We are in our second month of gardening and attempting to do the whole gardening thing for the second year in a row. So far, so good.

We have over 30 different things planted including fruits, vegetables, and herbs. Our daughter planted cat nip as well

With winter basically rolling over into summer this year we already have squash that we’ve picked and devoured!

One of our favorite and fast dinners to make consists of the vegetables from our garden. We take squash, carrots when they’re grown and celery and toss with a light olive oil and fresh herbs of basil, sage and thyme and a little salt and pepper. This gets tossed into the a 350 degree oven and roasted to al dente, approximately 15 minutes.

The next things we do is cook up rice but not with water. No no. We use a can of vegetable broth to a cup for rice. We blend Summer Savory, basil, sage, thyme, garlic, onion powder and dill into the broth as it begins to boil. This helps infuse all the flavors into the rice. When everything is cooked, we add, a Paula Dean favorite, an entire stick of butter. It’s unbelievably tasty.

Then we cover this with a drizzle of my signature of red wine sauce.

While we are trying to stick to a vegetarian diet (we fail at that a lot) we also like  to pair these dishes with pan seared salmon.

It’s a perfect dinner and fast! I hope you’ll give it a try.