As laughter and murmurs of animated conversation drifted from the terrace with view of the Blue Ridge Mountains into the kitchen (where I, the chef, was putting finishing touches on the dessert plates) and as guests raised their glass for a toast shortly after sunset, I knew that dinner was a success. One can never [...]
Read More..>>I promised more peach recipes. If “recipe” is the word to use. You got to do a lot of things - fast - when you got a bushel (close to 60 pounds!) of peaches.
Perfectly ripe fruit call for a very simple treatment. Why mess up with pure goodness? Some nice dough, a sprinkling of sugar, [...]
It rained all through last night and today – something we haven’t had in a long time. The creek which had become so low I could not hear it from the house (but unlike last year, it has not dried out completely - at least not yet) is singing again. So of course, I did [...]
Read More..>>The lovely peach originates from China, although as its botanical name (Prunus persica) indicates Europeans thought – in the 18th century – that it came from Persia. Peaches seemed to have been introduced to Southern Europe via the Silk Road in Antiquity. They were brought by the Spaniards to the Americas where adopted by a [...]
Read More..>>This is going to be a good summer for peaches.
Two local orchards I already hit had early peaches in the 2nd week of July. A third said the rain was having them push harvesting by a few days, but that peaches should be coming strong after the 15th. And they did! On Friday, I picked [...]
I don’t like to throw out (I mean compost) food - even things that other people may not see as still edible.
I went wild berry picking earlier in the week (that’ll make a post fo another day) and decided to make a sorbet with some of the wild blackberries I picked. (By the way, if [...]
Twice this past week-end, I prepared a simple dish combining a few very much local ingredients: easy, lots of flavors, nice colors, great smell, happy eaters… and no need to apply heat: as far as I am concerned, the perfect summer party dish. What was it? Melon & Virginia Country Ham Salad with Combava (Kaffir [...]
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Comments(4) Gardening keeps you humble.
Here you are: pretty proud of yourself, because you’ve been gardening for over twenty years – you’ve even had some pretty good years and raised some unusual plants; you’ve dabbled in all kinds of things; have propagated a lot of your own plants and saved seeds; you are even teaching people how [...]
Lemon Verbena
A small shrub from South America, lemon verbena (Aloysia triphylla) is a delightful plant in the garden. Because it is a tender perennial, I grow two mother plants in pots that come in the house or the greenhouse in winter, and make cuttings every spring that I plant in the garden once they have [...]
Read More..>> Comments(0) On July 2, The Washington Post (business section) had yet another article on the latest salmonella scare. Is it tomato? Or is something else? The FDA still does not know. Not a great confidence builder in the FDA or our industrial food system now, is it? The article contained a photograph captioned “Tomatoes are inspected [...]
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