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…)
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…)
Last week I had lunch at one of my favorite restaurants. I got a pesto dish that I’ve had many, many times, and it tasted fine, as usual. But then the very next day, I had a very strange metallic taste in my mouth. No amount of toothbrushing or water drinking seemed to get rid of it. I had never experienced anything like it before – all food tasted bad, it didn’t seem to be going away, and the prospect of having this go on forever, or getting some mysterious disease, scared me. With Lonnie’s help I believe I found the cause – our sometimes quality-free friends the Chinese have been selling us a variety of pine nuts that have apparently never been used in human consumption until just recently. The symptoms are exactly as I described, a metallic taste in your mouth. Fortunately, it does go away, but not for several days in some cases. Yay, economic development at the cost of human health! (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…)
One of the sweetest things about living in Eastwood is living so close to Cafe Kubal, which occasionally means smelling the coffee roasting when we step out our back door. We’re so grateful to Matt and Rachel and all the staff who have made this tiny cafe a huge success. To add frosting to the cake, you’ll find master barista Chris Deferio behind the counter these days. Chris was the fourth-place finalist in the 2007 US Barista Competition. Eastwood once again attracts great people: Chris and his wife have moved here. (more…)
My garden progress:
