tomatoes
sastyk | July 29, 2011When the heat wave finally broke this week, I found myself dying to cook again. After days of it being too damn hot to cook - and too hot to eat anything that had been cooked, when salad and corn on the cob were the extent of my culinary ambitions, food appealed again.
This is good, because the list of things you can do with raw zucchini is somewhat limited and we had reached the "For the love of god, someone, please cook something with these damned zucchini" stage. So we did. And with the tomatoes, the blueberries, the eggplant, the kale, etc....
Zucchini make wonderful dried zucchini…
sastyk | August 30, 2010"...and that's true love and homegrown tomatoes." - Guy Clark
Guy Clark's song is true - and over here we've got homegrown tomatoes and true love coming out our ears. The true love can be put up for winter until it is chilly and huddling together for warmth looks good, but the tomatoes, well, they have to be eaten, and preserved. So that's what your blogiste is doing today.
You might as well listen to the song while I'm at it:
sastyk | August 17, 2010It is that time of summer here - the one where you can't eat all the vegetables pouring out of the garden, and the farmers can't keep up with all the stuff their farms are producing, and many things that are precious and rare much of the year are cheap and abundant. Besides eating yourselves into a coma on ripe tomatoes, okra, eggplant, peppers, blackberries, peaches, sweet peppers and the ubiquitous zucchini, it is time to think ahead to the days when the idea of thinking "oh, no, more ripe vegetables" will seem strange and alien, and you will be desperate for red and green and orange and…
sastyk | July 27, 2010Hat tip to reader Abbie who pointed me to this video. When we talk about local and organic, one of the central things that often gets lost is this - who does the work? And how are they paid? And how do you change this so that they get paid fairly - because right now the way we pay for food leaves a lot of folks out.
Dateline NBC introduces you to your five year old tomato picker
Sharon.
sastyk | January 13, 2010The best estimate I've seen is that in 2009 alone, we had more than 2 million first time gardeners, and from 2007 on, we've added 8 million new vegetable gardens. This is one heck of a movement. Unfortunately, it also meant that millions of people started gardening in what was, in the Northeast, the crappiest garden year ever.
Well, maybe not ever. There was eighteen-hundred-and-froze-to-death when volcanic activity meant hard frost in July. But at least in 40 years, according to CR Lawn, head of Fedco Seeds. Here in the Northeast it rained - I don't mean a little. We got 23 inches of…