Posts from — August 2009

Last Sunday, I came back from a visit to the Bullocks’ Homestead on Orcas Island in the afternoon, tired, dirty, ridiculously happy, and ready to collapse in a heap on my little blue sofa with some iced tea and The Taste of Place, which I had started on the ferry. But then Lucy came and roused me and told me she had been invited over to Rob’s to pick figs.

Rob is a fellow farmer, known for his pasture-raised meats which he sells at the farmer’s market along with his buddy Guard Sundstrom. Their Meat Wagon is always busy with folks looking for fresh, local, humanely-raised ridiculously tasty meat. Both Rob and Guard are members of the Island Grown Farmer’s Cooperative which is a group of farmers who banded together to design and launch a mobile slaughtering unit that allows for local processing of beef, lambs, and pigs. This unit was the first of its kind in the US and since then groups of farmers’ around the country have come to these folks for help replicating the model in their own communities.

But Rob isn’t just a lamb man, he’s a true farmer and, dare-I-say, homesteader.

In addition to his animals, Rob takes care of a lovely orchard, and a garden on an adjacent property. He started out 30 years ago in a little trailer; he built a lovely yurt, then a beautiful home where his older son now lives with his wife and children.

When Lucy and I arrived at Rob’s place, the two big dogs ran out to greet us, barking madly. No one was home so we poked about behind the house, amidst the chickens and the trees, looking for the fig tree. Being city-folk we weren’t exactly sure what a fig tree looked like, so we stopped off at the walnuts and the pears and the apples before finally we sighted the little bush close by one of the mobile chicken coops.

Right as we started picking, Rob arrived, clean and spiffy from his granddaughter’s birthday party. We picked a basketful of ripe figs, then Rob offered us cling peaches from his trees.

We walked through the orchard, asking about the different pears and plums and apples — Asian pears, Bosc, Red Anjou, Santa Rosa plums and about the history of the place.

Rob told us of wheeling his pregnant wife to the car in a wheelbarrow back in the days before there was a proper driveway to the house. She vowed not to come back until he built a proper house. He built the yurt where he still lives today.

Then he showed us the house that he built back in the early 90s with help from his brothers, one an architect, the other a woodworker. It was a well-conceived house, and very beautiful; white adobe-style walls and huge windows facing out on the orchard and the pond. Inside, the exposed wood beams and gorgeous live-edge counter gave the house a cozy woodsy smell and a warm, friendly feeling. The wood came from trees felled and milled on the property and Rob described the process of forestry management — taking skinny, distressed trees from beside the thicker looking counterparts because their skinniness was indication of slow, dense growth.

Then we went up to the area where his younger son was just laying the foundation for his own home. We toured the sweet outdoor kitchen, composting toilet, and the wooden frame ready and waiting for the concrete truck which would arrive the next morning.

I was inspired, to say the least. My own dad and I have been talking about building a home together. I can’t think of very many things that would be more satisfying.

I ate most of my share of the figs fresh within a day or two — subtle, sweet soft flesh popped into my mouth whole. All that remained was a little pile of stems in the compost bucket below the sink. But then, the remaining fruits started to get a little soft. I didn’t want to eat them all at once, so I looked for a way to turn them into something else to savor.

I wanted to pair the figs with anise — one of our local bakeries makes an amazing yeasted Fig Anise Bread and I’m obsessed with the combination. It’s warm and crunchy and slightly spicy. But I wanted to make a breakfast bread, so I looked around for recipes with fresh figs and fell upon instruction for a Fig Tea Bread by Jenny Colvin of Jenny Bakes. It turned out that the tea in the recipe gave the bread a deep, smoky richness and lovely color and the seeds from the figs distributed through the bread gave a lovely crunch — something like poppy seeds in other breakfast breads. I reduced the other spices and the sugar, so the star anise flavor came to the fore, perfectly complimenting the soft sweetness of the figs.

Figs, raisins, tea, star anise and nutmeg make up the flavor body

I kept the fig chunks pretty big so they’d stay whole in the bread

The figs soak in the tea for just over 10 minutes, then part of the tea is reserved for the bread

Wet ingredients

After the dry ingredients are in, mix in the tea, figs and raisins

The finished loaf is dark brown and almost savory…

Black Tea, Star Anise, Fig Bread
Adapted from Jenny Colvin of Jenny Bakes

1 cup figs, stemmed and coarsely chopped
1 cup Irish Breakfast tea, brewed double strength
1 3/4 cup flour
1 cup golden raisins
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
4 sections star anise, ground
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup sugar
½ cup olive oil
2 eggs

Gently combine figs and tea; let stand 10 min.

