Wordless Wednesday on Saturday--TOMATOES!

Deep Fried Zucchini Sticks

This is one of my favorite ways to eat zucchini.

Deep Fried Zucchini Sticks

Zucchini, peeled, cut into sticks, or wedges like big oven fries
eggs
milk
Italian style bread crumbs OR flour
salt
pepper
and any spices you'd like to add...I usually add garlic & onion powder. Somtimes I add seasoned salt.

In a large bowl, stir together eggs, milk, salt & pepper.
In another pan (I usually use a pie pan, it's a good size for this) place the bread crumbs. OR you can use flour that you've add some seasoning too, like salt, pepper, & garlic & onion powders.

Drop each stick into a deep fryer with the oil set to 375 (you can use a big pan with oil in it on the stove, oil temp at 375). Fry for 3-4 minutes. Drain well, blot with paper towl, sprinkle with salt.
Let it cool a little (this is hard for me!), eat, & enjoy!

Here is a picture of the deep fried zucchini sticks made with store bought Italian bread crumbs:

And here they are dipped in flour:

I love them both.

:)

Cucumber and Onion Salad

Here is another recipe that my m-i-l gave me about 20 years ago. It's that sweet 'n sour cucumber salad that used to be at all family dinners & pitch ins.

Cucumber and Onion Salad

1/2 C. olive oil

1/2 C. vinegar

2 T. sugar

salt (to taste)

pepper (to taste)

1-2 thinly sliced cucumbers

1 large onion, thinly sliced

Combine oil, vinegar, sugar, salt, & pepper. Add the cucumbers & onions. Cover & chill a few hours before serving.

Adventures in Green Beans

We had our first pickin' of green beans last weekend.
Our dogs, Louie & Otto, wanted to help us. Actually they wanted to sneak green beans & eat them. Here's Louie, pretending he's just relaxing & keeping watch while we're picking. He would get up & sneak a bean out of our boxes, & then go hide behind the onions (right behind him in this picture) to eat his bean. He thought we couldn't see him behind those onions! LOL

After 3 hours, here's what we picked.

My husband lit up our burn pile ( just various limbs & stuff that we burn every once in a great while) & we sat around a campfire for many hours, just breakin' beans & eating s'mores.
In this picture, you can see that Louie is gaurding the boxes of beans. He's pretending that he's just relaxing with his ball, but everytime I looked over at him, he had moved just a little closer to the beans. He was just waiting for us to not look at him so he could sneak another bean. LOL
And here are both of our gaurd dogs (bean gaurd dogs! LOL) on duty. Otto's snout looks funny in this picture...that's because he's eating a green bean!

I started canning late, WAY too late in the day for this big mess 'o beans. I put the first load in the canner about 3:00pm.
This is the first canning load of the season!

This was a beautiful sight... but by the early morning hours, quite frankly, I was getting a bit tired of it! LOL
We had so many beans, that for the first time in my life, I didn't finish canning them. I couldn't go on. At 5:50AM I took my last load off the burner. I drained the sink full that I still had in the sink, put them in big pans, put them in the frig, hoped for the best & went to bed. I had canned 70 quarts of beans.
Bless my dear husband's heart, I woke up at 10:30am (hey, I got 4 1/2 hours of sleep!) & he was finishing up canning the last of the beans! He canned 20 quarts, so our grand total for this pickin' was 90 quarts!
WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
Here they are, all ready to be stored for the winter.

I had to find storage place for them quickly...to make room for my zucchini. LOL
You can see just some of those hiding behind the beans.
To be honest, we should have picked the weekend before, but we were just so busy with things that we couldn't do it. Then we weren't able to do it through the week, so it fell to last weekend. The unseasonably cool weather saved us on this one, because if it were as hot as it usually is here in Indiana in August, those beans would have been spongy if they'd been left on the vine too long. Normally, we would have had our first pickin' over a week ago & canned 40-50 quarts. Then picked again last weekend & got another 40-50 quarts. So really, this 90 quarts was 2 pickins' done at one time. LOL

Whew. It's a lot of work.
But it is very worth it.
I have been thanking God all week for this green bean harvest.

Now, I was hoping the corn would be ready this weekend, but it may be a few more days. And the tomatoes are coming on slowly, we get a few a day, but as soon as we have a few 90 degree days, we're going to have LOTS of them.