Kid-Friendly Veggie Recipes

Families who have to cope with a nightly struggle over who won’t eat what vegetable might be interested in the Love Your Veggies™ Campaign (LoveYourVeggies.com). Readers may also want to check out Chef Art Smith’s (photo) commonthreads.org to read about getting children involved with vegetable gardening and healthy cooking.

I’m sure kids are not the only ones falling short of the recommended 2-5 cups of daily fruit and vegetables, so treat yourself to one of Art’s tasty dishes:

Moroccan Chicken with Roasted Vegetable Couscous

Ingredients:

1 cup whole wheat couscous

1 tablespoon vegetable oil

1 medium onion, chopped

2 bay leaves

5 whole cloves, crushed

½ teaspoon cinnamon

1 teaspoon dried, ground turmeric

¼ teaspoon ground cayenne pepper

6 skinless, boneless chicken breast halves, chopped

1 16-oz. can garbanzo beans

1 16-oz. can crushed tomatoes

1 48-oz. can chicken broth

2 carrots cut into ½-inch pieces

1 zucchini cut into ½-inch pieces

1 packet Hidden Valley® Original Ranch® Salad Dressing and Seasoning Mix

Instructions:

1. Prepare the couscous according to package directions

2. Heat the oil in a large pot, over medium heat, and cook onion until tender.

3. Mix in bay leaves, cloves, cinnamon, turmeric, and cayenne pepper.

4. Place chicken in pot and cook until well-browned.

5. Pour garbanzo beans, tomatoes, and broth into the pot and bring to a boil.

6. Reduce heat to low, and simmer 25 minutes.

7. Mix carrots and zucchini into pot and add Hidden Valley® Original Ranch® Salad Dressing and Seasoning Mix.

8. Continue cooking 10 minutes, or until vegetables are tender. Serve stew over cooked couscous.

Serves 4

Courtesy Chef Art Smith and kitchen tested by students at Common Threads on behalf of Hidden Valley® Original Salad Dressings.

Gardening as Process: Planning and Mapping –2

Once you’ve defined your activity areas, it’s time to take inventory of the plants you already have. At one extreme, a relatively new house will have next to nothing. At the other, your house, like mine, may be in the middle of the woods.

On an open lot, you’ll probably want to plot every tree, large or small. In a mature garden, scalloped-edged bubbles can indicate a stand of deciduous trees; spikey-edged bubbles, an evergreen stand. If you have only a few young trees, you’ll need to imagine what they’ll look like when fully grown, for example into a 90-foot tall, three-foot diameter oak, with a canopy 50 feet wide. Your landscape map should indicate the mature size of your plants.

Next, it’s time to edit. If you have a small city lot, take out that oak now, while you still can and replace it with a tree that’s more in keeping with the scale of your garden, a service tree (Amelanchier) for example. Other readily available choices are ornamental cherry (Prunus), flowering dogwood (Cornus), or crabapple (Malus). Today, plant breeders have developed dwarf or miniature versions of nearly everything so, if you have your heart set on a particular type of tree, keep looking until you find the right size.

I can’t overemphasize the importance of choosing the right trees for your garden from the beginning. They’re expensive, they take a long time to grow, and if you have to take one out later, that’s even more expensive. Between the tree-cutters, their equipment, and the new sunspot opened up by removing the tree, the other plants in your garden are likely to go into shock, as well.

If the trees in your garden have grown up over the years, you may want to try viewing everything with a new eye. If you were starting from scratch, would you still want what you have? Are some of the trees in decline? Shading out too much of the flowerbed? A tree doesn’t necessarily have to be removed. High limbing can do wonders for a garden. It preserves desirable shade and air cooling properties, but lets in enough sunlight for most perennials to thrive.

Repeat this process for your shrubs and perennials. Your layout sketch should portray a birds-eye view snapshot-in-time of the current state of your garden.