In a medium sized bowl, beat sugar, oil and eggs to mix. Sprinkle flour, spices, baking soda and salt on top and mix until just combined.

Drain tea from figs, reserving 1/4 cup of liquid. Gently stir in figs and ¼ cup tea; pour batter into well-greased loaf pan; bake at 350º F for 1 hour, or until toothpick comes out clean.

Cool in pan 10 min., then invert onto a rack. Keeps on the counter in plastic wrap for up to 1 week, or freeze slices in plastic baggies and thaw in the toaster or microwave.

There’s the finished bread based loosely on the recipe from the back of the Gold’s Bread Flour package. I thought I didn’t take a picture, but I guess my crazy food photo fetish is even more deeply ingrained than I realized.

I love the habits that I’ve accumulated since coming to the farm. I hope they stick.

When you work 8 hours a day producing food, you’d think that the rest of the time you’d want to sit back with a bag of puffy Cheetos and forget about the rest, but what has happened to me is quite the opposite. Spending so much time with my hands in the dirt growing veggies somehow just gives me more momentum to get my hands involved in other food producing jobs. It just feels so good to make yogurt or granola, or my very favorite: bread!

I will never be a professional bread baker. I’ll probably never even win a ribbon at the county fair, but I will get to stick my fingers into soft tacky dough and slap a ball of flour and water and yeast on the counter until it’s stretchy and pliable and ready to bake.

I am not scientific with baking. See, for instance, the maelstrom of my last loaf:

Evidence of my lack of bread-baking discipline:

1) that bowl is NOT big enough for what I’m attempting, but who cares?
2) I was too lazy to go get the scale so I used a cup measure… leveling off with a knife? please…
3) My last loaf was too “blah” so I decided to add a random amount of sourdough starter (1/2 cup) and subtract some related amount of flour/water (1/4 cup of each)
4) Windowpane test, shwindowpane test. When I was tired of kneading, the bread was left to rise
5) When I got invited to a party mid-bread-baking, I simply stuck the rising bread in the fridge covered in plastic wrap and picked up the process when I got home the next day.

In the end, I even forgot to take a picture of the finished product. I ate it too fast. Like in a day and a half. By myself. So even if you can’t see it’s golden-brown deliciousness, let that be testament to its goodness (and hopefully not to my lack of standards).

For me, cooking’s a joy. It’s an experiment, an act of creativity and spontaneity. Once it becomes too prescribed or scientific, it loses part of its charm. When I post recipes here, they’re always things that I’ve tried and measured and recorded, but on most days, my kitchen is a crazy alchemist’s lab full of tastes and smells and happy accidents.

Thursday morning, I got up a little after 5, shook off the sleep, ate a bowl of oatmeal, packed my bag, and headed off on my bicycle towards the interisland ferry. On the boat, I fished out my little brown notebook to jot down some questions for the farmer at S & S Homestead where I was headed for a visit.

I met Henning at the county fair. He and Peter (farmer here at Synergy) were part of a panel to discuss approaches to sustainable agriculture in the San Juans. They sat on opposite ends of the panel bench: two professor-turned-farmers well into their 70s, Peter, tall, fair, frail and deliberate and Henning, swarthy and compact and full of passion. Peter talked about economic sustainability and soil’s organic content; Henning discussed harnessing energies of the universe. At one point, Henning makes an aggressive jab at Peter, chiding him for importing chicken feed and potting soil instead of producing it on-site. Peter defends his position: after all, his farm has only been in operation for five years compared to Henning’s thirty-five. Henning tries to make peace and I step in to introduce myself and ask if I can come out for a visit. He’s impressed by my handshake and tells me to give him a call.

So that’s how I find myself gazing out at the blood orange sunrise Thursday morning on the ferry ride over to Lopez. The ferry bumps up against the plastic bumpers of the Lopez dock and I trudge up the hill, mount my bike, and ride the six lovely miles out to S & S Homestead. I arrive at 7:30, the farm is still. I park my bike in a shed with other bikes for company and wander the small perimeter around what seems like the main farmhouse, looking for signs of life. I wander upon the front porch and see a woman who turns out to be Elizabeth who says she’ll get Henning from upstairs.

