The Modern Victory Garden

I am a firm believer in the health benefits and good economics of eating abundantly from the garden's resources, avoiding highly manufactured and processed foods, and using a relatively low amount of sugar compared to the Standard American Diet (ironically the acronym for the Standard American Diet - is SAD!).  It is also a personal goal of mine to reduce the amount of foods that we use that are produced using factory farming techniques (heavy on pesticides, chemical fertilizers, and monoculture crop growing) and which are located far from our home and thus require large amounts of fossil fuels to transport and refrigerate the items before they come to our table.   My personal definition of local is a 200 mile radius from our house.  Grains, many fruit items, dried beans, meat, dairy, and eggs all must be purchased because we do not have our own production of such items.  Buying from more local sources (organically produced if possible) and in a relatively unprocessed form - is the next best thing to growing it ourselves. 

Fresh, whole foods, produced as locally as possible, and prepared at home.  

This page will be a place for me to share some of my regularly used recipes that I think you may be interested in.    I am a proficient cook - but not a great chef.   My recipes use ingredients I keep on hand in the pantry, fridge, or freezer, and items that we grow fresh in the garden.   I hope some of them will work for you too!

Once a week I make at least one batch of this no knead bread recipe.  Often I make two batches with one loaf being used immediately and the other put in the freezer for use later.   while we typically go through one loaf a week - occassionally it is faster.   I keep a few extra loaves of bread in the freezer in case I am not able to  (or don't feel like) baking that week or if we suddenly run short early in the week.   For the past year or more we have been using the no-knead bread recipe.   The crusty artisan style bread is easy to make and is so good tasting that all traditional bread recipes pale in comparison.   It is a rare day when I make a traditional loaf of bread anymore.  The photo gallery has an album with cooking and preserving pictures.  You can see pictures of the bread and the pans/bowls I use there.   Click here for the "no-knead bread" recipe.

There are lots of recipes I use regularly that use or complement the abundance regularly harvested from our garden.   The following recipes are particular favorites that I thought you might like to try also.

Italian Bean Salad

Italian Vegetable Stir Fry

Shepherd's Pie

Hamburger Rice Florentine

Sandy's Butternut Squash and Bean Soup

Easy Cheesy Scalloped Potatoes