We ate and drank too much on Thanksgiving. Friday, it was my turn to make dinner and since we had a big piece of pork shoulder in the fridge, I had a ready plan: green pozole.
Writing about green pozole was one of my first efforts as a food writer. It was never published. But that’s [...]
The first year I helped our farmer friend Mike slaughter his turkeys I came home with a 40-pound bird as my reward. It barely fit in our oven and my wife has been on a tear ever since trying to reduce the size of our Thanksgiving gobbler.
This year, we implored Mike to find us [...]
Tags: Thanksgiving·turkey
I probably neglected to mention that when I came home from a week’s vacation in August I found that something had eaten all the seedlings I had started for the fall. Romaine lettuces, cabbages, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, collards. Everything chewed down to the nub. I assume it was birds. I had left the seed [...]
Tags: Gardening Blogs·greens·winter
Leftovers, consisting of “Dad’s meatloaf” with mashed potatoes and collard greens.
Preparation time: 5 minutes
Shopping: none
This meatloaf, a recipe we’ve adopted from Tyler Florence, is now our favorite. The loaf itself consists of ground beef and ground pork with eggs, bread crumbs soaked in milk and a wicked relish made of red bell pepper, onion, [...]
According to the Associated Press, that honor would go to Huntington, West Virginia. There, the dining experience is ruled by hot dogs. Huntington leads the nation in heart disease and diabetes–as well as the number of elderly people who have lost all their teeth.
“A lot of the patients we were seeing were getting heart [...]
Even farmers advise letting eggs eggs grow old before trying to hard-boil them.
The reason is, as eggs get old they deteriorate. The egg’s attachment to the inside of the shell grows weaker, making it easier to peel when hard-boiled. The membrane that holds the yolk in the center of the white also breaks down, [...]
Tags: eggs
That’s the question I posed in my Powerpoint presentation yesterday at the Historical Society of Washington. And about 60 determined souls braved arctic temperatures and bitter winds to show up at 10 am to hear it.
During two years as president of D.C. Urban Gardeners, I never ceased to be amazed at the number inquiries about [...]
Tags: composting
We’ve been watching several volunteer potato plants and cheering them on as fall stretches toward winter. Would they actually survive long enough to make new potatoes? They were in the pink of health well into November and seemed to love the cooler temperatures. But then this week a blast of arctic air moved into [...]
Tags: fall planting·garden·potatoes
Here’s a shocker: Kids love collard greens.
Anytime we put green vegetables on the menu for our “food appreciation” classes we are prepared for the kids to hit the reject button. Not so with Southern collard greens. They wolfed it down and begged for seconds.
No doubt this has to do with the meaty broth the [...]
Tags: collards·Southern food
We are engaging the concerns of a hungry planet--slowly--right here in our kitchen garden in the District of Columbia, one 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. 