Henning was part of the consulting team that helped Peter and Susan when they were starting up Synergy Farm five years ago. Susan’s eyes sparkle when she talks about the elegance of Henning’s farm systems: the self-sufficiency, the focus on soil-building, and the incorporation of animals. Manure from the animals fertilizes the pasture and makes beautiful compost for the garden. Damaged fruit feeds the pigs and old cabbage leaves are a treat for Lovejoy the milk cow. The farm family: Henning, Elizabeth, Elizabeth’s mother, and seven young folks eat from the farm’s bounty and return their waste to the soil by way of a composting toilet. Each element of the farm is part of a system and the grand orchestrator of it all are the farmers who have had years of experience and mistakes to hone their craft.

That morning, after breakfast, I go with one intern, Colleen, for the morning milking, then head out with everyone to pick the season’s first crop of cider apples for pressing. It’s an inefficient process, but incredibly enjoyable: five of us pick apples into 5 gallon buckets and munch on Yellow Transparents under the orchard canopy while Henning and his towheaded grand-nephew from Stuttgart set up the press.

Yellow transparents, ready for pressing

Intern Colleen, teacher Heather, and nephew Sebastian operating the press

Nearly full barrel is ready for shifting below the press

Four 5-gallon buckets of apples made 2.5 gallons of cider and lots of extra pulp for pigs

We cut the apples into chunks and feed them into the trough while someone turns the black wheel to grind the chunks into pulp which falls into the net-lined barrel below. Once the barrel’s full, we shift the barrel back on the platform to position it under the screwpress, we place a wooden lid on the top of the pulp, and use a stick to turn the wheel to push the press down and down till the golden liquid pours out the bottom and into our metal bowls.

When we’re finished, we’re left with a bunch of seeds and skin and pulp to feed to the pigs.

The farm is run by the biodynamic method, developed by Rudolph Steiner in the 1920s in response to falling fertility in the soils in Germany. Despite the fact that he’s heralded as a poster-child of the method in the islands, Henning tells me that he didn’t know anything about biodynamics until 20 years into his farming adventure when a neighbor came around asking for certain animal parts to make special biodynamic soil preparations.

The view of the orchard from next to the pond

I’m still a novice in terms of my understanding of biodynamics, but three things strike me in particular as different from the biointensive approach we use here on Synergy: one, an appreciation for mystery and an underlying spiritual component; two: the importance of integrating animals into the system; three: the focus on nurturing the farmer and the farm family and the de-emphasis of financial profit. Most every process on the farm seems to be designed to maximize the health and happiness of the farm’s main inhabitants.

Once we’re finished washing down the press, we head towards the farm kitchen to rinse off bowls and transfer the cider to jars for storing. On one wall, shelves of preserved food: chicken broth, pickles, jams, preserves, tomato sauce: a bounty of food to sustain the farm family through the winter season.

On the kitchen table, a gorgeous huge crock of sauerkraut slowly fermenting.

The view from the 6am ferry

Yesterday was a whirlwind day: Went on a farm field trip to check out a farm on another island, biked about 18 miles to and from the ferry landings, and when I finally got back to my watertower, sweaty and exhilarated, it was just in time to hitch a ride with Farmers Peter and Susan to a meeting about drafing new farm intern policy for the state.

After the meeting (sobering, but hopeful!) I piled in the car with the Heritage folks and we headed down to the Alehouse where there’s Thursday night SINGALONG! So we all got beers and threw decency to the wind and belted out the na-na-na-na verse of “Hey Jude” till our throats were hoarse.

And THEN I came home and checked my email and realized that Jaden had posted my recipe for Hainanese Chicken on the Steamy Kitchen blog and it was the perfect topping to finish off a beautiful, beautiful day.

For those of you who don’t know, I’m interning with Jaden over at Steamy Kitchen, learning how to take rockstar food photos and write great recipes, and helping out with research, writing and photos for the ingredients section of her site. My plan is still to go to graduate school and study sustainable food, but it can’t help to have some skillz to spice up those papers and presentations!

So a great big welcome to everyone who’s come over from Steamy Kitchen — I’m so pleased you’ve stumbled upon my humble little blog — it’s lovely to have you.

