Tomatoes, originally uploaded by jordynnmackenzie.

I guess I know it's the end of summer when friends bring me tomatoes from their gardens - I'm not complaining! These are a mixture of tomatoes from Aidan's mom's garden and my friend Liisa's garden. I especially like the look of the yellow pear tomatoes that Liisa gave us. They are very brain-ey and filled with the tomato seed mush (I love that part of a tomato!)

Tomatoes, originally uploaded by jordynnmackenzie.

This was also my first year as a container gardener. I was given a tomato plant from Aidan's mom and I re-potted it, pruned it (yes I pruned) and then ate the tomatoes as they came off the vine. Unfortunately some animal.. probably a raccoon or squirrel, found my plant and dined off of it a few times. But here it is before much had grown, right after it was potted and pruned:

My Tomato Plant, originally uploaded by jordynnmackenzie.

I really like Martha Stewart recipes. And I also really like desserts. So you can imagine how excited I was when I found this recipe for a vanilla ice box cake.

I make it in a bundt pan with icing sugar sprinkled on top and skip the candied lemon zest and frosting. I just have to bake it for longer. I can't remember exactly how long I baked this cake that I made for the party we had to watch Aidan on the Ellen Degeneres show.

The real vanilla is also what makes this cake taste awesome... Oh and the butter - it makes the best crust.

Aidan and I are mostly vegetarians. We started to eat fish/seafood in the past 8 months or so.

One of my favourite recipes lately is our version of Martha Stewart's shepherd's pie using ground beef substitute. Yum! We also used more tomato paste than the recipe suggested. It's a large portion too so it feeds us for a while.

The name The Shep comes from a Degrassi TNG episode.. I was going to explain the whole thing, but I found a Degrassi wiki: The Shep