Easy Garden Bake

When my mom was here last week she busted out my cook book and made one of her old standby recipes: easy garden bake! It was sooooo good. The whole family left yesterday (sniff, sniff), and John and I were starving for lunch after we got back from our hospital appointment so I rifled through the cabinets and discovered that we had enough ingredients for another batch! Don't you just love it when you don't have to go shopping to make something delicious?! I do. The recipe truly is very, very easy. I doubled it so I could use up a lot of ingredients (John brought in about 10 tomatoes from the garden today and we had just a cup of Bisquick left) and so we'd have plenty of leftovers.

Here's the recipe (don't forget, I doubled the recipe to get a full 9x13 pan's worth):

Heat the oven to 400 degrees. Spray a square baking dish (8x8x2) or a pie plate.

1 cup chopped zucchini
1 cup chopped tomato
1/2 cup chopped onion
1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese
-I also added fresh broccoli because we had it in the fridge. I chopped it up pretty small. You could also add potatoes! If you want to add cooked meat like ham, bacon, or sausage you'll probably want to omit the salt and reduce the pepper (which follows).

Sprinkle above ingredients evenly in pan.



In a separate bowl blend 1 minute or until smooth:
1 cup milk
1/2 cup Bisquick baking mix
2 eggs
1/2 t. salt
1/2 t. pepper
Then pour batter evenly over veggies and cheese. Bake 30-35 mins.* or until knife inserted in center comes out clean. Let stand 5 minutes before cutting. Serves 6.

*For the double portion, I added an extra 15 minutes to the cooking time and it came out perfectly. As you can tell, John and I took out 6 portions on our own!! We were hungry!

Garden fresh goodness!

This week while my family's in town we've been feasting (once again) on the fruits of my husband's vegetable garden: green beans and tomatoes!! Can I just say for the record that home-grown tomatoes taste SO much better than store-bought? It's one of the joys of summer. We've had quite a crop this year of Romas, Better Boys, Beefsteaks, and even a few little Early Girls at the beginning of summer. I've made tomato-basil pizza with fresh basil from my herb garden, we've had TONS of great salad and sandwiches with our tomatoes, and we've also eaten easily 10 pounds of green beans from our back yard (and we even shared some with our neighbors!). I love that we got so many beans from a little package that only cost $1.50!! If you live in a climate that can handle it and have the time, veggie gardens are AWESOME!

Here's John and his dog tending the soil:

John enjoying his beans (or waiting to while I take a picture) with some homemade meatloaf!

This week we made tomato and mozzarella salad with fresh basil:

It was so simple to make ... just cubed fresh mozzarella, tomatoes, fresh snipped basil, olive oil, balsamic vinegar and salt and pepper. We GORGED on this!!

We also made beans and potatoes to round out our lunch (the potatoes were from Trader Joe's, as was the fresh mozzarella):

We boiled the beans and potatoes together in salted water, drained, and then added butter and salt and pepper. YUM! I accidentally left my plate of leftovers out in dog range the other day to make a bathroom run and my basset hound ate ALL the rest of my veggies. I was so MAD!!