Daughter and I took a walk to the farmers market at Dupont Circle yesterday and found spring busting out all over.
There was a canopy of blossoms over the sidewalks.
The star magnolias beg you to stop and admire.
These daffodils were ready to make an escape.
This fellow found a quiet place to [...]
Tags: spring
Locally-grown foods may have a chance to compete with the industrial food complex when there is some infrastructure for local produce.
Think about it. Most of the nation’s farmers markets are closed for the winter. When they are open, it is only for a few hours a week. Those that remain open between Thanksgiving and Memorial [...]
Tags: food news
Our friend Mary is visiting from California. Quick! Make a snack!
I can say in all honesty that I had nothing to do with this. It’s my wife’s concoction and her go-to, fattiest, most indulgent and politically incorrect guilt food: Rotel mixed with Velveeta cheese.
Rotel is like salsa in a can–diced tomatoes and green [...]
If it’s spring, the cherry blossoms must be in bloom here in the District of Columbia. My wife has been busy inventing cookies to mark the occasion.
My home is ground zero for our local gardening group, D.C. Urban Gardeners. This is no garden club, but an insurgent conclave committed to greening the District of Columbia.
To entice their attendance at these monthly planning sessions, I lay out some kind of buffet. It gives me a chance to show off the food [...]
No matter how much we hover over our garden, Mother Nature will take her course in her own good time. The Roma tomatoes were the first to emerge from the seed tray we’ve been tending on a heated mat. All four seeds sprouted seemingly in unison. But that just raises the suspense level for [...]
Apparently I’ve gained a reputation as the soup guy in our family. As we were preparing to decamp from Easter dinner and as parting gifts were being distributed, brother-in-law Barry produced the bone from the buffet ham. With a certain glint in his eye, Barry looked in my direction. Would I consider accepting this [...]
Here’s our friend Matt shredding grass and leaves in a trash can to make compost. For you suburbanites out there this may be totally unnecessary: You have a big back yard in which to construct your composting system.
But for us city folk, ingenious steps must be devised to compost in small spaces, especially to [...]
Tags: composting
Looks like it will be at least another year before we see any raw milk for sale in Maryland.
State legislators in Annapolis this week gave a thumbs down to unpasteurized milk despite the best lobbying efforts of the Maryland Independent Consumers and Farmers Association. Members of the House of Delegates’ Health and Government Operations [...]
Tags: food news·Gardening Blogs
We had so much fun making pasta on the ghitarra at school that I decided to try it at home. Daughter was happy to help. We took turns rolling the dough through the pasta machine, then pressing it through the ghitarra.
We keep a big Ziploc bag of pesto cubes in the freezer that we don’t [...]
Tags: CSA·dark days challenge·garden·local foods·pasta·spring
We are engaging the concerns of a hungry planet--slowly--right here in our kitchen garden in the District of Columbia, about a mile from the White House.
What's in your turkey? We killed and butchered more than 80 birds on the farm of Mike and Michelle Klein in Prince George's County. Thankfully, Michelle did the gutting. Unfortunately, Mike bought his turkey chicks earlier than usual and they did not stop growing. Our prize for helping was a carcass that weighed nearly 40 pounds. It barely fit in the oven. Here, Mike is subjecting a slaughtered bird to the "magic fingers," a machine with a nubby, rotating barrel that removes most of the feathers. 
