By Amy Machnak, Sunset recipe editor

By Margo True, Sunset food editor

Even though I knew that going to see the movie Food Inc. would not be mind-changing for me--I mean, talk about preaching to the converted!--it's so worth seeing, even if you've been a Michael Pollan fan for the past 10 years and can recite passages from Fast Food Nation. My top reasons:

* It communicates the difference between mindless slaughter and careful harvest of food animals. And it does so without making you want to run out of the theater clutching your stomach. In fact, the industrial feedlot scenes are the least gory.The bloodiest scene (and it's not that bloody) takes place in the most humane setting: a great farm, run with respect for animals—Polyface Farm, in Virginia. 

* It makes the best case for avoiding GMO crops (like most of the large-scale corn and soybeans grown in this country). Not necessarily because they're intrinsically harmful to the human body, but because the seeds are patented by enormous corporations—and are considered intellectual property. If farmers harvest seeds from their new crop for replanting the following year, as they've done for centuries, they violate intellectual property law. So they're forced to buy all new seed from the company. This is like having to pay for rain, or sun. 

* It tells the story, compellingly, of ethical farmers who challenge giant corporations and get squashed--easily, because our laws totally support the corporations. These are very courageous people who lose everything for the sake of doing what's right, and were it not for this movie, would probably have gone on living in obscurity: the poultry farmer, a haggard woman with a vestige of beauty, refusing to enclose her grown-for-Purdue chickens (already dying by the dozen) in lightless sheds; the seed-cleaner, a man forced to give up to Monsanto the names of his customers—for whom he'd clean seeds so they could be planted in the spring. Doubtless there are hundreds more like them, unseen, unheard, and heroic. (FYI, filmmaker Robert Kenner told NPR's On the Media that his legal fees for Food Inc. were more than those for his past 15 films combined. And remember Oprah's legal struggle over her on-air hamburger-disparaging comment?

* It points out how easily our food supply can be contaminated when it's run like a giant machine. One example: Industrially raised cows, fed grain (largely corn) instead of the grass they're actually built to digest, have developed a whole new (and especially virulent) form of E. coli bacteria in their intestines called E. coli 0157. This strain is the one that's been causing so many of the foodborne illnesses in the past few years: hamburger (several times), spinach, even frickin' cookie dough. 

* One good way to fight food inc.? The One-Block Diet! Seriously, any form of local eating—whether you're raising crops yourself or supporting your area's farmers--will be better for your body and your community; and it will nearly always be fresher and taste better. For more ways to take action, see these 10 tips from the moviemakers themselves.

By Amy Machnak, Sunset recipe editor

If there was ever a moment of ill-preparedness, this was it. 

Johanna Silver, test garden coordinator-extraordinaire, told me that I needed to cook the escargots TODAY, because they were on the verge of kicking the snail bucket, so to speak. 

The timing couldn’t have been worse. I was up to my elbows in recipe testing for the magazine and I couldn’t possibly cook them. I hadn’t had time to research the books. I didn’t even know if we had parsley. 

But I had no choice. We had been torturing and fattening these little guys for days now, and it was only respectful that we follow through with the project as intended. The alternative would be wasteful, not to mention downright cruel. 

I did the quick Internet search and found a few recipes that, as I had hoped, called for butter, garlic, and parsley. But they mentioned packing the shells and then putting the snails back into them. Huh? How was I suppose to get them out, let alone back in? Why didn’t it mention how long to cook them? 

Never mind, I thought to myself. It can’t be rocket science. I’m an accomplished cook, and I just don’t have any other options.

I melted about 4 tbsp. of unsalted butter in a large skillet and then tossed in our snails and a minced garlic clove. I cooked them for about 3 minutes, stirring occasionally, then finished with chopped fresh parsley and a sprinkle of kosher salt. Voilà.

We called in the official tasters (whoever was willing and interested).

Due to our professionalism and total respect for our food editor, Margo True, we waited for her to have the first taste. (Okay, so we were all too scared to take the first bite and made her do it, but hey, what do you expect? We may be adventurous, but we’re not completely nuts, as evidenced by Elizabeth’s doubtful expression.) Margo popped the end of her toothpick into her mouth, gave a few chews and then proclaimed with a wrinkled nose: “It’s kinda...mucusy." 

EEEWWWW! I decided that these were not an item that should be served medium rare. Back into the pan they went for a thorough cooking over high heat. About 10 minutes later, now with the butter and herbs both very brown, we gave it another go. 

