Mid summer weekmenu

Now that the garden is in full swing, it’s time for the last part of my S O W | G R O W | H A R V E S T | F E A S T circle. The F E A S T part. The indulgence part.
As I would like to motivate you all to start a kitchen garden wherever you can next year, I will share some pictures of meals we have eaten during a certain week with produce from our garden. I’m not sure if I’ll choose to share every week with you, because sometimes I’ll prefer to just post individual meal recipes during a week and other times I don’t want to take out my camera before a meal.

Also I won’t post a full 7-day week menu as we sometimes don’t eat at home. In general you will find 5 meal ideas. And I’ll do my best to do one of these posts every other week or so. I’m hoping that will give enough inspiration and motivation to dig in yourself. The fun thing about these posts for me is, that I will mostly link to other peoples recipes that have inspired me to make a certain dish. I can show you my inspiration.

But let’s quickly go back to back to the garden to see what I’m talking about when I say that the garden is in full swing. The pictures below of six months ago, three months ago and now. They speak for themselves I think, don’t they? I’m always surprised to see how quickly a bare field can turn into the food jungle it is now. I didn’t do all the transformation work I must admit. Most of the credits have to go to the soil and the weather we’ve had this year. We are now feasting on the bounty of cultivated nature. I wouldn’t want it any other way.

D A Y 1 | We are drowning in aubergines this year. And although I love my traditional vegetarian moussaka recipe, I wanted to try out something new. I found this Gateau Aubergine Libanais and it looked so appealing that I immediately wanted to try it out. On retrospect it was a beauty, and pretty tasty, but definitely a hell of a job. I’m not sure I’ll try it out again. If I would make it again, I would do it on a banquet dinner to impress all my guests. It’s definitely a show stealer!

Day 2 | Roasting chickpeas has been on my to-do list ever since I first saw it fly by on one of my timelines. So I tried it out last week and mixed it up with assorted other fresh vegetables. It was very tasty and easy to make. Definitely something I’ll make more often. There are many different ways to season these chickpeas. I made my own mix, but you could try out this one for example. I didn’t use any cheese by the way.

Day 3 | We eat a courgette soup every week now. Our yellow courgettes have been producing like crazy. I always make the same courgette soup (shown above), as we both like it very much. It’s my own invention. I take two small courgettes, one decent sized onion and a garlic glove and chop them all up. I stir fry all the ingredients together in some sunflower oil and then add a cube of vegetable bouillon and a spoon full of fresh thyme. I stir some more and then add two cups of water. I let it cook for 15 minutes and then take a hand blender to blend it all up. It turnes out like a perfect and creamy soup, without adding any cream.

Day 4 | Another one to tick off my to-try list this week. Grilled cabbage wedges. Very tasty. And easy to make. Do try it out!

Day 5 | This last one is a pumpkin risotto. Eduard made it. I am not sure what inspired him, but it was very good. He fried up some onions with garlic, mushrooms and some cooked pumpkins and then added the rice. Soon after he added some vegetable stock and slowly started cooking everything. After it was cooked, he topped the risotto off with some parmesan cheese and red sage. Perfect and easy!

90% of the ingredients used in these dishes came from our own garden. Very pleasing. Now that I’ve written everything out, I can’t wait to show you more now. If you aren’t patient enough to wait for my next weekmenu post, you can find some more ideas here.