A Green Girl's Guide to Food and Life: gardening

Showing posts with label gardening. Show all posts

Out of Control (Cheeseburger Pasta Recipe)

| Labels: Beef, dinner, gardening, quick and simple, recipe

I am a woman obsessed!

"Obsessed with what?" you ask!

GARDENING!!!!!

This is what my desk looks like! Craziness, pure craziness! On the up side though, I have managed to get a lot done.

When it comes to gardening I am clueless! I was never blessed with a green thumb. I can just look at plants and they die. It's sad, I know! I have vowed to myself that I will follow through with this garden, and it will flourish... even if it kills me!

So I plan. I plan every last detail!

I've decided that Square Foot Gardening is the way to go for me. I had planned on ordering my boxes from the website, but now that I've seen how cheap it can be to buy the materials and build it myself, I believe I'll go that way!

Now I'm making my list of what exactly I want to plant, and over at $5 Dinners I found FREE gardening planner printables! They have been a lifesaver!

In the midst of my garden crazy, I realized that the hamburger meat I had set out to thaw, hadn't thawed enough for me to make the cheeseburger sliders like I had planned! So it was back to the drawing board for dinner....

I ended up making Cheeseburger Pasta with corn and green beans! It was yummy.

Cheeseburger Pasta

1 ½ c uncooked whole wheat penne pasta

¾ lb lean ground beef

2 T finely chopped onion

1 can (14.5 oz) no-salt-added diced tomatoes

2 T dill pickle relish

2 T prepared mustard

2 T ketchup

1 t steak seasoning (Montreal steak seasoning)

¼ t seasoned salt

¾ c shredded reduced-fat cheddar cheese

Chopped green onions, optional

Cook pasta according to package directions. Meanwhile, in a large skillet, cook beef and onion over medium heat until meat is no longer pink; drain. Drain pasta; add to meat mixture.

Stir in the tomatoes, relish, mustard, ketchup, steak seasoning and seasoned salt. Bring to a boil. Reduce heat; simmer, uncovered, for 5 minutes.

Sprinkle with cheese. Remove from the heat; cover and let stand until cheese is melted. Garnish with green onions if desired. Yield: 4 servings.

Nutrition Facts:

One serving: 1-½ cups

Calories: 391, Fat:12 g, Saturated Fat: 6 g, Cholesterol: 57 mg, Sodium: 759 mg, Carbohydrate:43 g, Fiber:4 g, Protein: 28 g,

Another Day In the Yard

| Labels: gardening

The kiddo and I decided to head back outside today to tackle our next task...

This is what it looks like along the side of my house. Sad, I know. Last year the leaves just kept coming and coming and I never raked them. So now they have sat there all winter and I just can't take it anymore.

I got the most of it done today, but now I have no clue what I should do with this area... it's nothing but dirt.

Of course my kiddo's answer was to plant flowers, but this area of our yard gets zero sun. From what the neighbors have told us, grass won't even grow there.

Anyone have an idea of what might work well in this area????

We ended up sitting down for a break and I got sidetracked taking pictures of the kiddo! I could do that all day long, but with a face like this....

who couldn't :)

My Adventure Outside

| Labels: gardening

Most people that know me know that I have a BLACK thumb. I have always wanted to be one of those people who have massive gardens and flowers everywhere. I just can't seem to get it right.

So, this year I have decided I will turn this all around. I've decided to build some planters so I can start a garden, and my kiddo has informed me that we need to plant flowers out front.

But first, the dreaded monkey grass.....

This stuff is outrageous. I despise it, but at the moment it's there and I do not feel like digging it all up. So, I figured I should probably figure out how to care for it. Off to Google I went. I found out quickly that you are supposed to trim it back to around 3 inches in the late February or early March!

As you can see mine desperately needed to be trimmed.

Now this might sound super easy, but considering I haven't done a thing with this since we moved in a year and a half ago.... it was quite the pain.

It had thick saplings growing out of it everywhere, and it was caked with leaves and trash.
At least I had a great helper!

So I finally got it all cut down, an hour later....

(Ignore the bag of trash someone apparently tossed out their car window onto the sidewalk sometime through the night. People can be so rude!)

While doing this I noticed that the grass has started to take over. It is supposed to stop at the top stair and it has grown about a foot farther than that...