Find our recipes for summer's luscious produce all in one place
We have 15 tomato-centric recipes to share in Taste Summer! including this Cherry Tomato Focaccia. Kathy Morrison
Summer is such a glorious time for fresh produce. Tomatoes, of course, but also cucumbers, corn, peppers, zucchini. And the fruit! Peaches, nectarines and plums are just the start of summer's bounty.
Here at Sacramento Digs Gardening, we have published five summers of recipes, one each Sunday of the season, Debbie and Kathy alternating. Each recipe features something we've harvested from our own gardens, or found at the local farmers markets and farm stands. Each recipe is tested and proven in our own kitchens.
Those 60-plus recipes are now together in one place, debuting online in "Taste Summer!" It's our second e-cookbook, following the publication of Taste Spring! in April, and it's just in time for Fourth of July celebrations.
Because Sacramento summers can be so hot, many of our recipes are designed for minimal or no cooking. Chilled peach soup, anyone? We have two versions, including a vegan one. We have some cool cocktails, too.
Tomatoes, not surprisingly, account for 25 percent of the summer recipes, ranging from cherry tomato focaccia to tomato tart, tomato pilaf to tomato clafoutis. We have an easy slow-cooker sauce for now, and tomato jam and chutney to preserve for later. We even have a recipe to make tomato powder from the leftover skins: It's great sprinkled on salads or popcorn.
Summer produce works so well in both sweet and savory recipes. We put pluots in salad, cantaloupe in gazpacho and white nectarines in salsa. Squash gets into the act with Kathy's popular chocolate zucchini bread.
Then there are the delicious surprises: Baked cucumbers! Tomato crisp! Roasted grapes! Zapped pickles! (That one uses cukes or zukes.) Debbie also has an easy salsa verde that makes terrific use of fruit from a tomatillo plant on overdrive.
Whether you harvest your own fresh summer produce, or indulge at the farmers market, you'll find delicious and useful recipes for fruits and vegetables in Taste Summer!
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Garden Checklist for week of July 21
Your garden needs you!
* Keep your vegetable garden watered, mulched and weeded. Water before 8 a.m. to reduce the chance of fungal infection and to conserve moisture.
* Feed vegetable plants bone meal, rock phosphate or other fertilizers high in phosphate to stimulate more blooms and fruiting. (But wait until daily high temperatures drop out of the 100s.)
* Don’t let tomatoes wilt or dry out completely. Give tomatoes a deep watering two to three times a week.
* Harvest vegetables promptly to encourage plants to produce more. Squash especially tends to grow rapidly in hot weather. Keep an eye on zucchini.
* Pinch back chrysanthemums for bushy plants and more flowers in September.
* Remove spent flowers from roses, daylilies and other bloomers as they finish flowering.
* Pinch off blooms from basil so the plant will grow more leaves.
* Cut back lavender after flowering to promote a second bloom.
* It's not too late to add a splash of color. Plant petunias, snapdragons, zinnias and marigolds.
* From seed, plant corn, pumpkins, radishes, winter squash and sunflowers.
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