Yum

It’s been a busy few weeks, we’ve finally almost finished unpacking all our stuff.  The few boxes left don’t seem to contain any critical pieces so they are in the basement waiting for organization.  Amidst the unpacking and organizing I got sidetracked by working in the yard.  Given that my favorite place to pick vegetables ceased their vegetable u-pick this year and now that we have plenty of yard space to have our own garden. We got busy!

After plenty of research on the internet we decided to go with raised garden beds.  There’s a fabulous website that allows you to plan out your garden.  So I used GrowVeg to organize mine.  This of course led me to plan quite a large garden in 4×16 beds… 10 of them.

We ordered 14 yards of 4 way mix with loam and sand and compost, a rich blend of food for all the stuff to grow next year.  Each of the beds was first layered with cardboard, boxes that were left over from the move, and the cracks were filled with newspaper.  This kind of layering is supposed to kill all the grass and weeds and then compost into the earth.  After loading each of them with what seemed like millions of loads of dirt in almost intolerable heat with earth… they are a vision beauty.  Now, this winter I’ll order some heritage seeds, start many of them in the porch in the spring and then plant when the threat of frost is over, just about when my classes are done after the May long weekend.

I’ve been told recently that I haven’t been cooking much lately, largely because I haven’t really been posting, but I have been cooking, I made about 15 dozen meat perogies and slow roasted tomatoes about 80 lbs of them!.  Some things you just do every year.

For today I give you a wonderful lemon blueberry loaf that I found on another blog. I have to say that the recipe is simple and so delicious.  Just the thing that is easy to make when you have a few minutes, one for eating and the other for the freezer so that you have it handy for when time is tight!

Lemon Blueberry Cream Cheese Loaf

(as borrowed from Rock Recipes)

• 1 ½ cups sugar
• 8 oz (1 cup) cream cheese
• 1 cup butter
• 1 ½ tsp vanilla
• 4 eggs
• Zest of one large lemon
• 2 ¼ cups all purpose flour
• 1 ½ tsp baking powder
• 1 1/2 cups fresh or frozen blueberries

Butter and flour the pan you’re going to use.  I used loaf pans so that I could eat one and freeze one.  Then, by hand with a whisk, cream together sugar, cream cheese, butter and vanilla, once that is creamed and the eggs one by one and mix until well incorporated and add in the lemon zest.  Then mix together all the dry ingredients in a separate bowl and mix slowly into the wet (sugar/cream cheese and butter) mixture. Fold the berries in slowly just until incorporated. You can certainly use any berries of your choice… I happened to have a whole bunch of fresh-picked blueberries on hand.

Bake at 350 in either two loaf pans (one for freezing…  🙂 or one 9 inch bunt pan.  Bake for about an hour until a toothpick comes out clean.  Using frozen berries will add some time to the baking, just check every little bit.  Or as my mother would say, “Once you can smell it, then it’s just about done!”

Rock Recipes also adds a blueberry and lemon glaze that looks quite pretty, but I left that out… I have to say that this loaf is amazingly moist and freezes very well… I would just wrap it in parchment paper before putting in a freezer bag.