Julia Child: The Way to Cook
A little dowdy, but it's a great teaching book.
Lynne Rossetto Kasper: The Splendid Table
For real Italian cooking.
Tish Boyle: The Good Cookie
You can never have too many cookie recipes.
Francois Payard: Simply Sensational Desserts
One of my go-to books for special occasion desserts. Also has the very best recipe for tarte au citron (and I've tried a lot of them).
Hilaire Walden: Sensational Preserves
Whenever I need inspiration for something new to seal in jars, I turn to Hilaire.
Edon Waycott: Preserving the Taste
Wonderful recipes for my canning habit.
Rick Bayless: Mexico One Plate At A Time
I'd like to thank this book for helping me to win my husband's heart. (Tamales made easy.)
Anne Willan: La Varenne Pratique
This book is my culinary school.
Irma S. Rombauer: Joy of Cooking
I use an older version, before it was stupidly 'modernized'. It's a fine reference for American basics, and the book I always reach for when making biscuits or pancakes.
Alice Medrich: Cocolat
I've made a lot of the gorgeous desserts from this book, but I also turn to the section on component recipes for when I'm inventing.
Michael Ruhlman: Charcuterie
Fun with pork.
Patricia Wells: Bistro Cooking
If I could only have one cookbook, this would be it.
Terrance Brennan: Artisanal Cooking
I love Brennan's straightforward approach to fine cooking.
It's a melancholy thing, putting the garden to bed. Never mind the heartbreak of hacking back, uprooting, burning, and composting plants that were so lovingly nurtured. I can think of no more poignant herald of the long, cold months to come.
But gardeners are optimists by nature, and no sooner have I finished tearing down a season's effort than I've begun preparing and planning for another round. Maybe it's just a sophisticated form of denial.
There can't be an easier crop to grow than garlic, nor one that brings as much satisfaction at harvest time. Stick some cloves into the ground in November, feed it a few times in June, and come July the dirt rewards you with fat glorious heads of Vitamin G. You just can't buy garlic like this. Well, not unless you know a garlic farmer.
You'd never guess it from the weather today, but we've had a mercifully early spring. Last year, it was almost the middle of June before the trees were fully leafed out. This year, they were almost a month ahead of that. I've gotten a good start on the garden already (last year, I didn't plant until the third week in June).
The boxes TJ built for the first raised beds 6 years ago were starting to crumble with rot, so he built new ones – this time out of hemlock, which has a natural resistance to insects and rot. The wood is from a local mill, rough cut, so even though we couldn't get the 2 x 10 boards we used last time, stacking 2 x 6s that are a full 2 x 6 inches (instead of the frail 1.5 x 5.5 of “finished” lumber) gives us new boxes that are taller, beefier, and much grander seeming. The three beds full of garlic (above, in the foreground) will have to wait until after harvest for replacement.
I've got to get a post up before the 8th of the month, or I'm going to start looking like a real loser. I don't even have a good excuse this time – I've just been kicked back and enjoying a few weeks free of responsibility. I've been cooking up a storm; it's a complete disgrace that I haven't posted. So I'm making a commitment to myself and my readers: a post a day for the next week. There.
Let's start with the garden. It's doing quite well, considering what a challenge the weather has been this summer. Cold and dry to start – everybody planted late. My main crops went in a full 3 weeks later than usual. It was warm and sunny for a brief period, but it's mostly just rained. My lettuces bolted before they even set heads, then rotted around the bottoms. Most everything else has grown impressively – I had a fine crop of pickling cukes, and the winter squash have been greatly productive. The pepper plants are getting loaded up; even the poblanos (which are hit or miss in this climate) – they seem to love all the rain, and they're flowering like mad and setting a lot of fruit. The tomatoes plants are heavy with green fruit, but if we don't start to get some warm sunny days SOON to start ripening them, I'll be looking at piles of bloated, rotten green tomatoes.
Pictures of the garden and a list of what's in it follow after the jump.
Hard to believe, but it's almost that time again. Winter held on pretty tight until a few days ago, but the sun finally came out and it warmed up to seasonal levels – and all that snow finally started to melt away in earnest. If you can imagine, the chair in the garden was totally buried in snow for a good part of the winter.
Planning the garden is one of the things that keeps me from going nuts during the long grey cold months. Seed companies have it just right that they start mailing their catalogs just after the first of the year – they know forlorn housebound gardeners will leaf through the pages of bright photographs and lusty descriptions and drive themselves mad with desire for green leaves and dirt. And then order lots of seeds.
Jaune Flammée d'Orange. It's the name that does it. Or maybe its flawless beauty. Or maybe its perfect tomato taste. Put them all together, and this tomato gets my vote for The One Tomato I'd Grow If I Could Grow Only One.
I've been thinking a lot about how off it might seem that I post so much about gardening on a blog that's supposed to be about cooking, and that I post so little about cooking (or that I post so little at all). The truth is, cooking and gardening occupy approximately the same coordinates in my firmament. If I lived in a place with a milder climate, and could garden for more than the few fleeting months allotted us in the hills of Vermont, my blog might easily have been called “A Constant Gardener”. I often fantasize about having my own paradise, overgrown with flowering plants and exotic fruits. But I suspect I'd tire of it, and I'd miss the snow.
Well in advance of all the other tomatoes, this little gem – no bigger than a marble – came perfectly ripe today. Yes, I ate it. I relished it. And it was delicious – sweet, tart, and warm from the sun. It left me yearning for more.
The garden's just about growing out of control; I finally had some time over the weekend to catch up on chores – cultivating to keep weeds down, pruning the tomatoes, spraying for caterpillars, culling overgrown greens, pinching the basil, fertilizing. It rained like hell this morning, but a break in the rain this afternoon offered delicious light for taking some pictures. I love just hanging out in the garden; I can (and do) spend hours examining the tiniest wonders there.
The garden is really hitting its stride now, even though the weather still isn't consistently warm. There's not much to eat from it yet, except for salad greens. There are a few pattypan squash that'll be ready for harvest any day. And I could take some of the young fennel bulbs, but I want to let them get a little bigger. I'll have cucumbers and beets in a couple of weeks, around the time we harvest the garlic. The peppers and tomatoes are all flowering and setting fruit; the eggplants are just beginning to flower, as are the beans.
This is a “panorama” pieced together of shots taken from the third-floor deck. Funny, it looks so small and dollhouse-like. It's not: the beds are each 4' x 8' feet with about 2' in between, so the overall length is probably close to 80'. At the far right are the two newest beds; I still need to get a load of mulch down around them just to tidy things up.
If you'd like to see this photo in all its gigantic glory, you can click here to view it on Imageshack; once the page loads, click on the image to get it even bigger. If anyone has questions about the garden, or gardening in general, feel free to post your query in a comment and I'll answer as best I can.
