If it's hot outside, cool pasta salad mixes up with most anything to hand Soup is well known as an ingredient catch-all most of the year but in the hottest summer months, save for a nod to great gazpacho, I say cold pasta salad can fill the same role just as well. Boil any pasta you have around then run it under cold water immediately after to stop the … Read More →
When the grapes knock... Our whacky winter supply lines landed some excellent South African grapes on my doorstep this Easter weekend. I couldn’t resist a classic Waldorf Salad in the moment. Details are in my original post here for the uninitiated.
The Fastest Way To Love Your Cabbage Any fan of Discworld knows that cabbage from the Sto Plains can power everything from flying stagecoaches to bank scandals. If that sentence makes no sense to you don’t worry, you can still use your own locally-grown cabbage to make coleslaw that rivals any you buy ready-made. And that includes the sea green version from … Read More →
Mizuna, Romaine, & Bread Makes For Salad Days Mizuna is one of the odder greens I grow in abundance this time of year. Think of it as “Japanese mustard greens” for cooking purposes or a milder sort of rocket (arugula) for salad mixes. It’s a brassica so all the usual garden advice surrounding them applies but honestly it’s one of those greens that … Read More →
Smoke First, Dress Later Charcoal fills the air as much as honeysuckle this time of year and my little plot of land is no exception. Cleaning off the kamado smoker and trusty old Weber kettles is the BBQ equivalent of spring cleaning so I got after my collection of fire-based cooking vessels with the wire brush and scrunched-up balls … Read More →
How An Italian Snacks When the pantry is nearly bare just before market day and you have hunger alarms making a racket in your brain, you need something cheap, fast, and hopefully already in your dwindling stocks. The power might even be out thanks to a blizzard but if you can boil water over a camp stove on the … Read More →
Chic enough for dinner parties, Easy enough for a front porch snack There’s not much that says summer better to me than a freshly cracked watermelon. As a kid I preferred them to a cake for my summer birthday and still hold my own private melon celebration annually. My grandfather used to grow acres of them and I can still remember him ‘accidentally’ nudging one with the … Read More →
Grapefruit Not Included The grapes are flowing in from the vines, veg gardens are overly pleased with themselves at being productive, and I’ve just picked the first few test apples of the year off the trees. Still a bit small and tart but not horribly so. Give them another three weeks and they’ll be perfect. That didn’t stop … Read More →
What to do when it's coming out of your ears The first batch of sweet summer corn landed from points south this week with bulging sacks of the stuff for a quarter an ear at the Megamarket. After such a long journey from distant foreign fields it’s nowhere near as sweet as the ears we’ll pluck locally in just a few short weeks but I … Read More →
Caesar & Romaine walk into a bar... My local GinormousMart has the mildly irritating habit of putting romaine hearts on sale in a massive six pack for cheaper than my usual three pack every time a fresh harvest comes in from the Quebec greenhouses. Coupled with my own homegrown micro-greens not getting that memo and continuing to produce non-stop, some weeks I … Read More →
