Pizza last week, but more often I nuke a bowl of Chili, Thai-spiced garden stir-fry, or leftover soup-of-the-week, with pepper, winter greens, & minced Chinese Leek stirred in to freshen up flavors. If I'm shaky-tired hungry, Tuna on poppyseed bread, with dijon and cheeze is a great comfort - even better with big leaves of mustard green or other peppery greens inside. If in season, open-faced, with fresh broiled tomato oozing on top. Mmmmm! (I've got about 8 kinds of tomatoes sprouting now! YAY!) I love a good IPA or malty Craft Beer after gardening too. With friends is even more of a reward, but who really wants to leave the garden, clean up and travel to meet em?

Stacy, I have found it really hard to work with spinach measured in pounds! Two pounds of fresh spinach by weight would be a bushel I swear! Go with the two packages and see what happens. It's a custard it will still set up fine regardless of the amount of spinach. After the fact you can decide if you would have like more. Personally, for this recipe, I think two bags of Spinach is plenty.

Silvia, those pickled carrots are beautiful. I also plant the multi colored carrots instead of just orange. My favorite color is the Purple Dragon, they are purple outside but orange-ish inside. Last year I planted a mix of orange, purple, white and yellow, but the kids love them fresh from the garden and so I seldom have them anyway except raw, and if my great-nephew, Noah, beats me to the garden, I don't have any, LOL. Jim, Elery uses mirepoix in nearly every soup and sauce he makes, I think. He also adds carrots to chili and tomato based sauces to add some sweetness, so although I seldom cook carrots by themselves, we use them in a lot of things. They are grown here and sold as deer bait for $4 a fifty pound bag, bug those are usually the really big ones. I ought to use those (and cabbage) more often, they're cheap and local and usually very good. The ones from the grocery that come from across the country? Not so good, usually. Who knows how long they've been in storage... Annie

Kim, you really should explore the world of seafood, as it is ideal for fast meal prep. The whole secret with cooking shrimp, scallops, and other shellfish is to make sure you don't overcook it. But the particular critter usually gives you a clue. Shrimp turns pink when it's done. Scallops turn opaque. Clams and oysters curl at the edges. The hard ones are calamari and abalone. But even they give you clues. To clean shrimp you need to remove the shells and the mud vein that runs down the back. This can be done before or after cooking, depending on recipes. Hint: Shrimp cooked in their shells are more flavorful. There are special tools for prepping shrimp. But a regular table fork works just as well. Stick one tine into the shell from the head end, pointing into the mud vein. Then push the shrimp onto the tine. The shell and vein will pop right off. If you look at the Nuts & Bolts thread I've posted a simple recipe for Shrimp & Sausage Carbonade that you might want to try. Finned fishes, too, can broaden your choices. Fish does not require a long cooking time in any recipe (the rule of thumb is to cook ten minutes for each inch of thickness). Virtually any cooking method---from poaching to deep fying, baking to barbecuing---can be used for fish cookery.