli buds, tiny beets clinging to their tender greens, and itsy-bitsy radishes. Just wash them up and toss them into a salad. Cucumbers can also be the star of a salad, not just a bit player. A big bowl of young cucumbers, sliced and marinated with fresh herbs, vinegar, and olive oil is a wonderful treat on a hot summer day! Or try my favorite - dice a few ripe tomatoes and crunchy cucumbers, toss with fresh, snipped dill, olive oil, and balsamic or red wine vinegar, then sprinkle on some crumbled feta cheese and sliced black olives. I could eat this every day!

Fall Garden Soups

When the season changes and nights start getting colder, you need a nice bowl of hot soup to finish off the day. But, you don't have to stand in front of the stove for hours to make a soup that's satisfying. When the vegetables are right out of the garden, the flavors will do the magic without hours of cooking. Harvest an armful of squash, onions, beans, carrots, rutabaga, potatoes, and any other vegetables you can pick or dig, then scrub and dice them. The trick here is to roast them for a few minutes to sweeten and intensify the flavor, then throw them in a big pot with water or broth and simmer for just a few minutes. When the vegetables are tender, it's time to dig in. It's delicious simplicity at its best!

(Image courtesy of Apolonia at FreeDigitalPhotos.net.)

Fall Garden Salads

It may seem like summer is the time for salads, but not when you have such lovely fresh fall vegetables to choose from! For a delightful cold salad, cut beets in half and roast them just until knife tender, then peel them, dice them and refrigerate. Once they are cold, toss the beets in a bowl with chopped onion, vinegar or salad dressing, then top with some crumbled goat cheese or feta cheese. Any fall vegetable such as squash, sweet potatoes, or even pumpkin can be diced and roasted and then tossed with tangy oil and vinegar dressing for a filling salad. If you have the end of the season tomatoes still hanging on, you can blend those, strain the juice, and create lovely creamy dressings. And check your pepper plants! You may be surprised with a few that have turned a gorgeous red color and are just waiting to be chopped up and tossed in with a big bowl of shredded cabbage.

Walk around your garden any season and think about what you could do with your harvest without spending a lot of time in the kitchen. It's really quite easy to turn your fresh produce into delicious soups and salads without fussing with lots of ingredients or preparation. A well tended garden will always provide satisfying meals in minutes – all it needs is your imagination!