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Pickled Okra

So here’s my theory: If you’re going to have a fried chicken dinner, I think you need to serve a lot of really fresh vegetables to go with it so that the whole meal’s not super heavy and deep fried.  Braised collards are traditional, of course, but I think what really makes the meal is…

potato leek pancakes with pear sauce

On nights that I’m just cooking for myself, I have huge problems motivating myself to cook anything remotely resembling a coherent dinner. Lots of times I just make scrambled eggs. Sometimes I make popcorn.   These potato pancakes are my attempt at cooking a meal that’s a little more like real food, but still is…

Wild Blackberry Jam

Every August, I’m faced with the tough choice between how much I adore the taste of wild blackberries and how much I hate picking them.   It’s 102 degrees outside, the sun is blazing, picking blackberries almost invariable involves a hike, and, best of all, they’re covered with thorns.   As much as I love…

rouge vif detampes pumpkin

Heirloom Pumpkin Soup with Grapefruit Marmalade Posted on September 27, 2011 | 4 Comments This bowl of soup has a distinct sense of time and place for me, as is often the case with the thrown-together meals I make from the garden.  The pumpkin is an rouge vif d’etampesNational Heirloom Exposition this September, put on by Baker Creek Seeds.  I was…

white Nectarine preserve

How to Make White Nectarine Preserves: An Easy Homemade Recipe

A  friend of mine gifted me a box of white nectarines from his farm. They’re sweet, ripe, and juicy, and once we ate as many as we could, we turned the rest into this simple, lovely preserve.   I’ve been playing around with a couple of different variations on this recipe.  I think my favorite…

How to preserve 100 lbs of tomatoes with almost no work

Tomatoes are one of the main crops that I preserve. Jam is all well and good, but face it: there’s a ton of sugar in those jars. Tomatoes, on the other hand, are incredibly good for you can go in just about anything. Home-grown tomatoes are also one of the food items that are so…

Forage it Pineapple Weed Tea

The pineapple weed is blooming… This charming little pineapple-scented flower looks like chamomile, all the petals missing. Pineapple weed is an edible, medicinal plant that closely resembles wild chamomile.  It’s prolific in the western U.S. (although I believe it can be found in the eastern U.S.).  one 32 oz. french press (although  you could easily change…

Stout Beer Jelly

Post Updated 2/8/15 Oh, this ridiculous recipe.  A few years ago I was drunk on St. Patrick’s Day and decided that it would be a good idea to make jelly out of the beer we were all drinking.  So, I did. I wrote about it, and then it turned into one of the most popular…

Lazy Cherry Tomato Salsa Recipe

We’ve been harvesting a lot of cherry tomatoes recently. Normally, cherry tomatoes are mostly for fresh eating since it would be crazy to peel them for sauce or other canning projects… …but since I hate peeling pretty much everything (carrots, peaches, potatoes, etc.), I stopped peeling my tomatoes long ago.  I just zap them with…

Boysenberry Basil Jam … and Pancakes

For the last two weeks, I’ve had a case of boysenberries in my freezer. People with big freezers might leave them in there for the winter, but space in my propane-off-the-grid-style freezer is precious, and I realized that I had to get those babies into jars. This started a pretty straightforward berry jam recipe, until…