Unless you’re from Texas, you should be using fresh vegetables to make chili in the summer. Many years ago, a man accosted me in the dining room about the chili we served, not being chili. My nature is non-confrontational, so I nodded my head and listened about the demerits of beans, and learned that chili is…
Category: Summer
Easy Cheater’s Tomato Sauce for Procrastinators
If my grandmother had an immersion blender, would she peel and deseed tomatoes? During the past five years, I’ve reinvented preserving tomatoes. This method has developed from two concepts. First, when your tomatoes are ripe, you might not have enough to bother with the process of canning. And second, you might not feel like canning…
A Superior Stuffed Pepper Recipe for Practical People
This dish should be about the peppers, not the presentation. There wasn’t a vegetable recipe I hated more than stuffed bell peppers. The typical recipe is a multi-step affair that starts with browning ground beef, making rice, maybe a separate tomato sauce. Then you get around to the peppers, all of which need to be…
Melons: The Fruit of Summer
Melons are one of the highlights of summer. And unfortunately for their thick skin, they have become as unseasonal as potatoes and onions. Growers have managed to harvest melons with machines and ship truckloads of them from outside the country throughout the year. At my local stores, they show up in early May, coming from…
Revealing the Life-Cycle of Fresh Fruit
All of these nectarines are ready now. How many can you eat today? Eating “an apple a day” might “keep the doctor away,” but whoever said this didn’t realize that you can’t just go out to your apple tree and pick one apple each day as we do at our grocery store. In the United…
Now is the Time to Plant
Growing a fall garden Fall gardens are easier to manage than summer, once you know what you are doing. Living in a mild climate, I have understood and appreciated the benefits that come with harvesting year-round. In California, I have always thought that we should take time off from gardening in the summer when the…
Sweet Corn is Candy from the Garden
Enjoy corn for what it is, and don’t worry about the bad reputation. I once heard that your water should be boiling before you go out to pick your corn. The message is that as soon as you pick the ear the natural sugars are undergoing a transformation, becoming starch so fast that you need…
Basil, Beyond Pesto: Don’t be afraid to add it to everything!
This weekend I brought my mom a bunch of basil. She welcomed it first, but I knew what she was thinking, “What am I going to do with this?” I mentioned that I made pesto, (which I wrote about here) and she agreed, with hesitation, that she could do the same, but I knew more…
Pesto, it’s Not Just for Pasta
Pesto is an Italian sauce traditionally made in a mortar, pounded with a pestle, that gave it its name. The pesto that most of us think of is made from fresh basil, garlic, and Parmesan cheese, blended with olive oil and lemon juice. Fortunately for us, a blender or food processor will do the work…
Potatoes Have a Season, and This is It!
I never thought much about potatoes until I roasted potatoes year-round in the restaurant business, trying to solve why the potatoes didn’t reach the same golden-brown color at certain times of the year, no matter the time spent or temperature in the oven. But, since leaving the restaurant life and working at a farm, harvesting…