Let vegetables speak for themselves
Gardeners and cooks make excellent bedfellows. Likewise, farmers and chefs, judging from the number of ...
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Maine Dish
Gingerbread cookies are a crowd favorite
Last week, my culinary students at Deer Isle-Stonington High School prepared and served a harvest ...
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Gifts for sportsmen
Most of the sportsmen and women I have known over the years have an affinity for tools of the trade, gizmos and gadgets that have a practical application in their outdoor pursuits. And if they want something, and can afford it, they just go out and buy it. Oh, there are exceptions in the outdoor …
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Preserving tomatoes to enjoy all year
If I had the self-discipline of a Zen Master, I could walk out to the garden on a late summer day, pick the most perfect tomato for lunch, then make compost out of all the others too numerous to consume. At heart, I believe in living from moment to moment in the garden, eating only, …
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Stop the rot: avoid sordid messes in fridge
When you pick a fruit or vegetable, it is still a living, breathing thing. It respires, taking oxygen from the air and releasing carbon dioxide. But it can’t live indefinitely. A peach, lettuce or bean, once cut, can no longer make food by means of photosynthesis, and begins to draw down its stored reserves. It …
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Sifted compost ultimate luxury
If compost is the Holy Grail of organic gardening, what’s the holier than thou? Sifted compost. What you want in making perfect mature compost is, of course, organic matter so fully broken down that the original ingredients — whether straw, weeds, kitchen scraps or goat droppings — are no longer recognizable. Finished compost looks like …
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Deer hunt yields culinary pleasures
By Cheryl A. Wixson There’s an industrious level of excitement around our household as the month of October draws to a close. When the temperatures drop and daylight hours become shorter, we’re like the red squirrels, scurrying to prepare for winter. Wood split and stacked: check. Rain barrels drained: check. Pumpkins and squash harvested: check. …
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Happily gardening ever after
In youth, you look for mentors to get you going down a path. Later on, you look to them for a glimpse of where the path eventually leads. As a beginning gardener, I exploded with questions about seeds, soil chemistry or how to predict frost. In midlife, I looked at old gardeners and wondered …
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Raise a glass to “Ruby Juice”
Our slow, cool spring produced a bumper crop of rhubarb for many folks. Although usually eaten as a “fruit,” rhubarb is a vegetable, botanically speaking. An invaluable homestead plant in Maine, this tart- tasting member of the buckwheat family can reach up to 2 feet tall. I’m a collector of rhubarb recipes, and we’ve …
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Garden barriers to keep the wind at bay
After an April marked by snowy mornings and chill winds, spring planting requires an extra shot of courage. Even if you’ve hardened off cold-sensitive transplants such as tomatoes and cucumbers, setting flats outside on sunny days, it will be an act of faith to finally put them in the ground. Will the weather “have …
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Gretchen Jost’s cookies sweet sensation
Who doesn’t love a fresh chocolate chip cookie hot from the oven? America’s favorite hand-held confection is credited to Ruth Graves Wakefield, owner of the Toll House Inn in Whitman, Mass. In 1938, Ruth made cookies with chunks of a Hershey candy bar, featuring them in her restaurant as the “Toll House Cookie.” The …
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Cream doesn’t belong in dietary damnation
A drizzle of cream. A dab of butter. A slice of cheese. What could possibly be wrong with pleasures like those? And yet, to the fat-fearful, they might as well be arsenic — especially heavy cream, which seems to occupy its own circle of dietary damnation. Granted there are some folks whose systems don’t react …