New This Week: July week 2

This weekend was extremely busy, so just a really quick garden update! The harvest continues to roll in with the first ripe tomatoes, a cucumber, jalapenos, a ton of eggplant, more beans, and soybeans.

The big pile on the right side is soy beans. There's just over a pound of them there. That will be our one and only crop for this year. You harvest the entire plant at one time. They don't keep bearing like the bush beans and peas.

In the center of the picture are the chocolate cherry tomatoes. They're just now ripening. They don't taste any different that regular cherry tomatoes. They just turn chocolate brown when ripe instead of red.

We had two delicious meals made entirely of fresh food from the garden. Sunday night I did a modified ratatouille with some of the okra (not pictured) eggplants, tomatoes, peppers, and beans. Sunday night I made stuffed eggplant with tomatoes and banana peppers in the filling. So good. I accompanied that with a fresh tomato, cucumber, onion salad with a brown sugar and balsamic vinaigrette.

I'm going to have to come up with a whole bunch more eggplant recipes since this is only scratching the surface and we have about a million more eggplants to pick in the next several weeks!