Salted Herbs (photo by Sonia Lacasse)

There is comfort in stasis, in trees that are barren, and fields that are resting.

In those frozen, darker times, time is generous. You can make it your own and, with inexpensive switch-button illumination, it’s easy for everyone to make more of it.

Then comes the notion of soft rains falling—not yet falling, but soon, way too soon.

A frantic anticipation of springtime deadlines sets in: seeds must be ordered, seedlings started, ground prepared, planting schedules established. Time is no longer your own.

Fall harvest is the other time Mother Nature snaps a whip. Sometimes she offers extensions, but not always, and not any that you can count on.

Once the food from the garden is harvested, most of the work shifts to the kitchen, my first home. Cleaned and prepped, then blanched and frozen, dried, canned, or fermented, there’s a lot of work to be done, but the payoff is greater.

During the unpressured off-season months, all that you need to do to enjoy your hard work is (more…)

If you are running for your life in a landscape infested with zombies, aka “walkers,” and devoid of a modern food distribution system, would you grab your guns or seeds?

In “Seed,” the first episode of this season’s apocolypic zombie series The Walking Dead, Hershel, one-time-farmer now “walker” killer, muses that the caged bit of open green the show’s characters find themselves in could be a planting field for tomatoes, cucumbers, and soy beans.

In this temporary oasis, they have land, symbolized by the dirt Hershel allows to run through his fingers as his imaginary vegetable garden takes shape. But oops! No seeds.

Even if Hershel had the presence of mind to (more…)

RIPE
A Cook in the Orchard
by Nigel Slater
Ten Speed Press
591 pp. $40.00

For many, this summer’s read was the phenomenally popular Fifty Shades of Grey by E. L. James, a soft-porn bondage thriller that has, I have it under good authority, led to an increase in sales of rope in hardware stores.

I got my kicks from reading Ripe by Nigel Slater, a deliciously written bit of (more…)

I have some club news—newsier news than the ongoing ebb and flow of members coming and going, and the cycling through of new cookbooks: The Dowdy Corners Cookbook Club will no longer be based out of Dowdy Corners. All else will remain the same: the name (when Steiglitz’s 291 gallery changed address from its location from its original address of 291 Fifth Avenue, he kept the name—so I am too); the growing list of members (Bhakti and Marianne being the most recent to join); and the club’s function—to explore new foods and cooking techniques with a group of likeminded passionate cooks who love cookbooks.

I could stop writing here, and this posting would truly be just an update on club news, and the shortest posting to date. Instead, it may become the longest bit of writing on this blog, except perhaps my posting last year about a trip to France, a place that encourages wordy praise. Aside from poetry, which I do not write, how is it possible to describe the impact of three life-changing years in 500 words or less, the length of a typical blog posting?

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The house at Dowdy Corners is a 1940s cape which, being built on an older (more…)

Every Christmas my Aunt Stephanie makes handmade ornaments. They are always made of cloth or paper, or often a combination of the two, and fit unassumingly into a common letter-size envelope, which carries them to friends and family members.

This past holiday’s handwork is a bird constructed of white paper using deceptively simple origami folds. In its beak is a small portion of (more…)

An okra flower

I decided to plant okra in the garden this summer because I love all the cuisines that use it: Indian, Middle Eastern, Southern U.S, plus Mediterranean and Caribbean (and there are probably others). I’ve eaten it prepared different ways in restaurants but, before this summer, had cooked it just once at home. My plan was to grow lots of it and then become adept at preparing it different ways.

What do all of these cuisines have in common? They all originate in a warm climate. If this was not enough to deter me, you’d think these two characteristics of okra, of which I was fully aware, would have kept me from trying to grow it: okra does not like temperatures below 45 or 50°F and doesn’t like to be transplanted, eliminating the usual solution of using starters to extend Vermont’s short growing season.

Another lesson I learned, which I suggest to anyone planning to grow okra, is to plant a fair number of plants—a dozen at least. I had six plants and found that I never had enough okra to make a dish. Because okra toughens when allowed to grow too large—they should be picked when they’re about 4 inches in length—I made an effort to pick them almost daily. The problem is that there would only be a few ready to pick at any given time. By the time I’d accumulated enough for a dish, the first okra I’d picked would no longer be fresh. That was when I realized I would need to blanch and freeze as I picked.

(more…)