Weekend Basics

We spent this past weekend close to home and around our favorite spots here in RVA. Those pepper plants we transferred into our front planters have since turned colors, so we decided to go ahead and pick them to allow the main plants a little rest and time to strengthen their root system before producing the next round of peppers.

After picking them, we diced them up and tossed 'em in a cast iron skillet with some other summer veggies we needed to use up — the end result was a brunch of champions we're share here on the blog later this week!

 

Speaking of using up excess vegetables, we dehydrated a new batch of sweet potato treats for Basil and at the same time, tested out the same dehydration method on rings of eggplant. The result was awesome — see Basil being very still for the treat below:

In an effort to use up the rest of the eggplant we had on hand, we tested out a new recipe for roasted eggplant hummus:

This hummus was awesome and I can't wait to share our recipe for it later in the week on E.A.T.

During our weekly trip to the farmer's market, we spotted a new vendor, Gresham Pollard of Earthworks Enterprises, with these incredible natural rain barrel covers he makes from wood vines:

He calls them natural landscape elements since they are so versatile — rain barrel covers, tomato cages, garden supports, compost bins, and more. He also had a book filled with photos of other natural landscaping structures he's able to build, like garden and trellis gates that are equally as stunning. Seeing these made us want to get on to getting a rain barrel sooner than later! If you are in the Richmond area, definitely stop by the South of the James Farmer's Market to see these in person.

We took Basil down to the river near our other house — we hadn't been in weeks, can you tell by this photo the sheer excitement he had in being there?

Not sure we quite captured the full emotion of it all:

All that playtime at the river worked up an appetite, so I whipped together what I've dubbed The Belmont between Norwood steak sandwich:

 I gave it this name since the steak came from Belmont Butchery and the bread from Norwood Cottage Bakery — find the full recipe published on E.A.T. today.

Probably the most exciting part of our weekend involved getting to pick ripened figs straight from our neighbor's backyard tree. This is Mary taking a photo of me picking a basket-full from our top landing.

Since moving into this house, we've been waiting and watching this fig tree in hopes we might be lucky enough to pick some come fig season. Well the night the figs drooped, our neighbor was more than happy to let me go back there and relieve the tree of as many figs as we wanted — score!

Much more on this to come...

We ended the weekend with a Sunday supper of linguini and fresh clams — find the recipe for this easy summer dish in my latest guest post for Lot18:

We hope each of you had a wonderful weekend and are looking forward to August — can you beleive  it's almost here??