Even though the ground is covered with snow and ice and the sun barely shines, January is the time to plan your garden. There are four essential tenets of good organic gardening; have a readily available water source, keep on top of the weeds, feed the soil and rotate your crops. Crop rotation is probably…
Author: Dianna
{the new year} Fasting
Editor’s Note: This is our second week of reflective posts contemplating the start of a new year. We are putting these lists, reflections and helpful links out onto the interwebs to keep ourselves accountable and hopefully, to inspire your food/gardening/homesteady-related antics in 2012. Take it away Dianna! -Christina My New Year’s resolution is to fast…
{edible gift} Chocolate Dipped Candied Orange Peels
My sister-in-law is a new vegan. I had a moment of disquiet about this over Thanksgiving, saying to her, “But what are we going to do about mashed potatoes?” We sub-divided them, of course, which was perfectly sensible. But my next question was even more important: what about dessert?!?!?! Thanksgiving without pie? Really? She made…
{edible gift} Alegria, a traditional Mexican amaranth dessert
On the one hand, I really like cookies, like the way they look, like the way the taste, like their size and variety. On the other hand, I am on the far side of 50, have a sedentary day job and would like to survive to enjoy 25 years or more of active retirement, so…
{i am not a foodie} A Pledge to Simplicity, Part Deux
A month ago, I took a pledge to cut our grocery bills down to $70 a week for four weeks and give the extra $50 a week that I normally spend to charity and/or interesting causes. I thought it would be hard to spend so little on food, but in fact it wasn’t difficult at…
{from scratch holidays} A Family Cook Book
I am not a handy person. When I tried knitting, the scarf was lumpy and grubby. I bend nails. I am too impatient to do embroidery or calligraphy and inevitably cut the sleeves out of the material for the skirt if I try to sew. So when it comes to home-made gifts, I have three…
{Mexican Cooking} Chicken Tinga
My son Jacob spent Hurricane Irene with a Mexican friend in Washington Heights, New York City. Jose not only provided Jacob with shelter, he also cooked for him. When I called Jacob to see how he had fared in the storm, he didn’t mention the howling winds or the torrential rain. All he could talk…
{i am not a foodie} A Pledge to Simplicity
I have been shopping at food coops and farmers markets since the 1970s when I was a student in California. I started a modest vegetable garden in high school, stopped during college, and resumed gardening when we bought our first house. I did graduate research on the effect of crop rotation on insect populations in…
{community sharecropping} September is for Eggplants
September is the biggest harvest month in the community share-cropping gardens. That means that we have to do something with the perishable stuff we grew all summer. While I think zucchini make excellent compost, I want to use each and every eggplant, no matter how small. I have spent years convincing my husband that we…
{Remembering Attica} The Loaf
Even though I write for a food blog, my real passion is prisons. I worked as a prisoners’ rights attorney for the last seven years. Before becoming a lawyer, I was an academic administrator and teacher in a prison college program at a men’s maximum-security prison. Most recently I spent a lot of time hanging…
{COMMUNITY SHARECROPPING} Home Grown Wheat
Our rabbi, Jonathan Rubenstein of Temple Sinai in Saratoga Springs, runs a non-profit bakery out of the temple. Most Friday mornings he is there, baking challah and babka, plus his kick-ass granola. When we sold our house and garden in Argyle, New York three years ago and were moaning about where we would go to garden, Jonathan’s…
{community sharecropping} How to Braid Garlic
This year we harvested our garlic on July 10, let it dry for two weeks and then decided to braid some of it. Most years we make a mixture of hard and soft neck garlic braids but this year we were only able to braid our soft neck garlic. While we can usually braid the hard…
{pizza week} Feeding Teenagers w/ Doughboys
We have three sons, now all in their twenties. For thirteen years, we had teenage boys at home. Our house was filled with roving hordes of adolescent boys; boys with skateboards, boys with guitars and drums, boys with spray cans and paint brushes, boys with movie cameras, boys with paint ball guns and nerf guns,…
{community sharecropping} July is for Garlic Harvest
Garlic is an easy crop and should have a place in every home garden. The individual cloves are planted in October, lie dormant in the ground all winter, and then are among the first plants to sprout in the spring. You can buy garlic heads from your local farmers market this fall, break them up…
{recipe} Green Enchiladas in the Frozen North
I have lived in upstate New York since 1986 and my steadfast complaint since that time has not been about the weather, although the weather does suck, but about the lack of decent tortillas. While politicians bray about the influx of illegal Mexican immigrants into the country, I have been praying that they would come…
