Hello again, everyone. Welcome back to the Epic Gardening podcast. Chris is back on the show, so I recently had a birthday party here at the homestead, and Chris brought by a delicious loaf of sourdough, as well as some passion fruit compote,

and then just this morning had made some zucchini bread. Yeah. Yeah, zucchini bread. It's even made our own butter. Obviously you're not growing butter in the garden, but needless to say, you do a lot of cooking, and I would assume pre-gardening that was also true. Yes.

But now you're working in fresh stuff. Right. Right, straight out of the garden. And so we're going to talk tomorrow, actually, about what you grow to feed your family and the planting decisions you make.

But I think what's interesting today is it's a weak point for me, just from a time perspective of, okay, well, then I have to process it all, then I have to cook it, I have to figure out what to cook.

Oh, I need some buttermilk or something. I got to go to the store, you know, so it gets tricky for me. I'm trying to get better at it. I would love to know, and I think everyone would, what are some things that you do fresh out of the garden that's just delicious and tasty and easy to do?

It's probably my favorite part of gardening, and it's actually why when we talk yesterday about how to garden for busy people, that is one of the factors that I take into account as I want to garden so I can utilize the food.

And so I, I'm not a planner in the sense like I don't grow and then plant, you know, plan what I'm going to grow and then what I'm going to cook from it. I really like going out in the garden and seeing what's there.

So you're not like, okay, 16 tomatoes are going in this spring, thus I'll have this many to make this much. Yeah, okay.

I'm not a recipe follower. I'm just sort of a do it by taste.

Okay.

And so I'll go out in the garden and see kind of what popped up overnight or for the week, and I'll harvest it and then I'll come in and I'll survey it and think, okay, what can I make with this?

So, you know, last week, right for your party, actually, I saw that I had a bunch of different peppers who come up, you know, I had some, some hatch chilies and some Thai chilies, a bunch of different peppers, and then I had a bunch of herbs.

I had the cilantro, I had parsley, and so I made a homemade curry paste with that.

Oh, nice.

And it was delicious.

And then I also had some eggplant that popped up, squash, zucchini, and stream beans, a lot of stream beans.

And so I made just like a curry, like a coconut curry with that.

So you use the paste as well.

You use the paste as well.

And so I, like I said, I'll survey what I have and then go from there with tomatoes or, well, with tomatoes, what I'll do is because you know, you get so many of them.

I saw how many you have out in your garden.

Yeah.

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