Today I’m missing:

• my family (pictured above are Grandma, Grandpa, and an assortment of cousins, aunts and uncles seated around the table)
• lounge chairs
• eating outside
• tourtons (incredibly delicious fritters filled with mashed potatoes and leeks and eaten dipped in honey, with some salad on the side for good measure. They’re a specialty of the Champsaur valley in the High Alps)
• our old house
• everybody sitting around together reading and having their coffee after lunch (with lots of dark chocolate for me)
• France
• summer

You may not know this about me, but I love to garden. I love to garden as much as I love photography (and that’s alot).

There’s something incredibly satisfying about being so connected to what you eat. Someday, I want to have a full blown mini-farm and produce most of the food my family consumes. In the meantime, I’ve managed to grow decent quantities of food  for my husband and I  in the small spaces available to apartment-dwellers like us. These last two years, I’ve been incredibly lucky because our landlord is also an avid gardener, and kindly gave me two of his garden beds as well as a strip along the edge of the house.

Here’s what we’ve got growing:

Butternut squash, Marina de Chioggia squash, strawberries, cucumber, zucchini, about 8 different tomato varieties, green beans, purple beans, wax beans, peas, this beautiful striped eggplant, potatoes, artichokes, peppers, broccoli, lettuce, chard, ground cherry, and carrots.

Do any of you have gardens? What’s your favorite thing to grow?

(The scene outside my kitchen window)

I’ll be signing off today to spend time with family and enjoy the holidays! I’ll be back toward the end of next week with a beautiful wedding to post, but in the meantime I hope you all have a wonderful Christmas.

We’re in the middle of a surge of tomatoes and zucchini and though I’m scrambling to find new recipes to use them all, I totally love eating fresh from the garden.

Ok, so I know this is supposed to be a photography blog and not a food blog, but I’ve been enjoying spending time at home during this little break so much that I couldn’t resist letting a little of my personal life seep onto my work blog.

This is possibly my favorite summer dinner, second only to tapenade on garden cucumber slices and gazpacho.

The fish tacos are Nie’s, and the lemonade is Azucar’s.

It’s kind of my new favorite thing.

The minute I read the recipe in this book, I started my sourdough starter, and was pretty flabbergasted when it actually worked. I haven’t had much success with bread in the past, but this is some of the best bread I’ve ever had (if I may say so myself).

The book is great too.

It’s still a work in progress, but we like it.

More pictures to come when we get things decorated and furnished (our couches came this week!)

we’ve got potatoes, tomatoes, strawberries, green beans, purple beans, bell peppers, lettuce, peas, butternut squash, zucchini, cucumbers, cantaloupe, and herbs.

It’s kind of my pride and joy.

down by the river.

or maybe a house about a block away…

These ladies like to wake us up early on saturdays, but the fresh eggs are totally worth it.