Our strawberries, while small, are plentiful enough that in two days we had collected enough for a big batch of jam. Plain strawberry seems a bit boring though; I was thinking maybe of adding vanilla or lemon. So when I saw rhubarb in the store I knew just what to make, because strawberry-rhubarb flavor ties with apple for my […]
Nothing says May like the first strawberry harvest. Sofía loves to help me pick them. She actually ate very few, and we got close to three pounds today! She wants to make jam with them tomorrow. I didn’t even amend the strawberry beds at all last year – I’ve just been using them as groundcover […]
I’ve never been a mix-buyer. Cake mixes, bread mixes, pancake mixes… they can save you a few minutes in the kitchen, sure, but man do they charge you a premium – and for inferior, stale ingredients too. Still, some days those extra few minutes can be a lifesaver. Like this past weekend, when Sofía got […]
Fall is for apples, right? Well, even sick as I’ve been, I couldn’t give up homemade applesauce! I had made sure to pick up a half bushel of sauce apples at the pick-your-own farm way back in October when we went for pumpkins. If you’re wondering why I haven’t blogged yet about all that delicious […]
(Does anyone else think that “sauce the toms” should become cutesy lingo of some kind? You know, “what’d you do this weekend?” “Oh, I sauced the toms!” Common parlance y’all! Or maybe I’m just a GIANT DORK.) Anyway. You might remember I had all those red tomatoes (about 15 lbs) sitting around from when I […]
I’ve decided that if I only harvest tomatoes every other day or so, I can get more at one time without them cluttering up my kitchen counters. Good plan, eh? Well, unless it breaks my handmade basket – I got 18 pounds of heirlooms just this morning, plus almost 4 pounds of cucumbers and a […]
If there’s one thing I wished I had made more of last year, it was our garden-fresh salsa. God, I love salsa. Is there anything else that gives such amazing flavor from such a few, simple ingredients? I already had 22 pounds of heirloom tomatoes piling up on my kitchen counters along with a tidy […]
Out on a walk a month or so ago, we met a like-minded neighbor. He’d planted a little orchard and vegetable garden in his side yard in the middle of suburbia; we all started to chat and have since stayed in touch. He mentioned he had tomatoes but no time to can them – and […]
A friend introduced me to Wickle’s Pickles a couple months ago and I was immediately hooked. They’re bread and butter pickles, so sweet but so spicy! And the garlic in them makes them sort of like a dangerous potato chip that leaves you panting but reaching for more. I ate half a jar (ahem, maybe […]
I’d like to start doing something a bit new around here. If you’ve read the blog for any length of time, you know how important it is to me to reduce our food’s carbon footprint and simultaneously our dependence on commercial grocery stores. That mission starts with sourcing food locally of course. (Not for me, […]