For Thanksgiving I was in charge of the vegetables mainly because I wanted that to be my main meal. YES I still had turkey but very little. I always feel a lot better if I eat mostly vegetables. SO I decided to first go with a salad. Yet again I turned to pinterest for some help.
Original Post: http://lecremedelacrumb.com/2014/10/apple-cranberry-walnut-salad.html
I first started out with picking some beautiful lettuce from my garden. The best part of having a garden is getting to pick and eat what you have grown.
The prep work and amount of time spend on this salad was very little. It was nice and quick and a huge hit. People said it was nice to have a light refreshing salad with such a heavy meal. The salad dresisng you make makes a TON! SO I had leftovers of that to put in the re-fridge and use later
- 6 cups salad (I used a combination of arugula and baby spinach, any spring green mix will do)
- 1 red apple
- 1 green apple
- 1 cup walnuts, roughly chopped (such as Diamond of California)
- ⅓ cup crumbled feta cheese
- ⅓ cup dried cranberries
- 1 cup apple juice
- 4 tablespoons apple cider vinegar (or white vinegar in a pinch)
- 2 tablespoons honey
- scant ½ teaspoon salt
- ¼ teaspoon black pepper
- ¼ cup oil
- Core and chop apples (thin slices or 1 inch chunks). Toss lettuce, apples, walnuts, feta, and cranberries together in a large bowl.
- Whisk together all dressing ingredients. Toss with salad immediately before serving. Enjoy!
TIll next time
PEACE LOVE RUNNING!
A few weeks ago I wrote about how I have a garden. I started right before this past summer which is not ideal planting season in Arizona but I still had some success. Now that we have hit fall I was able to redo my garden an plant a ton of stuff I know I will use.
So this is how the garden looked before I replanted
As you can see it was crazy. The watermelon plant had taken over most of the garden. It was fun having a watermelon plant but vine plants really do grow a lot.
I was able t get the kids to help me and we pulled the watermelon plant out. The only plant I kept was a bell peper plant becuase it seemed to be holding up. Here is the after photo:
Crazy how different it looks! After I was done cleaning up the garden I added some organic soil mix to the soil we already had. I just wanted to make sure that the new plants got lots of nutrition. Before I went to the store I used Vegetable Planting Calendar for Maricopa County to help me pick out what I wanted to plant.
I decided on the following:
– Brussel Sprouts
– Green Beans
– Spinach
– Butter Lettuce
– Carrots
– Green Onions
– Red Onions
– Broccoli
– Cauliflower
Along with keeping the bell pepper plant!
I headed over to the local nursery A&P Nursery http://www.apnursery.com/ and picked up some plants and some seeds.
Here are some after photos:
As you can see I did do a lot of transplanting. The reason why I did this was because some of the things I wanted to plant were by transplant only:
– Brussel Sprouts
– Broccoli
– Cauliflower
I did transplant a few spinch and butter lettuce. It is kind of nice to have SOME stuff growing just incase your seeds don’t work out.
I did the following from seed:
– Green Beans
– Spinach
– Carrots
– Green Onions
The Red onions were a last minute add. You do them from bulbs and you can place them anywhere in the garden. So I am interested to see how that turns out since we use a ton of onions in cooking!
Can’t wait to share later on how the garden is doing!
PEACE LOVE AND RUNNING!
Like most people I have a few interests:
– Running
– Cooking
– Being a Mom
– Crafting
– Gardening
And I am sure a million more things.
I figured I would bring RANDOM interests and things I am working on or have done just to give some insight into my CRAZY life.
The big hobby I took up this past EARLY summer was GARDENING! I have always wanted to garden but never had the space. I feel like I get my interest in gardening from my Grandmother (Mum-mum) who passed away when I was younger. Since starting to gardening I feel like I can feel her presence when I am out there digging in the dirt.
Here are some photos from this past summer of gardening:
This was day one of planting. It is so sad looking but the future looked bright!
One of the GREAT benefits of gardening is it is activity that your kids can help with. The kids LOVE playing in the garden because they get to get DIRTY! I have had the kids help me dig, pick weeds, plant, and pick the vegetables!
By the end of the summer this is how the garden looked. The watermelon plant just took over! IT was amazing while it lasted and produced a ton of watermelons. We had to many that we were giving them away to friends and even to teachers at my son’s school.
Now we have moved on to fall. Next week I will show you the transformation from this crazy mess, to adding organic nutrition to our garden, and then planting fall crops!
Till next time!
PEACE LOVE RUNNING!
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