A few weeks ago, our farm welcomed a group of interested islanders in WSU’s workshop titled “Winter Fresh! Growing Your Own Produce in the Off Season.” We demonstrated some of the techniques we use for growing winter vegetables, including the low tunnels we build to protect some of the winter greens.

One of the participants, Debbie Hatch, wrote up a great article summarizing some of the things the group learned from the different farms they visited. The article includes a picture of me and Susan setting up a tunnel in our North garden!

Here in the Pacific Northwest, things like hoophouses, greenhouses, and tunnels can provide plants with extra protection from cold, snow, and wind. They lengthen the growing season and help folks grow fresh produce during times of the year when it might otherwise seem impossible.

Not many market farmers in this area grow in the wintertime; for one thing, it requires a lot of work year-round rather than the seasonal bursts of energy and long winter hibernations that many cherish. But here on Synergy, we barrel straight through the year which means that now, in August, we’re extra busy, reaping the bounty of our spring plantings, and preparing for all the plants that will keep on through the winter.

Here’s what the low tunnels looked like way back in early April:

Oven baked tomatoes: a dash of olive oil and 5-6 hrs at 200 degrees make sweet, crispy tomato chips out of juicy tomato slices, lovely in pasta and as a snack. Halve the tomatoes and cook at 150 for 12 hours for a sweet, chewier version yummy in salads, or in your panzanella.

Once upon a time, I was a kid who hated tomatoes. Tomato sauce was okay, ketchup was great. I even slowly came around to salsa, though for years I survived on dry chips (guac didn’t interest me till well into college). But that wet, slimy slice — that interloper between my hamburger and lettuce and bun, seemed tasteless, useless and generally insulting.

I don’t know when I came around, or the exact details of the conversion, but I’m quite I was spurred by my mother’s coaxing and a few superb Caprese salads.

If you’re lucky, you know the joy of a fresh, vine-ripened tomato. In case you don’t, it looks like this:

and tastes like this:

(actually that was remnants of powdered sugar and french toast, but you get the idea)

It’s become the poster-child of gardening advocates and “eat local” fanatics — it’s one of those things that really does taste better (taste at all? most tomatoes in the supermarket still seem mostly like soggy pink water) when you pick a ripe one direct from the garden.

We sold our first tomatoes back in July — the weekend a gaggle of friends came up to visit from San Francisco, and we took a bunch of the first Stupices for a picnic on the beach with a loaf of bread, some cheese, the last of the garlic scape pesto, leftover spicy scones from breakfast, and a bag of luscious cherries.

The tomatoes were exclaimed over, praised, and gobbled down; we expressed our regret at not bringing more. Then we went about our business hunting cockles in the low tide and headed home to use the rest of our tomato stash in a 4-pan paella masterpiece (only two of four shown below )

Since then, I’ve been continuing to enjoy the tomato harvest: on the grill, in salads, in pasta, and yes, though I never would have believed it had you told me as a child, sometimes bitten whole, like an apple, as a snack before dinner.

But one of my favorite dinners has been a simple panzanella, or simply said: hastily concocted bread and tomato salad.

Panzanella from forgotten ingredients, inspired by tomatoes

• One stale crusty loaf of rosemary hearth bread from the local bakery — at least 10 days old, abandoned on a lower shelf.
• Two beautiful red tomatoes with bright yellow crowns
• A forlorn chunk of sharp cheddar (or some very thin slices of Parmesan or hunks of fresh mozzarella would do)
• some browning sprigs of basil, rescued from the farmer’s market leftovers
  
• olive oil and balsamic vinegar
• a dash of salt

Careful of my fingers, I hacked the piece of bread apart, doused it in oil and threw it on a baking sheet in the oven which I set to heat to 400. In the meantime, I chopped up the tomatoes and cheese, tore up the basil and sprinkled them all with balsamic and salt. By the time the oven reached 375, the bread was browned and sizzling and crispy. I threw everything together and a delicious meal was born.

The next night, I repeated the dish with the remaining bread and added in some sweet dried tomatoes straight from the oven.

There’s something so happy and so sensual about tomatoes in late summer. Thank you Pablo Neruda for putting the words in my mouth.

A couple of years ago, Jaime and I went to Puerto Vallarta to visit his high school friend Naomi and her two incredibly cute and precocious little boys and to bask in the sun and eat delicious food. Rather than stay in town, on Naomi’s recommendation, we headed off by boat to a tiny little cove in a town called Yelapa.

