Happy Fourth

It's been a while since my last blog, so I will do a little recap of the past week.

We have had some things flourishing in the garden (like the sunflowers). 

Yellow Squash

Pole Beans

Tomatoes are approaching eye-level.

Tons of cucumbers, broccoli, swiss chard and Romaine lettuce.

We had our first meal with our homegrown broccoli in it this week!

The butterflies have been loving our purple cone flowers.  I have identified the Tiger Swallowtail and possibly the Red Admiral butterfly.

And our cucumbers are still attempting to take over the world...

...so I added onto the already 5 ft. tall trellises.

And they just aren't getting the picture.  But we have an abundance of pickling cucumbers that have been in our Pasta Salad, Fresh Salad, on sandwiches and soon to be pickled.

We had my family over for a cook-out yesterday!  The cucumbers were in everything and I was able to give 1/2 a dozen to my mom for distribution in Eastern Ma.  (Gotta love family!)  We also got to taste some leaf lettuce from my mom's garden (a surprise picnic lunch when they arrived)!  We had a pretty good day of delicious food.

We had a great spread, and relaxing evening on our porch.  Plus the bonus of Hager's Farm Stand homemade ice cream sandwiches.  Can't go wrong!

And just a Follow-Up on the Homemade Ravioli Front:

We had them for dinner the other night with a hearty meat sauce and they were great!  Phew!

The key with these will be a hearty sauce.  Since they are made with the local wheat flour, they have a distinct "these are good for me" taste.  But with the sauce we had, it was awesome!  They didn't even fall apart in the boiling water.

We had tomato sauce, and then added a mushroom, garlic scapes, onion, a huge amount of our home grown basil and parsley, some red wine and Hager's Grass Fed ground beef.

Then just when the ravioli went into the boiling water, I added the first of our summer squash to the sauce.

The end results were great!  It was definitely filling and we would have homemade Whole Wheat, Olive Ricotta Ravioli again.

Hope everyone enjoyed their weekend!