Independence Days Challenge - Update

Its been several weeks since I updated our Independence Days Challenge. Here are our efforts towards food independence over the last few weeks.

1. Plant Something: Its been above 100 deg. most days for the last few weeks, so until today, the weather was much too hot to plant. The weather prediction indicates a little easing of heat, so this morning, I planted 24 sweet pea seeds. A few weeks ago, we planted 18 and these are growing, although slowly because of the heat. Here's hoping to a great harvest in a few weeks.

2. Harvest something: Again, because of the heat (I think), our harvest is slowing a little. We're getting a cuke about 3 times a week, one or two tomatoes daily, purple hull peas and now red bell peppers. In addition, our tabasco peppers are turning color - such a beautiful plant.

3. Preserve something: Made 6 pints of fig preserves and froze 3 gallon size zip top bags of figs. Today, we are trying our hand a blueberry fruit leather. I'll post pictures if it turns out okay.

4. Prep something: Albertson's had bottled water on sale for the last two weeks, so we have 72 bottles of water now.

5. Cook something: we're trying our hand at making fruit leather. If it turns out well, we're making strawberry, raspberry and peach next.

6. Managed Reserves: We're doing fine rotating our stored foods.

7. Work on local food system: Still doing most of our shopping at the farmer's market and making many nice acquaintances of the farmers. Making arrangements with many of them for when the market closes in a few months.

8. Compost Something: We're still composting all of our garden scraps, organic veggie scraps and yard clippings (grass and such).

Are you working towards independence for your family? I'd love to hear about it. Please leave a comment and a link if you have a blog that talks about your journey.

Recipe: Fiesta Chicken

This is a really simple and quick recipe - I like to have the ingredients on hand for those days when we're too busy to cook.

4 Cups diced or shredded chicken
Fajita Marinade
1 Jar Salsa
2 cups (one can) black beans
! cup frozen corn

You can either use the marinade on uncooked chicken as a marinade or you can add it to the pot when you combine cooked chicken with the other ingredients. All you have to do to prepare this recipe is marinate the chicken, cook it, shred or dice it, then add the other ingredients to the pot until heated through. We like to eat it in tortillas with cheese, sour cream, lettuce and tomatoes, but it also makes nice quesadillas.

Menu Plan Monday-August 4,2008

After a few weeks off from blogging, I'm back today with Menu Plan Monday. This week, I'm going for simple, as we'll be doing a lot of canning of garden produce and my poor brain can't handle both thinking about cooking and thinking about canning, lol. So, this week is officially SANDWICH WEEK! On Sunday, I made up a few sandwich fillings to keep in the fridge and about mid week, I'll make up a few more. We have a variety of breads veggies and cheeses, plus dressings and other condiments.

So far, in the fridge, we have fiesta chicken which can be eaten on tortillas or if we're feeling more like cooking at the time, it makes a nice filling for a quesidilla (which I do not know how to spell). We usually eat this with lettuce and diced tomato plus sour cream. We also currently have BBQ roast in the fridge awaiting a toasted bun with veggie sticks on the side. In addition, we have a creamy imitation crab salad that we'll put in wraps with romaine lettuce and Cesar dressing.

About mid week, we'll make a few more fillings, including chicken salad to be eaten on French bread with lettuce, tomato and pickles, Teriyaki beef stir fry to be eaten in wraps with lettuce or on french bread. This is really yummy with stir fry veggies, so we make it with both beef and veggies and tighten up the sauce a little so that it clings to the beef and veggies and doesn't make the bread soggy. It can be eaten either warmed up or cold (I like it cold in wraps). Now, I just need one more sandwich filling. What is your favorite sandwich? Please post a comment with your favorite and a recipe or directions to make it. Thanks!

This week for breakfast, we're going easy as well. We're going to eat from the freezer. We have baked oatmeal, pancakes and french toast in the freezer so we will rotate those during the week and supplement with yogurt and fruit.

Snacks will include hummus and pita, trail mix, any muffins we might have in the freezer, bagels and probably more packaged snacks than I'd like.

Head on over to I'm an Organizing Junkie for more Menu Plan Monday.

Items from our menu that are in bold are locally grown or raised.

Garden Update

The peas are taking over, it seems. Well worth it, I think :o)

Cukes growing on the "trellis".

Gone Fishin'

My parents came to visit over the weekend and they bought the boys fishing gear and took them fishing. It was a lot of fun even though the fish weren't biting.

Nature Study - Cicada

Just beginning to emerge from its shell.

Drying its wings - its standing on top of the shell it just crawled out.

Independence Days Challenge

Last week I stumbled upon the website SharonAstyk.com and found that she is hosting Independence Days Challenge this summer. So, although its started in April, I decided to jump in and at least try it starting now. You are supposed to try to work in 8 areas at least once each week. Here are the areas and what we did last week:

1. Plant something: Its really too hot here to plant, but I decided to try anyway. We planted something five days last week including 2 squares of sweet peas, 2 squares of purple peppers and an indoor greens garden.

2. Harvest something: We harvested at least one thing every day last week. We harvested one pound of roma tomatoes, 14 purple hull pea pods, 1 carrot, 6 cucumbers and a bunch of basil.

3. Preserve something: Made one pint of fig preserves

4. Prep something (emergency preps): bought and stored 2 pounds of white beans.

5. Cook something/ learn to cook something new: Made yogurt.

6. Manage reserves (basically rotate your stockpile): Opened one jar of peanut butter and replaced it.

7. Work on local food system: Put out the word on Freecycle that we were looking for figs. Connected with two people there. Also mentioned to a friend that we wanted figs and she arranged for us to get figs in exchange for teaching the tree owner and my friend how to make yogurt. Made connections with farmers at the market.

8. Compost something: composted grass clippings, leaves, carrot top, cuke peel, tomato cores, potato peelings, coffee grounds and egg shells from hard boiled eggs.

I was really surprised how easy it was to do a little something in each category. Some categories were worked on daily and others only once a week. Its been fun and I'm excited about working on more this week and the weeks to come.