Goodbye, Winter Garden! You Were Delicious!

Yesterday, my husband and our daughters ripped out the winter garden that we had at our community garden plot.  The community garden happens to be at my local YMCA, so, while they did that, I was inside, having a nice little workout, which has left me very sore this morning.  Thank you, Body Pump!  It was funny because, as I was working my tail off (literally), I could see the three of them, out the window, working their tails off gardening.  After my class was finished and I had reclaimed my toddler from the nursery, we all went out to see the results of all of their hard work.  They had an enormous pile of onions of all shapes, sizes and varieties, as well as a couple dozen good sized carrots.  Sadly, most of our other plants either succumbed to the Texas heat (starting to become of the "hotter than hell" variety) or the bane of my gardening existence: bugs that I call "squash bores".  (I call them that because....that....is their name.)  Anyway, my once gorgeous artichoke plant was the latest, and perhaps most tragic, victim and had to be cut back to a mere shadow of its former self.  I hope that it will survive, but we shall have to see.  In any case, they planted some new munchables for the bugs - melons and cucumbers, specifically.  We loaded up the onions and carrots, took them home to clean and.....

A freaking hour later, I was finally finished cleaning the dirt off of all of my lovely veggies.  I really didn't know what I wanted to do with them (and the five new potatoes that they also dug up), so I made sure they weren't going to make a mess in my fridge or take up too much room and I let our dinner menu percolate in my head for a bit.  What I eventually came up with was this: a caramelized onion and new potato tart with white cheddar cheese, served with honey glazed carrots.  I sliced all of the onions into 1/8 inch slices and cooked them for about 20 minutes in olive oil on medium to medium high heat until they were completely soft and a lovely browned color.  I set them aside to cool, while I cooked the carrots, also sliced into 1/8 inch pieces.  I added them, another tablespoon of olive oil, salt, pepper and about 2 teaspoons of honey to a skillet with about 1/2 a cup of water.  I let them simmer, covered, in the water mixture until they were soft, then uncovered the pan and let the honey and oil caramelize and glaze the carrots. 

I found another yeast-less pizza crust recipe (2 cups flour, 2 teaspoons baking powder, 1 teaspoon of salt, 2/3 cup water and 1/4 cup olive oil), so I whipped that out, pressed it into a rectangular shape, topped it with paper thin slices of potato (salted and peppered those), the caramelized onions and finished it off with about four ounces of shredded white cheddar cheese.  I baked the tart in a 425 degree oven for about 20 minutes, until the cheese was melted and lightly browned in spots, and the potatoes were cooked through.

I wasn't expecting a thoroughly warm reception from the kids for this dinner (mainly because of the preponderance of onions, caramelized and hidden by cheese or no), but the girls ate it up!  They even came back for seconds!  Our son, on the other hand, usually a vegetarian by nature, refused to eat a single bite of the tart.  He ate a couple of carrots and steadfastly refused to eat anything else.  (This could have had more to do with the fact that, because dinner was running really late, we gave him his full cup of milk as an amuse bouche.)

Based on my general success, I left the dinner table last night feeling like a bit of a culinary bad-ass.  I mean, I literally took a pile of root vegetables that were dug up (from the ground!) in the morning and turned them into a tasty, satisfying vegetarian meal to feed our family of five for dinner that night.  I used ingredients that were in my pantry and fridge to round out the meal and (almost) everyone ate it!  See?  Culinary bad-ass.