For three endless days, we stayed in a casita at the beautiful Hotel Lagunita and spent our afternoons lazing under the pelapas on the beach, reading beach fiction, and practicing our broken Spanish with the overly aggresive local parrot. One evening, we headed up the hill behind the beach to explore the windy, narrow streets of the town, peering into backyards filled with banana trees and chickens, greeting old friends of Naomi’s, and ending up at dinner at the amazing Pollo Bollo. There we closed the night nursing warming bottles of beer and licking our fingers clean of the tangy sweet sauce that accompanied the succulent tender to the bone BBQ chicken that is their specialty. Another night, we wandered into the Yelapa Yacht Club, where the hopping local expat community jammed the night away to a mix of Tom Petty and world beats.

But some of my favorite memories of Yelapa were the mornings. The casitas at the hotel were open to the air and we woke up to the sound of the surf and the smell of the exposed wooden beams and salty air. We walked out the door down the flower-lined gravel paths out to the beach. Jaime and I were the only guests, and they had set up a lone table under a pelapa where we sat and ordered our breakfast. Strong Mexican coffee, juice, and delicious delicious food.

That was the first time I ever had chilaquiles — Jaime and I hadn’t ever heard of them before, and he ordered them as an experiment. They were served hot, with scrambled eggs and beans with a side of salsa, maybe some avocado, but definitely a stack of warm, fresh corn tortillas. They were so delcious that it didn’t seem at all weird to be putting cooked corn tortillas inside of more corn tortillas.

So when I looked in a corner of my kitchen the other day and saw a bag of stale tortilla chips, it got me thinking of that happy memory and the delicious mornings and how much I’m missing Jaime these days, and I had to try to recreate the moment. I’m the first to admit that food can be oh-so-comforting when you need something to cheer you up.

I’m quite sure they made their chilaquiles in Yelapa with stale tortillas, as is traditional, but this technique seemed to work just as well, and it probably takes even less time since you don’t need to fry the tortillas in oil before starting.

Chilaquiles like that morning in Yelapa
Serves 2-3

4 cups stale tortilla chips
1 tbsp olive oil

salsa
2 dried New Mexico Chiles (or dried California or Ancho Chiles for a more mild flavor)
1/2 cup fresh or canned tomatoes
1/2 medium onion
1 clove garlic
1/4 cup reserved chile soaking water
1/4 cup chicken broth (or substitute another 1/4 cup chile water)
1 jalapeno (optional for spice)

salt, to taste

optional toppings
– fried eggs
– avocado
– nopalitos (http://www.gourmetsleuth.com/nopalitos.htm)
– cotija cheese, queso fresco or feta in a pinch
– cilantro
– sour cream
– leftover chicken

Heat a dry cast iron skillet until hot but not smoking and toast jalapeno and dried chiles until lightly browned on all sides (3-5 min). In a small pot, bring 1.5 cups of water to boiling. Place dried chiles in boiling water and remove from heat. Allow chiles to sit for 10 minutes to reconstitute. Water should turn reddish-brown and chiles should become pliable.

Meanwhile, coarsely chop tomatoes, garlic, onion, and toasted jalapeno. When chiles are done soaking, add chiles, 1/4 cup of the soaking water, chopped vegetables, and chicken broth to blender. The chicken broth gives the dish an especially full flavor, but you can also substitute 1/4 cup extra chile water to make the recipe vegetarian.

Blend ingredients until completely smooth.

Heat 1 tbsp olive oil in a cast iron skillet. When hot (you can test to see if it’s ready by throwing on a drop of the salsa and seeing if it sizzles) add in salsa and fry for about 5 minutes, until the color deepens slightly and the consistency turns a little thicker.

Turn down the heat to medium and season sauce with salt. Add in stale tortilla chips and stir well to coat. Cook for at least 5 minutes — the sauce should soak completely through the tortilla chips. They should lose their toughness and turn moist, but not mushy.

Top chilaquiles with your choice of garnishes and serve with warm beans.

We had our second chicken processing last weekend, August 2nd. We slaughtered, dipped, plucked, and eviscerated 117 Cornish Cross broilers and a couple of ornery hens who had been cannibalizing eggs from the laying boxes for the last few weeks.

