The garden is the boss of me

I know you super master menu planners are out there, all with your weekly menus and corresponding shopping lists and meals that are not 100% green beans, and that is all fine and good but what do you do with all the green beans?

What I'm saying is, we have a lot of green beans right now.

And the tepee looks on while hatching its next batch of beans.

And before that, we had a lot of lettuce.

And coming soon - we'll have a lot of tomatoes. And then melons.

We only get things in lots around here. Because of the garden. (And if you want to see what all's coming in from the garden - the tracker is updated.)

So, that means that we have dinner based on what there is a lot of. So, you might say that the garden is my menu planner and corresponding shopping lists wrapped up in one handy friendly package.

I say, the garden is the boss of me and - make no mistake about it - if I cross it, there will be hell to pay. In the form of giant tough green beans that can't be pawned off on anyone regardless of their lack of taste in produce.

You can't just slap a "Hey, this is local and organic" on a giant overgrown green bean and have people accept it. Not around here anyway - we're all such snobby produce wanters.

Anyway, so we have green beans, as you've likely heard.

When I'm first harvesting a crop, I get very crushy about it. I take its picture a thousand times and then, when I'm sick of them, the photos make me ill. So, in a few weeks, this photo will have me barfing.

And, since the garden is so totally the boss of me, I went out to the garden to figure out what we were having for dinner last night and confirmed that, yes, green beans were definitely on the menu.

Hooray. I mean, HOORAY! I'm still at that point in the season where I want to eat the beans. Because we've only had them for a few weeks now and the farmshare hasn't started loading up on them, but that's about to change this week so my HOORAY! will so be WHAT THE FUCK ENOUGH ALREADY, but you'll know when we get there.

If only just based on the amount of swears you see here. If I had one of those word cloud things, it'd probably change over the next few weeks to the point where the only big bold words would be GREEN BEANS and FUCKING A but I don't, so you're spared.

HOORAY!

Yes, let's get back to hooray because TINY TIMES - I picked our #1 Tomato last night!

It's only BIG TIMES when it's a standard tomato. But I'll take it. For now.

It's more like HOORAY! since it's only a cherry tomato, but still, I got excited. Particularly after I hunted and poked and bent in ways that are unseen outside of Bikram in order to find this tomato that I *knew* existed somewhere in the depths of the Sun Gold tomato plant that is totally overrun by the nasturtium right now.

Someone save us. Please.

They are one, the Sun Golds and the nasturtium, and that makes it hard to find the Sun Golds in the mass of plants.

Did you know that Sun Golds AND nasturtium are a golden yellow color? Because they are. And I knew that, too, but when the little nasturtium started voluntarily sprouting all over the god damned place I didn't pull them out because awwwwwwww they're volunteers and now I have a confusing mess on my hands.

OK, so these are peppers and nasturtium, but you get the color thing. Good job.

Specifically, I have yellow nasturtium growing in, up and amongst the Sun Gold tomatoes and red nasturtium growing in, up and amongst the Better Boy tomatoes and...well...I'm in for a lot of disappointment this summer because I've already gone in after THE FIRST TOMATO OH MY GOD so many times only to pull back a handful of red nasturtium flowers.

Which admittedly are pretty, but NOT AT ALL delicious like a red ripe tomato, and so I foresee a season of OH, it's only a nasturtium.

Annoying.

Meanwhile, I've gotten off track.

What I wanted to tell you guys was that the garden, in its infinite wisdom and overflowing bounty, told me that we'd be having beans, 1 tomato and basil for dinner last night and I'd better just dust off my brains and figure out how to make that into an edible meal.

Good job, dusty brains.

We had a lovely and very local pasta primavera-ish dish where the most exotic and far-reaching item was the whole wheat pasta from Trader Joe's and the localest (oh yes, localest) item was the basil, since it sits a bit closer to my kitchen than the beans do.

The squash came from the farmshare and OH how I was happy to dispatch that crop before it went moldy and nast in my crisper. Yeach.

If you're wondering where the tomato sauce came from, well, I think you know that I had a few tomatoes last year and that I canned a few of them and froze a few of them and I've been making sauce from them in anticipation of the newly someday arriving 2011 tomato crops and this time they ended up as the tomato in the pasta primavera-ish dish.

So - again - localest!

And that is how the garden became the boss of me. Also, it pointed its finger at me and shouted, "BOW DOWN MINION" and I did so obediently, but I assumed you have experienced similar things so have until now left it unsaid.