The Seed Catalogs are Here!

I just finished "window shopping" in my 2010 Burpee seed catalog. Each year, I seem to buy more and more seeds. Mind you, although our urban home has a triple size yard (from back in the olden days when such things were commonplace), it is still on a city lot. That doesn't seem to stop me from buying vegetable seeds and plants. Potatoes grow great at the edge of the compost pile. And the broad space where our back hedge used to be (don't ask...) is begging for a pumpkin patch to cover the stumps. Growing food for my family makes me feel good, and I know we are eating.

Last year, we had a tease of an early spring, with summer-like weather that tricked us into planting things that had no business being planted yet. Then, the real "summer" hit, although in name only. It rained twice a week, with cool, muggy weather in between. Tomatoes didn't set fruit. Tomatillos produced empty balloon husks. Anything in the melon family grew a beard of gray mildew, then collapsed and died in a brown, squishy mess. Even the heartiest of my zucchini plants succumbed, after valiantly releafing to replace their first rotten leaves. Our local pumpkin patches suffered a great loss. My hot lemon peppers loved the cool, wet weather, though, and produced a bumper crop, as did my pole beans, which produced until frost.

So I flip through my Burpee catalog today, reminisce and put things in my "shopping cart" -- nearly all heirlooms, plants if I can get them (I never was good at starting plants indoors). Their names sound like music on a dreary winter day: 'Black-seeded Simpson' lettuce, 'Big Mama' paste tomato, 'Moon and Stars' watermelon, 'Fairy Tale' eggplant... I want to try them all. But I know, when the packages arrive in the spring, the space we have available will look surprisingly small, and I'll be coaxing my black-eyed Susans into scooting over for a small patch of beets or a pepper plant (or six).

Our two older boys moved into their first apartment last August. Both love cooking, and gardening, and are eyeballing their tiny back yard as a potential veggie patch. Maybe I can annex their yard?
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Leftover yams from Christmas found their way into a pie crust today. I adapted this recipe from one on allrecipes.com. For a change, I eliminated the white sugar and substituted vanilla eggnog for the evaporated milk. My mother-in-law taught me the trick of placing the pie plate on the oven rack and ladling the pie filling into the shell right in the oven, to prevent the filling from sloshing up onto the shell when you slide the rack back in, and then scorching in the hot oven. The things we learn from hanging around with great cooks!

Sweet Potato Pie

Makes one 9-inch pie

2 c mashed sweet potatoes or yams
1/4 lb butter, softened
2 eggs
1 c packed brown sugar
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 tsp ginger
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1/2 c evaporated milk
1/4 c white sugar
1 9-in unbaked pie crust


Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

In a blender, combine all filling ingredients. Pulse until well blended.

Pour into pie shell. Bake 10 minutes at 400 degrees; reduce heat and bake at 350 for 30 minutes or until firm. Cool before cutting.
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