“Oh, that’s much better,” said Ms. True. Then Elizabeth and Johanna had a taste. Not bad. Kind of chewy, but not tough. Overall, not disgusting and definitely resembling the stuff you get for $24 at a fancy French place in the city. My taste was fine, but I knew I could do much better than this on the execution.

Next: cooking escargot part deux. Just as soon as I locate our copy of Escoffier.

By Margo True, Sunset Food Editor

Two summers ago, when we started this one-block diet, I dreamed of growing something I'd had from a street vendor in Turkey: fresh chickpeas. He sold them off the back of a little wagon, a huge bundle festooned with pods. I sat and popped them open, one by one, gobbling the sweet, almost peanut-like morsels inside.

So we tried. Dismal failure. 

And then this summer, we tried again. Success! Why? Because this time, we planted them in spring, before scorching weather set in. 

Team Kitchen harvested a few and tried them (that's Stephanie Dean, our test kitchen coordinator on the left, and Amy Machnak, our recipe editor, on the right). 

We didn't have many, but they tasted nearly as sweet and fresh as I remembered. 

However, I don't remember them looking like tiny green brains (see below). Maybe I'd been eating them too fast.

If you're curious and would like to try these little nuggets, look for them at Mexican and Indian markets starting in early summer. Or grow them yourself! As long as you plant them early, they're really not so hard to get going.

By Amy Machnak, Sunset recipe editor

I feel confident that I can cook anything. And when given the opportunity to cook something new or unusal, the result falls somewhere between fair and outstanding.

An elk my Dad shot and then butchered in the garage? Check.

Morning glory leaves from a street market in Vietnam? check, check.

Wedding cake for 500 people that looks like it’s destined for the Mad Hatter’s tea party? No problem.

But when our resident test garden gal, Johanna Silver, asked me to cook a few snails that she pulled out of our garden, I became a little...well, intimidated.

I’ve eaten escargot plenty of times. After foie gras and sweet breads, it’s generally a sure thing order for me when I see it on menu. But I’ve never actually cooked it. At least not the fresh ones, still alive and sitting in a tray in our kitchen, living on a cornmeal diet to fatten them up.

Here’s my first dilema: What exactly is a snail? Is it like abalone (which I just learned is a type of sea snail), which cooks very quickly? Or is it more like octopus, which is better cooked longer, to soften the proteins?

I know that I want to cook our snails with the traditional butter, garlic, parsley, etc. and serve them with a nice crusty French baguette. But should I cook them slow and long? Hot and fast? Should they be baked? broiled? sautéed?

I think research in one of those old, dusty, classical French cookbooks on our shelves is called for.

By Margo True, Sunset food editor

Hank Shaw in his garden, in front of a gigantic cardoon.

Handmade boar salami....home-cured olives...wine grown in the back yard....fat, juicy venison sausages.

We ate this—and much, much more—on Saturday at the home of Hank Shaw, a political writer, and his partner, Holly Heyser, a journalism professor at Sacramento State.

Hank was also nominated for the James Beard blog award this year. We shared a table with him and Holly and his mom at the awards ceremony in New York back in May, and really enjoyed their company and like-mindedness. Hank writes fascinating accounts of making food from scratch, which in his case involves hunting and fishing as well as gardening. Holly grew up hunting in Minnesota and has a blog of her own about, as she says, "acquiring food the hard way."

Talk about a gracious guy. Even though he lost to us, he invited us to a cookout at his place on the east side of Sacramento. 

Dinner fell on what turned out to be a fearsomely scorching day in his neighborhood—as in, 108 F°. Nonetheless, a small group of us One-Blockers left our cool coastal habitat behind, lured by his promise of wild game.

A Wild Feast

The minute we walked in the door, Hank had his homemade and very respectable sangiovese ready for pouring, and a glistening array of things to eat:

* Good home-cured olives, which I found impressive since we've tried to make them ourselves, without success (yet!)
* Hank's own pickled beets, carrots, and sunchokes
* Totally delicious shad rillettes—a sort of loose pâté, traditionally made with pork or rabbit but here with  tasty local shad that Hank caught with his dad recently on the American River. I had no idea that shad existed in the West. I thought they were strictly an East Coast species. Now I'm hankering to catch some shad myself. (Their roe are particularly amazing, fyi.)
* Excellent saucisson sec, a dry salami from a wild boar Hank bagged in Monterey County. Secret ingredient: 1974 Heitz Cellars Angelica, made from Mission grapes. This fortified wine was the first wine made in California back in the 1700s.
* Lonzino, air-cured from the loin of above boar—more delicate and thinly sliced, so it looked like rose petals
* Fennel- and ouzo-cured salmon, made with an Alaskan pink salmon caught by one of Hank's friends

Bear in mind, these were just the appetizers. I hadn't seen snacks so hefty since my New Year's in Moscow, when I noshed on an enormous spread of zakuski.

