Find our recipes for seasonal fruit and vegetables all in one place
This Floating Island dessert is among several strawberry recipes featured in our Taste Spring! e-cookbook. Kathy Morrison
Every Sunday, Sacramento Digs Gardening publishes a seasonal recipe featuring fresh fruit or vegetables. Almost always, these recipes are inspired by what we’ve harvested from our own gardens or found at farmers markets and farm stands. We alternate weeks -- Debbie one Sunday, Kathy the next -- but the recipes always have a taste of Sacramento in every bite.
As SDG approaches its fifth anniversary, we realized: We have enough recipes for a cookbook!
Make that four cookbooks, one planned for each season.
Debuting now online is “Taste Spring!” – our first Sacramento Digs Gardening e-cookbook. It contains more than 60 recipes, each featuring our wonderful Spring bounty.
In the Sacramento region and all of California, Spring offers an amazing assortment of fresh fruit and vegetables – the first taste of a new harvest or the farewell to cool-season favorites. There’s so much inspiration for us gardening cooks!
We admit: We’re partial to strawberries – there are a dozen strawberry-centric recipes in this assortment. But we go way beyond your basic shortcake. Instead, we feature strawberry salad with edible violets, and strawberry slaw with fig balsamic vinaigrette. Strawberries stud a quick bread, flavor a no-bake cheesecake and top French toast (with cream). They also star in desserts with evocative names such as Angel’s Mess and Floating Island. (And in a strawberry shortcake with a twist: Hard-boiled eggs.)
Why stop there? Besides berry-good delights, this collection features nine more Spring fruits: Apricot, blueberry, cherry, orange, lemon, loquat, nectarine, peach and rhubarb. (Yes, rhubarb is technically a veggie, but we’re counting it as a fruit for recipe purposes.)
And we love Spring vegetables! In this cookbook, we feature 18: Artichoke, asparagus, beet, carrot, chard, corn, fava bean, fava greens, fennel, green bean, green garlic, green onion, kale, lettuce, pea, potato, spinach and zucchini.
We hope you enjoy these recipes as much as we did creating and testing them. Now, you can find our best Spring recipes, all with one click.
Check it out at Taste Spring!
Comments
0 comments have been posted.Sacramento Digs Gardening to your inbox.
Sites We Like
Garden Checklist for week of Dec. 8
Make the most of dry weather while we have it this week. Rain is returning.
* Rake leaves away from storm drains and gutters. Recycle those leaves as mulch or add to compost.
* It’s not too late to plant something. Seed wildflowers and plant such spring bloomers as sweet pea, sweet alyssum and bachelor buttons.
* Trees and shrubs can be planted now, especially bare-root varieties such as fruit trees or rose bushes. This gives them plenty of time for root development before spring growth. They also benefit from winter rains.
* Plant bare-root berries, kiwifruit, grapes, artichokes, horseradish and rhubarb.
* Set out cool-weather annuals such as pansies and snapdragons.
* Lettuce, cabbage and broccoli also can be planted now.
* Brighten the holidays with winter bloomers such as poinsettias, amaryllis, calendulas, Iceland poppies, pansies and primroses.
* Keep poinsettias in a sunny, warm location; bring them inside at night or if there’s rain.
* Plant garlic and onions.
* Prune non-flowering trees and shrubs while they’re dormant.
* Clean and sharpen garden tools before storing for the winter.
* Mulch, water and cover tender plants to protect them during threat of frost. Succulent plants are at particular risk if temperatures drop below freezing. Make sure to remove coverings during the day.
* Rake and remove dead leaves and stems from dormant perennials.