Learning to Garden!

Two years ago my husband build me a set of three garden boxes.  And we have harvested around 2 lbs of tomatoes... period.  For some reason we, or dare I say, I have a hard time growing things.  For some reason I felt that I was living in the movie, Field of Dreams, and chanting my mantra of "if you build it they will come".  Apparently building a garden box did not produce instant vegetables.  So when I found this book I figured to check it out.  First off we have a limited amount of space and second little to zero knowledge of how to garden.  My mom's fiance is a master gardener, meaning he looks at a plant and it grows, harvest and prepares itself. 

I am not like that.  I am however an expert tomato hornworm spotter.  My kids are expert tomato hornworm squishers.  My husband is an expert at being patient while his wife tries to figure this all out.

Yet when I opened the pages of this book I felt that I was given a second chance.  Our money paid for the garden boxes was not going to go down the drain.  While it reads like a book about gardening, lots of facts and details, limited on the fun fiction-y type of wording, it was full of information that I look forward to implementing.

It covers the right amount of ingredients to have in your soil and how to test your soil.  I am learning about what and when to plant.  It is great fun to learn about all the heirloom varieties that I can grow.  Since my garden was already full of beautiful tomato plants (who were viciously attack by a pack of hungry squirrels) I need to wait to amend my soil and buy some new plants.

I love this book for its simplicity and easy to follow instructions.  I really look forward to adding all the knowledge gained to my poor little garden!

** I was given this book to review for free from Blogging for Books.com!!

Vegan Holiday Cooking

I love being a part of the Blogging for Books program.  I have been reviewing mostly Christian books and love them.  But when they opened it up for other kinds of books I got really excited.  Especially when I came across a book called Vegan Holiday Cooking... and it was the Holidays.

This book covers just about every Holiday from Superbowl to Passover to Christmas.  I loved reading through these pages and seeing all the possibilities.  I started Christmas Eve with the Chopped Vegetable Salad (which was for Superbowl).  This is a great go to salad.  The dressing is full of flavor and it fooled my omnivore guests.  This salad can be mixed up with every topping you desire.  I served it like a buffet and let everyone choose their topping.  I was the only one who opted for the marinated Tofu Feta (which I figured would happen) and it was amazing.  I love this salad and will make it again.

For Christmas Day I brought the Roasted Brussels Sprout Salad to share with a group of hard core meat eaters.  And they loved it.  They great thing about this salad was the ingredients were easy to see and nothing that people don't already eat.  It was easy and simple and made for great leftovers.  Overall this is going in my rotation.

The last recipe I have tried (and certainly not the last) was the Vegetable Dumplings from the Lunar New Year section.  It was fun having my husband in the kitchen for this one.  We decided that our New Year's Eve would be a Chinese food theme... these fit perfectly.  They were a little difficult to assemble and I need to figure out how to cook them without them falling apart.  But the ones that held their own were yummy and delicious.  I even have some in the freezer for later this week.

Overall this is a great cookbook to add to my growing collection.  I would definitely recommend this to anyone, vegan or not.  It is fun to see all the possibilities that this cookbook can offer...