Post-Vacation Garden Dinner

We arrived home on Friday from our cross-country trip to find a very abundant amount of ready-to-harvest garden vegetables for which we possessed great hunger. The road food routine had played out and it was time to sit down to a meal that wasn't tasteless, over-seasoned, too sweet, past its prime, or otherwise unappetizing. After a quick trip to the garden for a couple odds and ends to go with the vegetables that my sister had brought in while we were gone (with her children), we had dinner on the table in no time. Scott made a salad of Israeli cous cous with a handful of garden peas, some chopped ripe tomatoes, and a bit of mint and oregano. I roasted some multi-colored beets, blanched and sautéed the beet greens with plenty of garlic, and threw together a simple cucumber salad with some slivered red onion, rice vinegar, and toasted sesame seeds. We sliced a few just-picked tomatoes and dinner was served. As my dear old granddaddy used to say, "it was the best we ever had".

Welcome To My Kitchen

After what seems like way too long a time, I'm finally taking my first steps into the realm of Blogworld. I've decided to document what goes on in my Real Life Kitchen, not because those things are fancy, frilly, or particularly fabulous. What I intend to show by opening this window into my world is that growing, gathering, and preparing wholesome delicious food is not a difficult task, but rather a gratifying and worthwhile exercise in living life in a way that's just a wee bit healthier for us and for our planet. I don't intend to be preachy and I'll certainly never profess that everything that we prepare in Real Life Kitchen is "health food", whatever that is. Rather, you'll see just how one family has chosen to put the brakes on eating obviously unhealthy mass produced over-processed products that can barely be considered real food. We've decided to eat mostly foods that we grow ourselves or obtain from local farms and farmers markets. Seeing where your food comes from and meeting the folks that produce that food really does connect you with your food in a way that just running to the supermarket for groceries or zipping through a drive-through window for a quick cheap bite to eat could ever do. When that human-to-food connection is established we tend to approach each meal with more respect and reverence, and that generally results in a more enjoyable and complete eating experience. We here in Real Life Kitchen have found that since adopting these new habits we not only gain nourishment for our bodies when we eat the meals that we prepare, but we also nourish our souls by taking a real interest in where those meals come from. Perhaps you'll be inspired to change your own routine by what you see and read here or, maybe, you'll just enjoy watching what we do. Either way, thanks for checking in from time to time and please feel free to leave comments, ask questions, or come by and share a meal with us sometime here at Real Life Kitchen. There's usually something cooking.