What's for Dinner, Sat., June 15, 2019
Baked pasta dish with rigatoni and bolognese sauce.
I picked fresh spinach, so with that I am making spinach salad with strawberries, goat cheese, and toasted pecans.
In other types of cooking activity, we worked all morning processing items from the garden. Now we have cilantro pesto sauce to put on chicken breasts. I also like it on Buffalo mozzarella, which can be put over a tomato or eggplant slice. We have lots of it, too!
I also washed many heads of lettuce. Much of it I'm giving away to friends who claim they don't enjoy making salads nor do they have the time to do so. I like showing them the different types of lettuce greens that are out there. They will never find these varieties at the store, so it will be a unique taste opportunity for them.
I am closing out a semester with my little gardeners (kids in 3rd & 4th grades) at one of the schools where I teach this subject. At our last session, we picked most of the vegetables and lettuces we'd grown. Each student went home with a big bag of lettuce, spinach, kale, scallions, and radishes. This is a big deal to them. They heard this speech from me before they left: "Now when you get home, you tell your mom or dad you want to eat this right away for dinner tonight. Wash it up and have it in a salad: tonight." I then explained that fresh-from-the-garden is a new taste, unlike what we get from the stores. I could tell from the expressions on their faces that they had never been told that before.
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too cold in winter for garden and spring/fall are too short for much, summer so hot and dry I mostly only do tomatoes and a few chiles (containers at that due to the extreme abundance of gophers 
). lettuce bolts in the spring and/or it is just too hot and even if not gets so buggy it takes too much water to clean it.
it might actually work in the fall but I get too lazy by then for starting new stuff.
dinner tonight will be green chile cheeseburgers done over mesquite, there are beans or tortilla chips and there might be some salad if I feel motivated.
