Garden Beauties

Ben enjoying a fresh peach

I love fresh veggies in the summer, but I have such a black thumb that I've never had a garden.  I guess I could say I've made an attempt.  In our days of apartment living, I tried container gardening but I never reaped a harvest.  

With summer winding down, a gardener on our road set up a produce stand with his surplus.  On Saturdays he sold his wares and on Sundays, he gave the leftovers away for free.  Several weeks on the way to church, we stopped and filled bags with tomatoes and squash and peppers and cucumbers and peaches!  

Vegetables literally covered our kitchen counter. We ate our fill of raw veggies and loaded our salads with them.  I'm craving vegetables with this pregnancy  (a wonderful craving to have!) and my 6-year-old, Ben, will chose veggies over sweets for a snack, but even so, we could not eat it all. I turned to the internet for ideas of how to use our vegetables in other ways.  

(Recipes are from around the web; photos are mine.)

For breakfast, I made roasted peaches.

 

For lunch another day, I tried this stuffed pepper recipe and there were leftovers for the next day, too. 

I made several batches of cucumbers in vinegar.  I used less sugar than what is called for because we like the tang.

I made chunky tomato sauce, but instead of pasta, I mixed it with quinoa.

I brought squash casserole to a family dinner.

For dessert, we enjoyed  peach crisp.  It was just as good leftover with a splash of milk poured over the top. 

September has arrived.  It is still in the 90s around here, but a few cooler mornings are whispering that fall is around the corner.   Any recipes I shouldn't miss before summer produce is gone for the year?