Meg In the Kitchen

I've been putting our garden veggies to use, this week!

First up: a freezer meal.

There's a restaurant in Gilroy called OD's Kitchen that serves an awesome breakfast dish called The Kitchen Sink.  It's basically homefries with ham, onions, and peppers with cheese and an egg fried over medium on top. You get the crispy savory goodness of a breakfast skillet, but the eggs and cheese add a heavenly gooey heart attack that makes it the best breakfast over.

So, why not have the Kitchen Sink in my own kitchen?
#1 The Kitchen Sink:
I diced up some peppers and onions from the garden, and gently boiled the potatoes and diced them up. I froze everything on a large cookie sheet for a couple hours so it didn't stick together, then separated it into freezer bags in serving sizes for our family.  Now, I can just dump the bag onto a hot skillet with some oil or butter, wait 15 min for it to brown, then add the cheese and egg.  Dinner in less than 20 minutes! I made four bags plus a bag of plain diced potatoes and the only thing I had to buy was a package of ham for a few bucks.

#2: Pickles!  Homemade pickles are sooooo good.  I haven't made them in a few years, but if you want the recipe, click here for the 2009 post when I made a fazillion pickles with Jerushia.  One thing we learned is to NOT process them. The batch we processed in a waterbath got really mushy and the batch we left alone stayed nice and crunchy.
The best part about homemade pickles is that they are fast to make.  We whipped up 10 quarts of pickles tonight in about 45 minutes from start to finish, and it would have been even less time if I had done them by myself. Fast, easy, delicious, free!

#3 Veggie Pesto Pizza. 
Pizza dough recipe found here (CPK pizza dough)
Pesto recipe found here (Elena's recipe)

Seriously, how good does that look?  And y'all know I am a terrible photographer, especially when it comes to food pics.  This is actually as good as it looks and even my kids ate it.

For the perfect garden pizza, thinly slice up garden veggies. We used bell peppers, green and yellow squash, onions and tomatoes.  I thought about adding spinach, but forgot to get it out of the freezer to defrost in time.
toss with a little EVOO in a bowl.
Spread a thin layer of pesto sauce on pizza.
Top with veggies.
Now, add drained black beans (optional) and mozzerella cheese. Fresh mozzerella is better. All we had in the fridge this time was homemade gouda and white cheddar, so that's what we used, and it was still awesome.

Bake.
Chiffonade  some basil and throw it on the hot cheese right when it comes off the stone.

Eat.
Pat yourself on the back because dinner was great.