After a fully appreciating all that was on the table, we presented Hank with a couple of just-baked fruit pies, plus gifts from the One-Block Diet: last year's honey from hive Veronica and this spring's honey from Midge, plus a bottle of red-wine vinegar and some fresh eggs from the flock.

Then he took us on a tour of their abode.

The Tour

The first guided look-around of a person's house is always fun, isn't it? It's especially interesting when the place is full of strange and quirky stuff. Hank and Holly live in that kind of house, and seeing how Hank makes his food only increased our pleasure in eating it.

Hank's homemade wine, hanging out with the books.
Each carboy holds one varietal; included here are
Tempranillo, Sangiovese, and deep, dark
Portuguese Touriga.The two tiny carboys in back are
Zinfandel, which Hank made from his own grapes
(the rest used grapes he bought).

The garden, where Hank grows everything from beets
to heat-resistant romaine to salsify. 

It occupies a chunk of their 1/4-acre back yard,
but there's plenty of space to grow more stuff. We
semi-seriously suggested he try growing wheat—
since he actually has the space for it.

A few of Hank's vines (I think these are mainly Zinfandel).
More grapes grow against a far wall.

In the garage, garden zucchini dry on a rack.
Several ripe figs were set out to dry on a work
surface nearby.

And best of all...

The "curing fridge"—a battered but useful appliance
in the garage, equipped with a thermostat control
and a teeny humidifier (at bottom right).

Hank at the grill while we gab under the tree.

Hank slowly and tenderly grilled a slew of those venison sausages until they were shiny, taut, and on the verge of bursting. The rest of us sat around under the big shady tree just beyond and gabbed for a while.

The Dinner

We went indoors—merciful air conditioning!—and feasted on those sausages, stuffed into giant buns with homemade pickles; firm, meaty marinated octopus liberally seasoned with paprika; two pasta salads—one with the couscous-like Sardinian pasta called fregola, studded with bocconcini (tiny fresh mozzarella balls), and the other with barley and sundried tomatoes—and a lovely, simple little beet salad with feta cheese and lovage. So much care and generosity went into this dinner. Hank even made the paprika. As in, he grew the peppers, dried them, and ground them. Having made our own salt, we knew this wasn't as crazy as it sounds. These kinds of things are worth doing, if for no other reason that it makes you really, really appreciate paprika and salt.

Hank served his honey lemon-verbena ice cream, I cut up the pies, and we chewed our last bites in a semi-stupor. Hank brought out some little glasses filled with that precious 1974 Heitz Angelica, which tasted surprisingly similar to Italian nocino, a walnut liqueur. Delicious. 

Then Hank and Holly, pied pipers that they are, ushered us into what they proudly call their Opium Den. It's a library with deep pink walls, a comfy sofa, a fireplace, and a mantle adorned with bare skulls of past game. As we sank into the sofa, Hank plied us with homemade absinthe. Yow. You could practically see the fumes emerging from our lips as we tried it. It only took a couple of sips to finish us off.

We eased into our cars and drove home, sated from head to toe and marveling at all that Hank and Holly do. Before we left, they accepted our invitation to munch freshly baked pizzas from our brand-new wood-fired oven, topped, naturally, with whatever will be ripest and most flavorful in the One-Block garden. Coming soon.

UPDATE: Here's what Hank wrote about the evening (and you can see the food he made, too).

By Margo True, Sunset Food Editor

Behold our new outdoor kitchen. It was finished about 10 minutes ago. Frankly, I'm dazzled...I have to restrain myself from running out there to admire it yet again. Not only does it have a stately pizza oven (that large red item at the back), a snazzy cocktail/wine bar (in foreground), and a long counter inset with multiple grills and a ferociously hot wok burner, it also has...

By Elaine Johnson, Sunset associate food editor

Photos by Kimberley Burch, Elaine Johnson, and Margo True

We have a tough job here. Really. Well, maybe not so tough. We just raised our glasses to the spring harvest with a beautiful lunch featuring our own produce, eggs, Chardonnay, beer, and honey. Team Kitchen did the cooking.

