Entries from March 2007

Where Food Comes From

March 31st, 2007 · No Comments · Uncategorized

Why does real food cost more, you ask? Take a look at the man on the left, down on his kness planting onions by hand. That’s Mike Klein, a farmer friend from Bandywine, MD, who is planting crops for his summer subscription service.
I paid a visit to Mike and his wife Michelle yesterday to [...]

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If it’s Thursday…

March 29th, 2007 · 2 Comments · Uncategorized

…it must be delivery day for our box of goodies from the farm.
Let’s see. What do we have here…
…a gallon bag of mesclun…some Siberian kale…tender collards…a Ziploc of salad mix with tat soi and Asian mustard greens…English cress. And, for us “Yes-eggs” subscribers, one dozen eggs from Brett Grohsgal’s brown chickens. A veritable riot [...]

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Spring Kale Harvest

March 28th, 2007 · 2 Comments · Uncategorized

A few snips here, a few snips there, and in just a few minutes we have a bowl full of kale, enough to feed four easily.
This is the kale I planted September 20 of last year. The variety is called Red Russian and it survived a balmy December and January, then a bitterly cold [...]

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The Stuffed Ham that Wasn’t

March 28th, 2007 · No Comments · Uncategorized

Today I would have been curing our ham for the Southern Maryland Stuffed Ham we had envisioned as the centerpiece of a family Easter buffet. Alas, the fresh ham that was promised at our local Whole Foods turned out to be a fairy tale, a chimera, the figment of a meat clerk’s imagination.
I’ll call [...]

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Edible Buds

March 27th, 2007 · 1 Comment · Uncategorized

For a vegetable gardener, a flowering plant usually means an ending is nigh. The vegetable “bolts,” then goes to seed and is no longer edible. Or at least not edible in the usual way. Our genius farmer friend Brett Grohsgal, being ever so resourceful as a farmer must, harvests the flowers from his bolting [...]

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Accidental Roast Pork

March 25th, 2007 · 5 Comments · Uncategorized

This is how an accidental roast pork happens:
I pulled the roast out of the freezer several days ago. It was one of the bone-in loin roasts we brought back from our farmer friend’s matanza earlier in the month. But then we ended up throwing a dinner party for 10 people. The roast wasn’t big [...]

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Truffle Oil

March 25th, 2007 · 4 Comments · Uncategorized

When I appeared before the Garden Club of Annapolis last week the misstress of ceremonies by way of introduction ticked off some of the bullet points in my bio: Former newspaper reporter, caterer, personal chef, gardener, teacher.
“And what does that mean, exactly, ‘The Slow Cook,’?” she asked when she got to the moniker I [...]

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Check Out Garden Rant

March 24th, 2007 · No Comments · Blog

The story of the evolution of Children’s Studio School Garden is the lead in today’s Garden Rant blog. Garden rant is read by editors, designers and gardeners on both sides of the Atlantic. Our friend Susan Harris, the webmaster at D.C. Urban Gardeners, got me to write about my trip to Anapolis this week and [...]

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Giving the Schedule Over to Gardening

March 23rd, 2007 · 2 Comments · Uncategorized

I had meant to write about the bane of my existence–my refrigerator–in this space. Funny how the gardening side of The Slow Cook has suddenly raised its seaonal head and completely taken over.
On Wednesday I was cloistered with the ladies from the Annapolis Garden Club. My mother-in-law, who lives on the water and hangs with [...]

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Not Enough Hours…

March 20th, 2007 · 8 Comments · Uncategorized

I’ve been commiserating with Kevin over at Seriously Good about not having enough hours in the day for cooking and writing and working. Well here’s a news flash: It’s Spring, and food needs to be planted.

What you’re looking at here is a view north on our corner lot in the District of Columbia. I started [...]

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