Quacking from Rappahannock (our blog)

Butter Cookies From Brittany

That’s “Brittany” as in “French Brittany” the westernmost maritime province of France. Following my recent post on making Petits Pots de Yogurt With Strawberry Compote, Paula and Mary both asked about the golden cookie pictured next to the yogurt, and would I please provide the …

Petits Pots Of Yogurt And Strawberry Compote

Yogurt is for dessert too. After a 15+ year hiatus, I am again making yogurt. Easy, tasty, low-tech. Did I say easy? Since I much prefer eating yogurt to drinking milk, I have been making at least two quarts of yogurt a week. Love it! …

The Art of Picnicing

Serve good food. Serve fresh food.

Use real silverware and a real cloth napkin. Make it pretty.

Be imaginative in your use of containers – avoid plastic.

Print a menu and tuck it in the box.

Have fun.

Volunteer Seedlings

Among the pleasure of the early spring garden is the hunt for the wanted volunteers: dill pokes its elongated slim first leaves among the sowed arugula while cilantro is coming up now in the pea bed – both bright green, brightly flavored, their unmistakable pungency …

Hardening Off

It’s time to start hardening off the babies. At least, for those of us in the Northern Piedmont (and in the mid-Atlantic area). Yep, time to start hardening off the hardy annual vegetables that were lovingly started indoors. That include you people who took one …

Planting Onions

Transplants: 350! (more or less); about 200 planted on Monday and 150 planted ten days ago. I have never been successful with the sets (mini-bulbs) planted in the spring: they hardly grew bigger than they start at! So, this year, I bought (more expensive) transplants: 2 bunches from our local farm store (1 red, 1 white – unnamed) and 3 more expensive kinds via mail order at Johnny’s Seeds: Walla-Walla, Mars, and Copra. It’ll be interesting to compare how they perform. The CFC transplants were available earlier, so I could plant them earlier (always a good thing in my book), but the ones from Johnny’s had better roots, and the bundles were bigger. We’ll see (I hope!)

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They are all outside, in a bed that had been “sweetened” in the winter with ashes from the wood stove, planted fairly closely as I want to use young onions for salad in late spring and throughout the summer. Whatever remains (if anything) will be used as storage onions. That’s the idea. In practice, we eat a lot of onions, so I am not even sure 350 will do!

I also have seedlings in the greenhouse planted in cell packs: a pack of bunching White Spears impulsively bought at a rack display (yes, my impulse purchases tend to be seeds!) & mini-white Bianca di Maggio. They were started later than they should have (in early March instead of Janauary) and will need to be up-potted soon. Most of the three-weeks old seedlings still have their seeds up in the air, at the tip of their first leaf. Makes them look like little people whispering oniony gossips…

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At the rate they are growing, I am guessing that I’ll set them out in late April.

Meanwhile, I’ve got lettuce, leaf broccoli & cutting celery to transplant out. Best to do it before the rain which we are suppose to get this afternoon & tomorrow.

Breakfast For The Girls

We are calling them girls (Gael, Gladys, Gwen, Gali, Gudule etc etc). There might be a boy in there – won’t know for sure for a few weeks. He’ll be Gaston, or Gus, or Gaspard – haven’t quite decided yet. The girls are still in …

Blue And Red

Spring is blue and red: blue clear sky and red maple flowers. Indeed the maples are blooming now, the earliest single species source of nectar and pollen for our bees.

Green

Finally – rain. Gentle, slow, soft, over the course of a few days.

A the end, it did not add to that much altogether – maybe 1/2 inch (as measured by my hand thrust in a bucket that was left out). Nonetheless, it was rain in what has been a cold and dry winter with hardly any snow, hardly any rain, lots of drying wind and temperatures dipping below 0F ( -18C) at time. So, a few days of mild temperature and a gentle rain are making everything sprouts, buds, shoots, germinates, swells… springs!!! It makes one hunger for fresh vegetable.

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Among the vegetable that we can harvest now are the kales. Continue reading Green

He Likes Duck Fat

Potatoes fried in duck fat, with garlic & parsley, a very fresh green salad (with not a leaf of lettuce in sight) topped with a little bit of duck breast – a perfect lunch for this blessedly rainy Sunday. Obviously, he thought so too (and …