It’s spring in Minnesota! And it’s a whole two weeks early. Unlike the east coast, who will probably be two weeks late this year, Minnesota is enjoying an unseasonably warm and lovely spring. Pale green leaves are peeking out of bare branches, Read more ›
I know, I know. It’s a little late to be making hot pepper jelly, right? It’s almost Thanksgiving. We got a little busy, what with a vacation to New Orleans, winterizing our gardens and chicken coop, and a way-to-early snow fall and hard freeze. Read more ›
I like radishes. In the spring there’s an explosion of little red globes, followed again three months later by the fall radish boom. But our Minnesota summers make radishes pithy, bitter and hot, so there’s a long pause in radish season, which I find wholly unacceptable. Then I met the daikon radish. Read more ›
When we got our half hog from Snake River Farm Minnesota, it came with the largest pork belly I’ve yet seen from our own pig. This baby was 10 plus pounds, enough for two batches of bacon. Yahoo! I let the belly languish in my freezer for almost a year before finally hauling it out to defrost. I tend to delay making bacon until the fall because there’s bacon, we eat it immediately. Read more ›
Last Sunday I had the pleasure of presenting and cooking at our local Linden Hills Farmer’s Market as part of their Chef Guru series, produced by Kitchen in the Market. The topic was what to do with the season’s abundance of corn, tomatoes and zucchini. My immediate thought was lacto-fermented vegetables which require no cooking at all. Read more ›
Oh kale, such a healthful, nutritious, easy to grow green. It’s good for me. It ups the nutrient quality of my diet. It’s versatile in cooking and good raw. Bla bla bla. Frankly, I’m bored with kale, the poster-child hipster vegetable. Naturally, I have loads of it in my garden. I’ve packed it into eggs, sautés, salads, etc. What’s a bored girl to do? Read more ›
Volunteer coriander is taking over my garden! Coriander is another name for cilantro. The seeds must be bulletproof because they survive our deep freeze winters and sprout immediately in spring. Every year we try eat as much cilantro as possible, but invariably, it gets away from me, reseeding my entire garden plot. This year I have a different plan of attack. This year I let it all go, then harvested the tiny flowers to make Coriander Flower Liqueur. Read more ›
My strawberry patch at Dowling Community Garden in Minneapolis has been under construction for years. Wrong location, wrong variety, wrong soil, not enough water, it was soooo frustrating! This year all that hard work finally paid off. Loads of compost and manure combined with heavy spring rains made my strawberry patch go BOOM. I had strawberries coming out of our ears! Read more ›
Our summer rains have made my rhubarb patch something out of Jurassic Park. The stalks are big and heavy things, mostly dripping with rain or dew. While I am a huge rhubarb pie fan, my daughter is rather luke warm on the whole “pie plant” idea. It’s not that I’m trying to get my kid to eat her vegetables – she’s is a fantastic eater. I just don’t want this great seasonal veggie to go to waste. Enter, fruit leather. Read more ›
It’s almost the winter solstice and my fridge is still hiding a few gems from my summer garden. The produce bin sports a couple dozen carrots, three purple cabbages and a big bag of beets. I love beets, but my family are not fans. So I concocted a dehydrated candied beet that is sweet, chewy and salty, making the earthiness of the beet a little more accessible. Read more ›
I just returned from a lovely Caribbean vacation on the island of St Martin/Sint Maartin. Half of the island is French, the other, Dutch. The two main food styles are French and Creole West Indian. And the Creole side really likes habanero hot sauces. Bottles of the stuff grace every table in multiple levels of really hot to hotter than hell. Read more ›