Growing your own food, you sometimes forget how much better it tastes than the stuff at the supermarket. Then a small bite shakes you back into reality.
Case in point: our spinach.
Spinach is notoriously difficult to grow here in the District of Columbia. Our springs are too short. It gets hot and sticky too quickly. Spinach [...]
Entries from April 2009
Ridiculously Fresh Spinach
April 30th, 2009 · 9 Comments · garden
Community Supported Gardens
April 30th, 2009 · 2 Comments · Blog, food news
If community gardens are going to be relevant to a sustainable future they’ll need to cease behaving as quiet refuges for individual gardeners and start reaching out to the broader community.
In case you haven’t noticed, areas of the city that most desperately need fresh produce are the same areas that have the fewest public gardens. [...]
Flowers, Too
April 29th, 2009 · 3 Comments · Blog, garden
Chives may be one of our most undervalued treasures. They come back year after year, adding a bit of green garlicky flavor to omelets and sauces, and every year around this time they produce dozens of little flower buds that burst into spiky, lavender-colored pom-poms. They brighten our path to the front door as we pass [...]
Potatoes, But Not For Eating
April 28th, 2009 · 5 Comments · garden
It was only a few weeks ago that two pounds of Yukon Gold seed potatoes arrived from Wood Prairie Farm in Maine. We’ve had a fluky spring. It was too cold to plant potatoes at the usual time in mid-March. Instead we spread them on a baking sheet in the kitchen and let them sprout. In [...]
Kids Make Tropical Fish Casserole
April 24th, 2009 · 4 Comments · Recipes
This week our food appreciation classes traveled to Costa Rica on our virtual world food tour. One of the most peaceful and stable democracies south of the border (Costa Rica has no standing army), it is situated between the Caribbean on the east and Pacific Ocean on the west, an ideal locale for fish lovers. [...]
Tags: Add new tag·beans·casseroles·fish·Latin·rice·seafood
Shrimp Stir Fry
April 23rd, 2009 · 2 Comments · Blog, Recipes
We found some shrimp frozen in the freezer. Defrosted and tossed in our cast-iron wok, this is the result: shrimp stir fry with vegetables and piquant garlic sauce. Notice, no rice. We are skipping the starchy carbs in favor of healthful protein and fresh produce. The wok makes quick and simple work of it.
Recipe: Shrimp [...]
Tags: dinner·seafood·shrimp·stir fry·vegetables
It’s Not the Burger, It’s the Bun: A Defense of Meat
April 22nd, 2009 · 9 Comments · Blog
Does red meat cause cancer? How about heart disease? Or could we solve global warming if we just stopped eating beef?
Every day the headlines declare another reason not to eat meat. But I’m thinking of three million reasons why red meat has been very, very good to the human race. That would be about the [...]
Tags: carbohydrates·fats·food fads·food news·Food Politics·meat·nutrition·pickles
The Birds!
April 21st, 2009 · 7 Comments · Blog
We like to boast that we have very few pests in our kitchen garden in the District of Columbia, about a mile from White House. No pesky rabbits or gophers or deer munching on our produce. No squash borers or grubs or beetles inflicting damage.
But every once in a while, for reasons still unclear, we [...]
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.
