Farmers Markets 
Perfectly Hard-Boiled
Until you’ve eaten a couple of hard-boiled eggs tough enough to bounce off the pavement and tinged with grayish green, you might think that boiling an egg is no big deal.
There seem to be a variety of approaches to the perfectly hard-boiled egg, one that isn’t overdone and has none of that greenish [...]
A Fool for Rhubarb, It’s Hot Pink & Heralds Spring
What can I say? She’s a babe. Eight weeks ago rhubarb lay dormant in her own leafy compost, today with hot pink stalks and abundant crinkly leaves ablaze, she struts her stuff. These first leafings are positively iridescent in their exuberance. (Don’t even think about eating them!) Enough for a small bowl [...]
A Breakfast Ritual Worth Repeating
Many families have a ritual around at least one special meal a week. For us it’s our Saturday morning trip to the farmers market followed by breakfast at home, made with everything farm-fresh. It’s the same every week. We wake up, roll out of bed, get dressed and set off to the market. We usually [...]
Back to Our Roots, Roast ‘em
Now’s the time to roast any vegetable, and I think I mean any vegetable. If there’s an exception I don’t know what it is. Maybe lettuce. Warm up the house, kick up the flavor, which caramelization via high-heat roasting accomplishes (the Maillard Reaction), and dinner, maybe two, is halfway done. It’s an efficient way to [...]
Mucho Gusto Tomatillo
Truthfully, I’ve found tomatillos most appealing because of their beauty, lime green jewels in a delicate, lacey husk, but I have scant history of actually cooking with them. When I scouted around and found a recipe for Roasted Tomatillo Coulis I got past their looks and into their culinary potential. A coulis, which I had [...]
Hats off to Johnny: A PNW Waldorf Salad
Johnny the vagabond meets the highfalutin Waldorf and together they make a mean PNW salad.
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The romanticized Johnny Appleseed, Johnny Chapman, was a real appleseed-totin’-plantin’-canoe-travelin’ eccentric with a passion for apples. At first he was as wild as the seeds he carried, wrote Michael Pollan in Botany of Desire (published 2001). [...]
Culinary Contenders, Crookneck vs. Straightneck Squash
In the garden as in life, you don’t always get what you want, or what you thought you wanted, or thought you planted . . . whatever. We plant our lettuces year-round, Brassicas in late summer for winter crops, tomatoes sometime in May, favas are a nutritious cover crop, artichokes have created a mini-orchard [...]
Peachy Mornings on the Horizon
. . . thanks to Billy.
In the pouring rain we dashed in and out of our farmers market the other morning with solid intention to buy only what we needed for dill pickle making – cukes, garlic and fresh dill. We accomplished that, plus some cauliflower, at Whistling Train Farm where Shelley had it [...]
Mix ‘n Match Summer Salads
This hot weather is enough to drive even a southern girl like me out of the kitchen around dinner time. My solution is to fix salads — lots and lots of salads. Buy your basics from the farmers market or better yet, grow your own. Add a couple of exotic accessories and you [...]
Spreading Fava Love
Fava love may not equal our devotion to tomatoes or strawberries, but they’re in the running, for their flavor and remarkable bright green stature, and even for the intent required to prepare them.
This is slow food. Prepare to be nurtured – it will take time, more than we’ve become accustomed to. Shelling and [...]
