A Cooking Life

Garden Report: April 8

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.

Spaghetti and Meatballs

© 2007 Dan Grossman; Hosted on Fotki

We haven't had a very autumnal autumn this year, but the weather pattern appears to have shifted in fall's favor late last week. Saturday broke dark and heavy, with pelting rain shot from a lowered sky – an excellent day for a track meet.

My husband's youngest daughter, Isabel, took up cross-country running when she got to high school this year. It's quickly become very important to her, and we've scheduled weekend visits carefully to allow her full participation (the kids live with their mother in the farthest northwest corner of the state, just shy of the Canadian border; we see so little of them as it is, we'll take them however we can get them). The state championships were held Saturday up in Thetford, north of here by about an hour-and-a-half's drive. Isabel would be traveling there by bus with her team; we arranged for the other kids to be delivered to the meet, where we would collect them all for the remainder of the weekend.

Garden Report: August 12th

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.

Garden Report: July 18

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.

Sun-Cooked Fruit Preserves

Back when I was first teaching myself about preserving and canning, I came across an old method for making strawberry preserves that called for setting the strawberries (tossed with sugar) on a tray out in the sun to cook down slowly and gently over a period of a few days. It sounded intriguing, but for a novice still struggling with the logistics of canning, it also sounded like a lot of extra work.

My Little Garden

Every season I have gardened in Vermont has presented its own set of challenges. The first year I gardened here – the first year I gardened, period – there was a killing frost in early July. Luckily, my garden was very small (10' x 15') and I was able to replant without going broker than I already was. But there was another killing frost in late August, making the total length of the growing season about 45 days. If you garden at all, you know that's not much of a growing season.

Finding Time

I should have known when I committed myself to blogging that actually finding the time to do it would prove difficult. It isn't that I'm not finding the time to cook, it's just that I can't manage to swing a photo shoot every time I find myself in the kitchen, and I'd persuaded myself that without gorgeous photos, there's no point in blogging. Well, phooey. I don't know who these people are that manage carefully composed and beautifully shot pictures at the same time they're scrambling at the stove...I'm certainly not one of them, but from here on out, I refuse to let a lack of food porn stop me from posting.

Because this is what it really looks like when I'm cooking: