My doc’s got me on a paleo diet for 30 days as part of a process to figure out what foods I might be allergic to. I’d be totally depressed, not eating any dairy, any grains, any legumes, if it weren’t for the joys of the garden. How can you feel deprived when this is what greets you in the morning? (more…)
Like about 10% of Americans, I have realized that I’m healthier when not eating gluten. This is not necessarily a fun realization, especially for someone who enjoys dining out as much as I do. But like a few million others, feeling good and having lots of energy is worth the changes that I’ve made in what I eat. (Any reader who would like to discuss the health aspects of a gluten-free diet is welcome to contact me or read this excellent book.) (more…)
Nothing says “Spain” to me like the taste of the smoked paprika in a real Spanish chorizo. Went out yesterday to find some Palacio chorizo at Wegman’s, cut some up this morning and fried it oh so gently in olive oil with the scapes that I just had to cut off the garlic. If you leave the scapes on, the plant puts energy into the bulbils at the end rather than into the bulb in the ground. Gosh, the things we have to eat this time of year! Tiny radishes, micro-greens, baby this and baby that. Poor us. (more…)
Tonight’s delight: spring salad. Recipe: Look around the garden. See what’s edible. Leave seeds in the ground, do some thinning. Pull weeds away from strawberries, pick the ripe ones. Grab a lone asparagus spear, cut the almost-flowering basil back, pull off a few mint leaves. Take the largest leaves off the lettuce so the little seedlings underneath can grow better. (more…)
A friend asked the question, “What are you planting?” I’ve been so busy getting the dirt in (10 cu/yd, with lots of help!) and getting things planted, I didn’t answer her until today. So here it is. As you can see, no time for more blogging until everything’s in. I had a goal: everything done, staked, poled and whatever by Memorial Day. This year, by gum, I’m going to meet that goal! (more…)
When you marry cooking to gardening, something very exciting happens to the cooking. You get handed a very specific set of ingredients, always varying with the season, never to return until a whole year later. So your thought in the moment of standing in the garden is, “How can I get the most and the best out of whatever this garden is offering me today?” Because tomorrow is another day and anything can happen between today and tomorrow. Rabbits eat, blights come, hail falls. Talk about keeping you in the present moment! (more…)
It takes time to remove all the plastic from one’s kitchen, but we’ve pretty much succeeded. Sometimes there’s a bread bag around that we’ll use a few times, but now when we want to seal something tight we put it in a glass refrigerator dish and lay a piece of wax paper over it before putting the glass lid on. Seems to work just fine. (more…)
It’s so basic, so simple. If you mess up your land, you mess up your food. If you mess up your water, you have no good water with which to grow the food, cook the food, and drink with the food. Hydrofracking is already destroying land and water in Pennsylvania. (more…)
We’ve done some careful consideration of the options, including the “three sisters” possibility, but have decided that fussing about complete proteins is just too much work. Instead, we’ve installed a cow in our yard. Bessie makes the freshest milk in town!
Just a few pictures of what’s left from last year, what’s coming out of the garden right now – that’s the ides of March, folks – and what we can look forward to. I love this time of year! Is it spring? Is it winter? (more…)
Some time ago, Dave and I took a fascinating tour of the Oneida Community Mansion House and there discovered a restaurant tucked into a wing of the building: Zabroso Restaurant & Lounge. Alas, it was closed that day and pressing our noses longingly against the glass didn’t get it to open. So we returned home, to spend many months saying, “You know, we have to get out to Zabroso.” (more…)
It’s March, which means it’s that magical time when we can start harvesting one of my favorite vegetables: parsnips. They’re sweet now, having been through the winter, and so aromatic. But mostly they’re a vegetable fresh from the garden, something we haven’t seen for a few months. (more…)
We use funnels fairly regularly. This morning, as I used the white enamel one with the royal blue trim to get oil from a gallon tin into a glass bottle, I wondered how many other people use funnels any more. Ever since we stopped storing food in plastic, we’ve found it useful and economical to buy foodstuffs in bulk and then transfer them to smaller containers. (more…)
The Post-Standard already did a nice job of writing about the Rise N Shine diner, but I just have to add my three cents’ worth. Dave and I have decided it’s our new “our diner” for a number of reasons:
We’re musicians. While the style of music we currently make, flamenco, has little in common with the music you hear at this diner, we just love all the pictures of Syracuse-area bands from decades ago that are hung on just about every available bit of wall space (see pictures here). Some of you may know that Dave has been playing in bands of various styles for many many years: (more…)
My dad is an excellent gardener – of flowers. To my knowledge, he has never grown a single thing that one can actually eat, but I learned a heap about plants while taking care of those childhood flower gardens. Dad’s a designer, of interior spaces and exterior gardens. He’s also a product of a 200-year-old lawn culture. So he couldn’t help himself when, in an otherwise sweet and charming email, he reacted thus to my statement that I was thinking of putting buckwheat in the front lawn: (more…)
My garden progress:
