Shrimp Civeche

One thing that I really love about living in Northern California, is the access to such a wide variety of fresh foods.  Within a 100 mile radius, this area produces almost every fruit, vegetable and meat one typically eats.  Olive groves for fresh olive oil.  Fields of artichoke plants.  Acres of citrus trees. Miles of pasture lands for animals.  Tomato fields.  Fresh and salt water fish.  Rice paddies.  Dairy farms.  You can even grow some varieties of bananas! If I were to go on a strict locavore diet, I don't think I would really miss out on anything at all.  Everything I love is grown around here. 

I'm still surrounded by bags of fresh lemons, so they are making their way into almost everything we eat.  And, even though it's only mid March, the temperatures have been creeping their way into the mid to high 70s!  When it starts to get warm outside, I only want to eat cold foods.  I decided to make my take on a shrimp civeche.  It was great eaten as is, but I also enjoyed it on a bed of butter lettuce leaves and scooped it up with organic tortilla chips. 

Shrimp Civeche

1 pound very small cooked shrimp, rinsed (I used 100 count shrimp)
2 Tbsp salt

Juice from 3 limes 

juice from 4 lemons
1 red onion, chopped
1 bunch cilantro, large stems removed and chopped
1 cucumber, peeled and diced

1 bunch of radishes, diced

Green Tobasco to taste
1-2 avocado, peeled, seed removed, cut into small chunks

Fresh butter lettuce (optional)

Organic corn tortilla chips (optional)

 

Place shrimp in a large glass bowl (do not use metal). Mix in the lime and lemon juice, red onion, cilantro, cucumber, and radishes. Refrigerate until ready to serve (at least 1 hour)  Right before serving, add the Tobasco and avocado. Serve chilled on a bed of fresh lettuce or as a dip with organic corn tortilla chips.  Leftovers will keep in the refrigerator for up to 2-3 days.  

New Beginnings

Every morning before work and every evening when I arrive home, I check on my garden. On the weekends, I find myself checking up on it a few times a day or just standing at the back door staring at the plants. It’s kind of an obsession. Since I’ve become a homeowner, I’ve come to resent the time and money spent in yard care. For what? Green grass that I’m very allergic to and can’t enjoy? Trees that make me sneeze uncontrollably? We should get something in return, darn it. Make our plants work for us.

When we decided to move to a new house last winter, I begged Dave to have a garden. He was very skeptical at first because I tend to have grandiose ideas and abandon them after a couple weeks when I get bored or distracted by a new, shinier idea. But now that we had a home with full sunlight all day long, I decided it was time to start our garden (and for him to do most of the hard work).

Dave hard at work...see how happy he is?!?!

Luckily Sasha is great supervisor/inspector.

We had to take out all the ugly bushes that came with the house.

But we had some good helpers.

This is our second year having a vegetable garden, but our first fall/winter garden. We’ve had so much fun with our summer gardens, we decided to take on the challenge of cool weather gardening. We are very lucky to live in Northern California where we have very mild winters that rarely dip below freezing, allowing us to grow a variety of cool weather crops.

After doing some reading and chatting with some “experts”, I discovered that many of the winter veggies are best planted from seed. So different from going to the nursery in the springtime, picking out the right plants, and sticking it in the ground, and immediately watching it grow. Seeds are so blah. You stick it in the dirt and wait. And wait. And wait. And then you wait some more. And I'm the least patient people in the world, I want to see results NOW. So for the first week after planting, I went out there morning and night and looked at dirt. And bare dirt makes me sad. Then one day, in the early morning, I saw a tiny little sprout, barely sticking up out of the ground. I really hoped it wasn’t a weed. By the time, I got home from work, there were dozens of tiny sprouts popping up all over the place.

Now a couple weeks later, the sprouts are turning into tiny little plants, growing bigger every day. In a couple weeks, we will be harvesting our first radishes of the season. I'm so very excited!

And I'm very glad that Sheriff Daisy will be there to guard them.