It still amazes me that feed, water, breeding and a lot of labor can turn this:

into this:

…and all in about 8 weeks. It’s really a miracle of science (breeding a chicken to grow so quickly into something so edible) and nature and I feel blessed to witness and take part.

More practically though, once the chickens make the transition from creature to meat, it becomes time for us to figure out what to do with the food we’ve produced.

Our chickens taste good. Really good. And roasted whole, they’ve been said to make older folks weep (only a slight exaggeration) and exclaim that they haven’t tasted anything so chickeny since they were growing up in XYZ pre-industrial country.

But sometimes it’s easier to have chicken pieces rather than the whole kit-and-kaboodle, so the other day, our neighbor Megan (a former chickenstress herself, and an expert on many things poultry) came over to show me and Susan how to cut up a chicken for storage.

The main trick Megan taught us was how to separate the chicken into the traditional bits: breast, wing, leg, thigh, back, without muscling our way through bones. Instead, she showed us how to feel out the joints and cut around them. In the whole process, the only place we had to cut through bone was a 2” section between the breasts. Pretty amazing.

The main tips I got from the lesson were:

• use a really really sharp knife. it doesn’t have to be big. even a paring knife will do for everything except that small section of breast bone
• always cut away the skin and flesh around the part you’re working on to get a better view of the bone to separate
• move the joints to locate the points where your knife can cut through
• I may never be able to do this as fast as Martin Yan, but I sure can do it better than before!

1) Cut off the neck fat and reserve for tasty broths and soups

2) With the chicken breast-down, feel for the joint of the wing by moving the wing back and forth. When you’ve located the round joint, cut away the skin and flesh around the joint, starting with the top and working your way around. Once you can see the white joint, use your knife to separate the two (you may need to also pull a bit to “pop” the two pieces apart). Repeat with the wing on the other side. You don’t have to do the wing first, but it makes it a little easier to deal with the leg.

3) Turn the chicken breast-side up. Holding the drumstick in one hand and pulling away from the chicken’s body, begin cutting the leg and thigh away. When you reach the joint that connects the leg, wiggle it back and forth to see where it’s attached.

Be sure to cut away all the skin and flesh so you can see well, then cut through the cartilage between the joint to separate completely. Repeat on the other side.

4) To separate the thigh and drummet, hold the piece of meat perpendicular to the cutting surface, drumstick bone pointed down, so that the point of connection between the drumstick and thigh is pointing up. With your finger, feel along the top edge for a bump and small indentation — this is the joint and where you should cut (the bump stays with the drumstick). You can also wiggle the leg and thigh joint to feel it out. Cut the two apart, and separate the cartilage between the joint with your knife (you may need to apply slight pressure to “pop” it apart). Repeat with other side.
5) Voila! You have your chicken body left. Look inside the cavity from the back and notice where the rib bones come together on each side of the chicken. You’ll see that the bones don’t actually join, but have a small gap.

Cut down the gap on either side to separate the top from the bottom.

To completely separate, either grab the two halves (top and bottom) in each hand and pull, or for those with more finesse, it’s possible to feel out the bones holding the two halves together and separate with a few knife strokes.

6) Leave the back as is, or cut into two pieces. Starting just below the ribs, cut away flesh and skin, then grab either end and crack apart.

7) To separate the remaining breasts, you can place the piece, flesh side down and chop in half with a heavy knife or cleaver OR you can start flesh-side up, feeling out the breastbone and cutting the skin and meat close right up against one side of the bone. Cut through the cartilage until you reach the last bit of bone. Prop the breast up perpendicular to the table, bone part on your surface, and use the butt end of your knife to break the last piece.

And that’s a wrap!

So we all had a feeling that garlic was good for us, but apparently, fresh garlic helps rats stay heart-healthy more than dried out garlic that’s lost some of its compounds to the air.

Wild.

I always knew that garlic salt and garlic powder couldn’t hold a candle to the real stuff, freshly chopped. Now I wonder whether these crazy things have the same nutritional value as the awesomely fragrant, huge juicy cloves I’ve been chopping in my kitchen lately.

Didn’t help this little guy much anyway…

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These days, when I’m not growing, cooking, eating, or writing about food, I’m generally reading what others have to say about (yes, you guessed it) FOOD. For more on what I’m reading lately, check out articles here and books here.