All over the country, food banks are running low because of economic hard times. Meanwhile, tons of food goes uneaten. In fact, by some estimates, half of all the edibles we create go to waste. But some groups actually do something about it, collecting otherwise unwanted food and distributing it to the needy.
Lately I’ve been reading [...]
Entries from July 2009
Gleaning For The Hungry
July 30th, 2009 · No Comments · food news
Tags: food banks·gleaning
D.C. Budget Cuts Would Slam The Poor
July 30th, 2009 · No Comments · food news
Bread for the City is one of those organizations that normally works behind the scenes, not only feeding the poor but providing a variety of badly needed social services. The group also has a dynamite blog that lately has been dishing up some cogent–and very scary–analyses of how Mayor Adrian Fenty’s recessionary budget proposals, scheduled [...]
Grow A Row For The Needy
July 30th, 2009 · No Comments · food news, garden
Do you have room in your garden for a few extra vegetables? Or perhaps you are already growing more than you and your family can eat.
Now there’s no excuse not to direct the nutritious extra food from your garden to people who can really use it. The Capitol Area Food Bank has started a new [...]
Tags: charities·sharing produce
Canning, Interrupted
July 29th, 2009 · 1 Comment · Recipes, garden
Do you set aside a day to can tomatoes?
I know I don’t. If I spent a day canning tomatoes, we’d have enough canned tomatoes to feed an army. We’ve found that just two healthy Roma tomato plants provide enough tomatoes to last us the entire year. In fact, we just used the last pint of [...]
Pork Pudding?
July 27th, 2009 · 5 Comments · breakfast
Apologies if this looks too much like yesterday’s post, but I direct your attention to the delectable brown blob on the right. I saw it recently advertised as “pork pudding” on our dairy’s website and had to know what it was. The “pudding” was so reasonably priced I ordered two. They arrived as small bricks, vacuum-packed, [...]
Tags: local food·pork
Breakfast
July 26th, 2009 · No Comments · breakfast, garden
Swiss cheese omelet with braised green beans and bacon.
Preparation time: 15 minutes
Shopping: none
Green beans for breakfast? Sure! Why not?
We’ve harvested so many green beans from the garden I made a big batch of our favorite green beans braised for three hours. Consequently, we’ve been eating braised green beans just about every day. Me, I will [...]
Tags: bacon·eggs·green beans
Spicy Pickled Okra
July 25th, 2009 · 4 Comments · Recipes, garden
I planted my usual long row of Clemson Spineless okra this year fully expecting they’d be giants by now. They’re still midgets because of this weird El Nino weather we’ve been having–cool, lots of rain, less sun–but that hasn’t stopped them from making seed pods like crazy. You might be shocked how quickly the pods [...]
Bittman Bites Again
July 24th, 2009 · 2 Comments · Sustainability
Back in April, New York Times food columnist Mark Bittman got a good spanking from food enviro-bloggers for publishing a recipe for red snapper, a severely overfished species listed as “avoid” by the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch program. Bittman explained the appearance of the snapper recipe in The Grey Lady as a “screw up,” [...]
Tags: food writing·seafood
Smothered Okra
July 23rd, 2009 · 6 Comments · Recipes, garden
It’s been a strange, El Nino year for gardeners. If it isn’t raining to the point of destroying crops (Northeast), gardeners in many areas are reporting stunted eggplants and tomatoes taking forever to ripen. Here in the District of Columbia, I’m having the unusal experience of bending over to harvest my okra.
Okra, one of my [...]
Tags:
What’s In The Potomac River?
July 22nd, 2009 · 1 Comment · Blog
Ever wonder why you never see anyone swimming in the river that runs through our nation’s capitol?
This may be one reason: Scientists are puzzling over why so many of the fish in thePotomac can’t decide which sex they are. More than 80 percent of male smallmouth bass sampled in recent years have female eggs in [...]
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.
