Chard and Calendula Salad

 

It must be the sunny weather inspiring me to make sunny looking salads.  Here's the second salad of the day to accompany my evening meal:  

Baby rainbow chard leaves and calendula petals (also known as pot marigold or english marigold)

All the ingredients fresh from the garden and packed full of vitamins and minerals.

Something else to distract impatience while waiting for those tomatoes to ripen!

Squash Flower Salad

Its squash or cucurbit season in my garden. Well it really started at the beginning of July but its cranking up to full swing now which is amazing.  Every day something to eat from the garden - and now we have some sunshine maybe the tomatoes will finally turn yellow or red (depending on the varieties).

In the midst of my tomato impatience, I have my lovely squash plants to keep me company and to keep me fed.  Patty pans, large squash, gem squash and courgette.  The patty pans and courgettes give the best flowers and I like to add these to my salads, but today as I have a bit of a glut of flowers I decided to make a flower salad.

It is the most basic of salads as garden fresh salad doesn't need much preparation... but I divided the squash petals removing the sex part of the flower (which will go to my wormery) and placed them in a bowl, I added a handful of nasturtium leaves for some peppery flavour and some borage flowers. 

Borage is said to having a destressing effect so I like to add it to my salads, not that I am stressed with all the gardening but it might be thanks to the borage flowers!

Stuffed Pepper

I had a lonely pepper in my fridge yesterday and not many more veg in the fridge except for some fresh garlic (by fresh I mean never been dried) and some goats cheese.  Wanted to do this pepper some justice, I thought I would try a stuffed pepper.  I've never tried stuffing peppers before but it turned out amazingly well so I thought I would share this one:

Ingredients:

Sweet pepper of your choice (there are loads of varieties, but choose one that has a shape that is easy to stuff)
40g goats cheese (or as much as to fill the cavity of the pepper)
garlic cloves
Ground black pepper to garnish (or you could try ground chilli if you prefer)
 
1.  Cut your pepper in half and fill with the goats cheese (or soft cheese of your choice)
2.  Squash in as many cloves as you would like, or your pepper accommodates
3.  Grind some black pepper over the top
4.  Roast in the oven for about 20-30 mins on about 140 C (but keep checking it to make sure its melting nicely and not too quickly and adjust the temperature accordingly)

The smell of these when they were ready was simply divine and eating them even better still.  The only downside?  I ate them too quickly!!