The tables at the Sunday farmers market were groaning with early fruits and berries, especially cherries. Here’s the cherry display at the Dupont Circle market.
Normally we would be out picking our own tart cherries–15 pounds or more to make pies and cobblers and freeze for the rest of the year. But somehow we haven’t [...]
Entries from June 2008
Tart Cherries
June 30th, 2008 · 7 Comments · Uncategorized
Weekend Update
June 29th, 2008 · 2 Comments · Uncategorized
I make no secret about my love for composting. If I couldn’t grow another tomato, I would happily spend my time tossing grass clippings and old leaves and food scraps together to make new soil. With vegetables I merely feed myself. With compost, I feed Planet Earth. Composting is one thing I can do [...]
Tags: food news
Garlic Harvest
June 28th, 2008 · 3 Comments · Uncategorized
Garlic planted in the fall overwinters and should be ready to harvest sometime in early summer. Yesterday we gathered 40 heads of garlic from a bed outside our front door. This is a softneck variety. Originally we had planned on planting hardneck garlic, which produces delicious scapes or flower stalks, but our favorite [...]
First Potatoes
June 27th, 2008 · 2 Comments · Uncategorized
Our friends Emma, Lucy and Asher came over for lunch yesterday. Since kids are always looking for something fun to do, we took them into the garden to see if there was anything ready to harvest. They pulled some radishes. Then we wandered over to the potato bed. Was there anything happening under the [...]
Training Cucumbers
June 26th, 2008 · 7 Comments · Uncategorized
The cucumbers are starting to take flight. Time to get them growing vertically.
Two varieties were planted in a long line with patty pan squash at the far end. Growing them up a trellis is the only way to manage them.
Our trellis is constructed of 1 1/2-inch PVC pipe cut to fit. The pipe and [...]
Breakfast
June 25th, 2008 · 4 Comments · Uncategorized
Sour cherry cobbler with farm-fresh half-and-half.
Preparation time: five minutes
Shopping: none
Here’s a real treat first thing in the morning: fininding sour cherry cobbler left over from Sunday’s dinner.
Quick! Get me a bowl!
I heated the cobbler in the microwave, then doused it with some of the sweet half-and-half we get delivered from South Mountain Creamery.
Bar the [...]
Tags: breakfast·cobbler·dairy·sour cherries
Greenpeace Flunks Whole Foods on Seafood
June 23rd, 2008 · 7 Comments · Uncategorized
It has always struck me that something looked terribly out of whack about the seafood selection at Whole Foods. Why, I wondered, were there so many fish species on display that I knew were listed as “avoid” by the organization I regularly rely on for seafood sustainability information, the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch [...]
Tags: seafood·sustainable fisheries
Weekend Update
June 22nd, 2008 · No Comments · Uncategorized
It will be years before some parts of the Midwest recover from record floods and already the damage is pushing up the price of corn and soybeans, deepening the world’s food crises.
Now comes news that the flooding in significant part can be blamed on man’s imprint on the land. Plowing prairies into croplands, diverting [...]
Tags: food news
Rack of Pork
June 21st, 2008 · 2 Comments · Uncategorized
It would be unfair to ask me for my favorite cooking method because I would answer without a moment’s hesitation: spit-roasting. Nothing develops flavor quite like a well-chosen piece of meat turning slowly over (or in front of) a low fire.
I wish I could say my method involved something as romantic as a stone [...]
Tags: entertaining·pork·spit roasting
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.
