Recently, I went out to the backyard for something and was greeted with an unexpected visitor just hanging out on our lawn. The second I came out the door he booked it, making haste for the wall. But instead of hopping it and running off, he just hung out. Watching me. But more importantly, watching our chickens.

This is the third time I’ve seen a hawk in our Long Beach, California backyard. They want chicken for lunch soooo bad, guys. Every sighting has been when it’s started getting cold, so I’m guessing they spot our girls and try to get at em because food’s getting a little scarce… in the balmy 60 degree winter? I dunno. But move along, buddy. You’ll get no chicken tenders here.

If you’ve kept up with us on Twitter, you know we had a massive gardening day last week. It left us with tons of fresh produce strewn across the table on our back porch, and a day full of food preservation. We froze food, we dehydrated, we canned. And we were STILL left with three large zucchini! Two of those were made into Bread and Butter Zucchini Pickles over the weekend, which meant we still had one large zucchini to do something with.

Last night I threw together a last minute casserole I immediately dubbed ZUCCHINI BOAT and it rocked our world! Super easy to make – get out a large casserole dish, put 2 cups rice and 1 can chicken broth in the bottom of it. (Vegetarian? Just use veggie broth or water!) Slice a zucchini in half lengthwise, and scoop out the seeds. Drizzle it with olive oil, and fill the hollowed out portion with whatever you like! We used half a bag of mixed freezer veggies and some leftover ricotta cheese from lasagna last week. Top it with a buttload of cheese, cover with foil, and send it to the oven at 350 degrees for an hour! Then remove the foil and let it cook 10 more minutes so the cheese gets super awesome melty.

It’s ZUCCHINI BOAT. Alert the people! What else do you guys like to do with leftover zucchini?

We are so jazzed about our garden this year!!! No lie, we may have gone a little crazy. It’s nice having a landlord that doesn’t really care what’s in our planters so long as it looks nice and the place is taken care of, because we may have cleared out massive chunks of planting spaces in the backyard for a ridiculous amount of edible gardeny delights!

If everything continues to grow like it is, we’ll have tomatoes, garlic, onions, artichokes, hot and bell peppers, strawberries, blueberries, grapes, raspberries, pumpkins, zucchini, cucumbers, squash, watermelon, lettuce, spinach, peas, beans, beets, sunflowers and corn. So much corn. At last count we had about 60 corn plants sprouted, and more have poked through the dirt since then!

I think it’s gonna be safe to say we’re going to spend a good bit of time canning this summer. Swoon.

A little color inspiration for a Friday evening…

Check it out, our seedlings are doing awesome! Hoping we’ll actually get pumpkins this year, and not just a huge viney plant with no fruit!

Check it out, our seedlings are doing awesome! Hoping we’ll actually get pumpkins this year, and not just a huge viney plant with no fruit!

I don’t see em at the bird feeder in front of the kitchen window too often, but a couple of finches stopped by for a snack this morning! I’m digging the mosaic quality shooting a cameraphone pic through the window screen gave this one:

Love that Real Simple cookbook Josh’s mom Carole gave us – here’s the quiche I made for dinner!

What’s neat about this dish is it was made up of lots of stuff we grew ourselves. The onions, basil, and eggs all came from our backyard garden, and holy cow this thing was delicious! We had this for dinner; I bet it’d be equally tasty with bacon stirred in as a breakfast dish.

Love that Real Simple cookbook Josh’s mom Carole gave us – here’s the quiche I made for dinner!

What’s neat about this dish is it was made up of lots of stuff we grew ourselves. The onions, basil, and eggs all came from our backyard garden, and holy cow this thing was delicious! We had this for dinner; I bet it’d be equally tasty with bacon stirred in as a breakfast dish.

Yesterday Josh walks into our office and says what no chicken owner wants to hear:

“We’re missing a chicken.”

Ummmm WHAT?!?! How are we missing a chicken?! I mean, last fall I saw a hawk hanging around our backyard cuz he was looking for a chicken dinner, but that was because our dog was in the other room and couldn’t tell us something was up. And none of the neighborhood cats messes with our chickens! Where could Judy Plume have gone?!?!

Josh went back out to the yard and searched for another 20 minutes. And then he noticed the box under our lemon tree.

The sturdy one that sits on its side as an option for places for our chickens to lay their eggs.

The one that was now sitting overturned.

“Nooooo….,” he thought, “she’s not under there.”

But oh yes. Yes she was. With 2 eggs, which leads us to believe she’d been stuck under there for 2 days. Josh let her out and she hightailed it for the water bowls, where she spent the next 10 minutes drinking, poor girl!

Moral of the story? A chicken in the hand is worth 2 eggs in the cardboard box you find her in 2 days after she’s gone missing.