A Vibrant Kale Pasta Sauce

A Vibrant Kale Pasta Sauce

Kales are a mainstay of the garden from mid-fall to early spring, with their winter hardiness, and their ruddy beauty. The various leaf sizes, colors, shapes, and textures seem to be almost endless, allowing one to paint kale parterres – if one was so inclined 

Winter Beets

Winter Beets

I like beets. I like them raw, grated or mandolined. I like them cooked. I like them pickled, whether a simple wine-and-vinegar pickle or in relishes (delicious with meat, salmon, or vegetarian burgers, or a mature cheddar). I like beet sorbet. I like them juiced 

A Way To Prepare Morels

2020 seems to be a good year for morels. Lots of people in the countryside are bringing home nice morel dinner. Chuck it to the last two mild and nicely wet (but not too wet) winters and… to having plenty of time. I like morels 

Eat the Invasives (Garlic Mustard)

Eat the Invasives (Garlic Mustard)

Unless we’ve been diligent in the fall planting for an early spring harvest, our gardens are not always as green as we want at this time of the year. There are however plenty of “weeds” (read: unwanted plants) to eat if we make the effort 

A Favorite Way to Preserve Zucchini

One of my favorite cookbooks is “My Calabria” by Rosetta Constantino with Janet Fletcher. A favorite cookbook is one I want to read, which draws me into the author’s world, tell stories that are relevant to the food it presents, and provides context for recipes. 

Chilled Sorrel Soup

Chilled Sorrel Soup

French (or garden) sorrel is a super hardy perennial potherb with a bright pleasant tartness. It grows in my unheated hoop house even in the harshest  winters providing refreshingly tart leaves for our winter salads. It is one of the first vegetables I harvest outside: 

Just Right Bread-and-Butter Pickles

As it turns out, when pickles are good, we eat lots of them. If they are too acid or too sweet, they languish in the pantry. I’ve tried many vegetables and many styles over the years and have concluded that we really only eat a 

Beet & Chocolate

Beet & Chocolate

I am firmly in the beet lover camp: a well grown garden beetroot  tastes of clean sweet earth. And that’s a good taste, intense, earthy, crunchy when raw, silky when cooked, deep garnet. But I know that the beet is as fervently disliked as it 

A Perfectly Pretty Watermelon Salad

  It took me a long time to accept the idea of fruit in my salads. Too gimmicky, if you had asked me! As a properly raised French child, the only acceptable fruit that was not dessert was an appetizer of charentais melon with port 

Beet-root Pesto and Beet-leaf Pesto

As one who loves beets, I have yet to find something made with beets that I don’t like. Raw beet salad, roasted beet and goat cheese sandwich, borscht, pickled beets (a favorite), beet ice-cream, savory beet tart, sweet beet tart (see Bar Tartine, by Courtney