Freezing the Harvest Meg, over at Meg’s Food and Wine Page blogged this week about the plethora of fresh produce she encountered on her weekend in the Hudson Valley, and how this time of year what she eats is largely dictated by what’s ready to be eaten (and how rare this necessity has become in a world where we’re flying apples from New Zealand for out-of-season produce) … at any rate, her post is much better than this summary so just go read it. But Meg’s post got me thinking about my summer here with my garden — yesterday I…
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Lurid Soup Beet Soup! It’s so gorgeous that it is right up there with the Oxford Magazine Music Issue. It’s a soup that will make you do the snoopy dance all over the room. It’s absolutely fuschia (which, by the way, is soon to be the color of my office), and tastes good, and generally is just so beautiful that it will make you happy. Now, I was a beet-a-phobe for a long time. It was those nasty pickled beet slices you’d sometimes get as a kid — the ones that leak nasty canned pickled-beet juice onto the perfectly innocent…
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Our little farmer’s market is on Wednesday evening and tonight I didn’t buy flowers, because I finally have enough things blooming in my own yard that I can fill the vase under my grandmother’s portrait myself. However, I did buy green beans (because the caterpillars got my bean plants before they could get off the ground), and new potatoes (which I think I’ll plant next year) and gorgeous, fragrant fresh garlic. So tonight’s dinner is pasta with the first zucchini from my garden, with hot pepper flakes, fresh garlic, and basil and mint from the garden.I don’t know how I’m…
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Breakfast of Champions The garden is in full swing — no tomatoes yet, but plenty of greens. Yesterday I harvested chard, radishes, carrots (about 4), gai lan (chinese broccoli — like broccoli raab but the chinese version) and a lot a lot of lettuce. It’s all lettuce all the time here right now. I bought a Foodsaver vacuum sealer the other day and so I spent much of yesterday morning washing, blanching and freezing veggies. My next big home purchase is going to be a freezer, but I’m waiting for the used appliance store on the other side of my…
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Eating Local We have a little local farmer’s market – when I moved here last fall it was pretty much just one good vegetable merchant and a lot of crafts. Well, they’ve done a great job getting new vendors, and Wednesday there was a local family selling their own pork, raised naturally without hormones and allowed to roam outside. Mr. Miller told me they started because they thought the local 4-H kids were paying too much for their weaner pigs, so they raised some weaners, and then when the weren’t all sold, well, they were in the pork business. So…
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This question was posed to my friend Wendy when she was in China adopting the darling Scott. Wendy had been describing something to one of her Chinese hosts about eating in America, and this woman just couldn’t believe that we bought fish dead in the grocery store. Who knows what you’re getting if you can’t see the whole fish — how can you tell how fresh it is if you can’t see the eyes or the gills? Better to buy your fish live, out of a tank, like sensible people, no? I got thinking of this because my garden is…
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A Plug for the Ruminator Review The latest issue of the terrific Ruminator Review arrived the other day and I’ve been devouring it. This issue is devoted to “Cultivation: Rural Lives, Global Issues” and contains interviews with such thinkers on the subject as Gretel Ehrlich, Verlyn Klinkenboorg, Scott Russell Sanders and Maxine Kumin. (This issue also contains a small review of a childrens’ book by yours truly.) One of the unexpected pleasures for me of moving to this small town in Montana is how interested people are in food, in the origins of their food, and in eating close to…
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Breakfast of Champions Not to sound like an Alice Waters clone, but my breakfast these past few days has been local farm eggs (1 yolk, 2 whites, extra yolk makes dog very happy — it’s good to share), scrambled with some arugula out of my garden and eaten over toast with a little goat cheese crumbled on top. It’s so good that yesterday, when I was out of eggs, I found myself cranky that the local natural foods store (which always makes me grumpy because they seem way more concerned with supplements than with food — eat real food people!)…
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Weird but good. But mostly weird. I had a lot of leftover chicken from The Week of Roasted Chickens, and it was all breast meat, which can be tricky to work with as leftovers because it gets dry and stringy and horrible. So last night, while gazing aimlessly into the fridge trying to decide what to do with said chicken, I noticed that little tub of Thai Green Curry Paste that I don’t think I’ve ever cooked with. I’ve used the red curry paste several times, but not the green. It was cold and rainy here and Thai curry sounded…
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Everybody likes cake. Another dinner party last night — our friends Bob and Robin came over to see the new garden. Since my chi is still a little low, I made the same dinner that I cooked for Patrick and the Nice Girlfriend the other night — but I made a cake. People think making a cake is a really big deal, but it’s not. I made the Buttermilk Cocoa Cake out of Laurie Colwin’s fabulous book More Home Cooking. It could hardly be easier — in a bowl you mix together flour, cocoa, sugar, a little salt and baking…