Week 1: Basil, Mint, & Lavender

    For my senior project, I am working with Katherine on a project around growing and eating fresh foods. Our goal with this project is to learn more about the growing process with our own small gardens in our back yards as using the foods that we grow in our cooking. Since it is hard to grow a lot of food, and we wanted to be able to do more cooking than our small gardens can produce on a weekly basis, we are also going to visit local farmers markets and farms to buy their products and learn more about there company and foods that they grow. We chose to work on this project because over the past year Katherine and I both have found more time for gardening and cooking. We wanted to be able to learn more about this as well as better our skills in both of these areas. Since it is springtime we found no better opportunity to start now!

    We started to think about this project in early March when it began to get sunny again. Katherine had also been experimenting with jam making and I was growing many plants in my house. We were talking about what idea would be interesting to further pursue as a senior project. Originally we wanted our project to be based around tea and growing plants that could make tea, but we quickly learned that those plants typically take around 3 years to grow, so that was obviously not going to work. We then shifted our focused to more food or "farm-to-table" based project since that was more applicable for the time frame that we are working with. This idea could also be supported by the local farmer's markets and farms much better since it had a wider scope.

    We each have a small portion of our backyard that we are using to grow our plants. We got most of our plants from stores around our house and many of them were already started, (we did not plant just seeds). This allowed us to grow the plants faster since they were already started. We then just planted them how you normally would plant a plant and hoped that they would grow! When we started to plant different things, we found that we could actually make a lot of tea-like drinks with the herbs that we were growing. So they made us more excited about our herbs since those seemed not as fun at the beginning.

Some photos of some of the plants growing :)

Our goals for the rest of our time working on this project are as follows:

1. Make creative meals that we haven't made before using fresh ingredients. 

2. Learn how to maintain flourishing gardens that we can sustain even after senior projects end. 

3. Support local farms and businesses for ingredients that we don't use from our own gardens.

This week our focus for cooking was on the herbs. We specifically used basil, mint, and lavender.

The first thing that we made was pesto pasta with homemade pesto sauce.

The ingredients used from the garden were mint and basil. 

We then blended these in the blender with some other important things, cooked the pasta, and then it was done! 

#foodblogready #gas 

Recipe link: https://www.meghantelpner.com/blog/10-amazing-things-you-can-do-with-mint/#tasty-recipes-50781-jump-target 

The next thing that we made was our lavender lemonade. 

For this, we steeped the lavender leaves in a honey-water mixture and then let the lavender infuse into the mixture while it was cooling. 

The final product looked like this! 

#summerdrinks

Recipe link: https://downshiftology.com/recipes/lavender-lemonade/ 

In the coming weeks, we are planning on working with berries and lettuce since we are predicting that our different lettuces will be done growing soon...!