350 GARDEN CHALLENGE

The 350 Garden Challenge is on!

May 15th and 16th Health Action, a Sonoma County coalition of Health oriented community organizations, invites our community to plant a 350 new water wise gardens either by planting a brand new garden, expanding existing gardens, or helping out on a work crew to help plant a neighbors garden. The 350 water wise gardens celebrates community and local food efforts to create healthy food for everyone at a reasonable cost.

I put our garden up for you to view. It is named the DeNicola Family Garden and you can see a picture of the garden after last fall's harvest. This garden feeds our family and also gives produce to the Ceres Project for cooking classes. We come pick our herbs, flowers and veggies for our class from the garden. We also check in on the worm compost and feed it our scraps.

To check out the effort and find our garden go to
http://igrowsonoma.org/content/350-garden-challenge

I hope you will join the 350 Garden Challenge!



Today we had a Spanikopita with freshly picked spinach and onions from the garden. It was the new Joy of Cookings recipe. I added a fresh garden salad and some leftover Black Bean soup to complete the meal.

The recipe was easy:
2 pounds of spinach cooked down and drained
1 large onion sauted until translucent

4 eggs
8 ounces of feta cheese
2 Tablespoons of Grated Parmesan Cheese
Salt and Pepper to taste

1 stick of butter (I used homemade ghee)
1 box of Filo dough

You prepare the spinach, drain well. Add the sauteed onions and cool.
In a large bowl beat the eggs and add them to the spinach and onions.
Add the crumbled feta and Parmesan cheese.
Add the salt and pepper.

Melt the stick of unsalted butter.

Open your defrosted Filo dough and lay a few sheets in a 9x13 glass baking dish. It will hang over the sides. Brush melted butter over the Filo dough. Do this 6 or 7 times, adding a few fresh sheets of Filo dough and butter.

Put the spinach filling on the dough, spreading it out over the whole dish.

Top with 8-10 more Filo sheets and melted butter. When I have placed all the filo dough on the spinach filling, I clip the side to about 1 inch tall and fold the edged towards the center of the dish. Then I score the top for the slices that will be made later on.

Refrigerate the Spanikopita for half an hour. You can preheat your oven to 350 degrees while it cools.

Bake for 45 minutes.

Enjoy,
Many Blessings!