Gardening as Process: Planning and Mapping -1

The next step in creating a garden is to map out what goes where. This can be as simple or complex as you like. You can purchase a computer-based design program, buy a plastic landscape template, or just make a bubble diagram. I prefer to start with a bubble diagram on 11” x 17” quadrille paper, which allows you to work on the larger scale needed to envision an entire yard. Use pencil and get a big eraser.

Next, you need to step outside. Look around. What are your lines of sight? Where is your eye naturally drawn? For better or for worse, these are your existing focal points. It’s important to deal with reality here, because you’re gathering vital information that will make or break your garden design. Don’t shrink from drawing an arrow from your back door to your neighbor’s plastic play set, if that is the dominant element in your garden view. Until you address such 800-pound gorillas, the garden will never look right.

Compare where your eye is drawn now to where you would like it to be drawn. If there is an eyesore there that can’t be removed, you’ll need a screening mechanism --- a wall, a fence, a trellis, maybe even a door. Be careful in your choice, because the screen is likely to draw attention to itself, unless you use a lot of camouflage or distraction.

If the garden simply lacks structure, direct the eye by creating a focal point such as a bench, a trellis, an urn, a sundial, a birdbath, a fountain, a statue or other garden ornament, along a visual axis. The axis can be hardscape, such as a brick path, or planted, such as an alee of hedges or trees.

In small gardens, a single major focal point along a major axis is sufficient. If you’re feeling adventurous, you can add a minor cross-axis with secondary focal points at each end. Larger gardens can handle more complex layouts, but too many focal points in any size garden will result in a hodge-podge.

Now, think about how you want to use your space. Will dogs or children need room to run? Do you host large parties or charity fundraisers? Will a swimming pool be worth the expense? Where’s the best spot for your birdfeeders? The veggie plot or fruit orchard? When you lounge outdoors, which direction do you want to face? If you like to dine outside, do you prefer to set up on the lawn or on a terrace? Where’s the work area for the family gardener (potting table, greenhouse, garden shed, compost pile, brush heap)? What about lawn sports? Draw each of these activity areas, in pencil, as a free-form circle or ellipse on the bubble diagram --- no talent required.

Once you’re satisfied that the concept works, fill in the bubbles with color-coded pencils or markers to distinguish one activity area from another. More next time.

Gardening as Process: Dreaming It into Existence

Gardening is a process. Elements of that process are, in their own way, like the elements of any creative undertaking. You can’t somehow leap to a finished garden without going through all of the steps. Might as well make them fun.

Since the manual labor of fashioning the garden takes place during the growing season, for most of us winter is the best time to take the first step in the process --- dreaming and planning. With a cup of cider to warm your hands, a fire in the fireplace, a fuzzy throw to snuggle under, a pile of books and magazines to stimulate ideas, and notebooks or sketchbooks to capture your thoughts, many a pleasant day can be devoted to what you want your garden to become.

Since you’re just dreaming, you might as well put everything you could possibly want into your vision of the perfect garden (editing things out comes later). Lawn, no lawn, or minimal lawn? Border beds, island beds, or both? Trees, shrubs, annuals, or perennials? How many? Where? What color(s)? Terrace, patio, or deck? What kind of wood or paving? Manmade or natural? Enclosed with walls and gates, or wide-open stretches of wildflower meadow? Food or ornamental plants? Exotics or natives? Water feature or no? Victorian urns or avant-garde ornaments?

The dreaming part of the process can address everything from beginning to end, be broken up into phases so that each stage looks complete in itself, or approached section-by-section, for example, the front garden, the east garden, the blue garden, etc. There are as many “right” ways to do this as there are gardeners.

Remember, this is supposed to be fun, not frustrating. Tackle what you think you can handle and no more. Your garden should suit the way you live now. Maybe the water feature should wait until your toddler is older. You can still choose the spot where it will eventually go --- right where the sandbox is.

That’s one of the great things about the process of gardening: As you change and grow, so can your garden.