Gorgeous Indoor Salad Greens
Chocolate Box Cottage Diary, Volume 3
Week 10: March 11, 2023
Another gorgeous fresh salad from my indoor garden! For the past 7 winters I have grown a variety of greens in my living room window. Like microgreens only less technical. No plastic trays, grow lights, or racks; instead I use soup bowls and a window.
I succession plant twice a week, so another harvest always awaits, all winter and through early spring, until the outdoor garden is producing again. Our salad bowl is always full of a colorful medley of crisp, delicious, flavorful greens! We also add them to tacos, sandwiches, avocado toast, and stir them into soups, stews, beans, and chili. So much yumminess.
Gorgeous greens
Bowls of gorgeous, healthy greens thrive on our living room windowsill: peas, radish, buckwheat, broccoli, and more.
Buckwheat lettuce is a particular favorite as it really does taste like lettuce!
For easy harvesting, I use clean kitchen scissors to cut the gorgeous greens right into my salad spinner basket.
I cannot get enough of scrumptious fresh salads like this with nuts, cheese, and homemade vinaigrette!
Seeds are miraculous! These seeds that are soaking in water will produce about 80 ounces (2.25 kg) of gorgeous fresh greens.
Sylvester knows he’s cool. Sadie knows she’s pretty.
Catch of the day
On Sunday Sam remarked that he hadn’t seen any raccoon prints in the snow; neither had I, which we both found surprising. The very next morning, this…
Three days in a row we live-trapped a female raccoon, then a gray fox, then the tail-less male raccoon.
Corn tortillas with Azure Market
Tacos with homemade masa tortillas!
You have heard me 
sing the praises of homemade tortillas – they are SO good!
In case you’re new to the Chocolate Box Cottage page, I decided to learn to make my own corn tortillas instead of buying them from the store. Each new skill mastered, however small or large, adds another layer of safety to our household food supply. It’s also fun!
A tortilla press is nice, but not absolutely essential. You can press the dough on a cut open plastic bag with a glass pie pan. I found my inexpensive $4 tortilla press at the grocery store and it has more than paid for itself. 
This time I tried Azure Market brand yellow 
corn masa from Azure Standard. I ordered a small package to experiment with and found it a little coarser than Bob’s Red Mill, which is my standard.
Tacos are way better with homemade tortillas! I even found a good deal on avocados and made guacamole. Mmmm!
So tell me, have you taken the plunge and tried making tortillas yet?
Soupmaking
Three soups this week made meals extra easy, a necessity with extra work due to the snow.
I keep 2 tubs of my homemade Taco Soup in the freezer for quick dinners. I freeze it in round tubs that fit in my slow cooker, so I can pop the frozen lump right into the Crock Pot – so easy! Eight to 10 hours later, the soup is ready to eat with our favorite toppings.
We ate up our last cube of Zucchini Velvet Soup base frozen from garden zucchini last summer. I heated it with coconut milk instead of dairy milk this time.
Sam cubes potatoes and cooks Italian sausage in the cast iron skillet after a busy day of work (him) and errands in town (me). Together we made a large pot of Italian Kale and Sausage Soup, or Zuppa Toscana, a copycat of our favorite soup from Olive Garden.
If you have noted Sam’s conspicuous absence in pictures the last couple of weeks it is because he has been busy with long days of plowing snow. He leaves in the dark and gets home in the dark, often on weekends, too.
Planting day ~ fruit trees
We were thrilled when a couple of sunny days melted enough snow that we could get out and plant the fruit trees that were waiting.
The snow was wet and sticky, making for tough sledding with the loaded wheelbarrow. Bless my husband for his heart and his hard work. For a list of what we planted, read this Cottage Diary post.
Bookshelf
Stillroom Cookery, The Art of Preserving Foods Naturally by Grace Firth
The stillroom in an early American home was an unheated alcove of stone or logs, a lean-to attached to the house, or constructed as part of a detached summer kitchen. It was a bridge between the garden and the kitchen table.
The stillroom served as a distraction-free chamber for the woman of the house (and sometimes, though rarely, the man) to coax all manner of culinary transformations into being through the powers of fermentation: milk into cheese, cucumbers into pickles, meat into sausages, dandelions into wine, and more.
The cherished sourdough starter resided in quiet coolness here, as did a variety of other wild, beneficial bacteria.
Though written in 1977, 
Stillroom Cookery hearkens to an earlier time because the author was raised by her older-than-average grandparents.
The book really is a treasure, one I refer to often for inspiration and comfort in my own endeavors to coax more goodness from our food.
Long out of print, you may find a copy on eBay or my favorite online used bookseller. I share my affiliate link here so that you and I may both earn points toward future books with qualifying purchases. Using my link helps me share more book reviews with you.
Blessings to you this week,
Michele and Samuel
