On Monday night the stars aligned. Ellis spent the night at Gram and Pop’s house, which meant that Adam and I got to cook together for the first time since Cal was born. We used to love cooking together. Sort of. I am all about the one pot wonders and Adam loves his mis en place. We have very different styles, but we make it work. These days one person is always child wrangling so we don’t ever get to cook together. We seized this moment.

I decided we should try and cook a meal using everything edible from our yard. We could still use spices and staples from the pantry but the homegrown elements should be the star (I have been watching a lot of Top Chef lately. Can you tell?).

I should preface this by saying we we are in no way master gardeners. In fact we are a little self conscious of our modest attempts to grow. We live between a very accomplished 88 year old gardener who can charm anything and everything out of the ground and literally a PhD of plants on the other side. Our yard looks very sorry in comparison. The theme song for Green Acres starts playing every time we pick up our shovels. When we first moved to the country we ate tulip bulbs thinking they were onions. I have also been known to still be harvesting melons in November because we always seem to be planting late.  So this homegrown challenge was a tall order for us. This is the mish-mash we had to work with:

 collards, parsley, sweet potatoes  

                             a little lemon from my tree     

Eggs from the ladies. Dinah was keeping these warm.

And some rosemary and garlic that I grew this summer. This was our total spread:

Through the magic of the internet (and cooking) we turned it into:

Garlic lemon collards. Rosemary sweet potato hash topped with a fresh egg and a sprinkling of parsley. Sweet potato souffles for dessert. It was super tasty. We crushed that challenge.