Test kitchen coordinator Stephanie Dean and recipe editor Amy Machnak put the finishing touches on the table. In front, you can see Grilled carrots and green onions with fresh thyme.

 

 

We started with Favas and ricotta on homemade wheat crackers and Radishes with fresh butter and sea salt.

Art director Jim McCann and test garden coordinator Johanna Silver try the crackers.

 

That’s me in the middle sampling the Sunset Chardonnay. It’s really mellowed from the crisp green-apple character it was showing last summer. Now it’s a lovely, full aromatic white. (In fact, wine editor Sara Schneider is scheming to slip it into our upcoming Western Wine Awards to see how it fares.) Photo director Yvonne Stender is on the right. She and Johanna (on the left) might be making faces about the beer. Still bad news, like Crayola crayons. Noble effort, though.

 

Managing editor Alan Phinney, associate garden editor Julie Chair (left), and Sara Jamison liked the wine, too.

We sat down to a table of pinks and greens. The Strawberry-honey lemonade (the pink drink in the glasses) was so refreshing. Plus, the color matched Johanna’s garden flowers.

The bulls-eye Chioggia beets looked stunning on the mesclun salad.

 

We also feasted on Spring greens quiche (made this time with spinach, but also delicious with sautéed fava leaves) and Grilled carrots and green onions with fresh thyme.

 

For dessert, another taste of spring: Fromage blanc with strawberries and lemon honey.

It’s incredibly satisfying to eat good food that you’ve raised and cooked yourself.

Here’s the recipe for the lemonade. We’ll try to catch you up on the rest of the recipes in Sunset or in a future blog. Happy spring!

Strawberry lemonade

MAKES About 2 quarts

1 qt. strawberries
¾ cup honey
1 cup fresh lemon juice (from 5 to 6 lemons)
Ice

Whirl strawberries and honey in a blender until puréed. Pour through a fine strainer set over a bowl, rubbing to extract liquid; discard seeds. Stir in lemon juice and 1 qt. water. Pour over glasses filled halfway with ice.

By Johanna Silver, Sunset test garden coordinator

Things are crazy in the test garden as we prepare for Celebration Weekend, but I wanted to take a quick minute to keep you posted on my ever growing interest in Team Escargot. Turns out Sunset wrote the book (er, article) on homemade escargot back in May of 1988. Check it out:

By Margo True, Sunset Food Editor

Last Sunday, Erika Ehmsen, Johanna Silver, Amy Machnak, and I sat in a darkened theater at the Millennium Broadway Hotel, nerves tingling. As some of you know, we'd been nominated—along with fellow one-block-diet bloggers Elizabeth Jardina, Rick LaFrentz, and Margaret Sloan—for a James Beard Journalism award.

Since we were sitting at a table near the exit sign, way way at the back, I was sure we wouldn't win. After all, no one would put us here if we were actually meant to get to the stage in any reasonable amount of time. I gently suggested that everyone just relax and enjoy dinner and give up the dream of winning an award.

So we did, and got to know our tablemates—fellow nominee Hank Shaw; his wife, Holly; and his lovely mother--all come from Sacramento. Hank writes a very entertaining, knowledgeable, pull-no-punches blog called Hunter Angler Gardener Cook. Like us, he's trying to show how possible it is for you to make your own food — from scratch. He tends to hunt and forage, we tend to garden and make wine, but the intention is very much the same. We felt glad to be sharing our table with a kindred spirit.

Then Kelly Choi, announcing the winners for the award ahead of ours (for Audio Webcast or Radio Show), accidentally opened the wrong envelope. "Erika Ehmsen, Elizabeth..." Oh, my lord. She'd flubbed, but we knew we'd won. Whoever got the Audio Webcast award, well, sorry, dude, our screaming completely drowned out your moment. Then we ran to the stage. (Ok, Erika walked. She's pregnant and wise.)

Hank Shaw's mother very kindly took this picture of us accepting our award:

 

Left to right: Johanna, me, Amy, and Erika, beside ourselves with joy.

And moments later, in the lobby:

Courtesy Hanna Lee

The rest of the evening is a bit of a blur. Some very fine journalists won awards, including the multiple James-Beard award winner Alan Richman, of GQ magazine, and we cheered them all. For the full list, click here. Erika, bless her, was Tweeting like mad the entire time.

The next night, we put on our fanciest duds and went to the chef awards, at Lincoln Center. What a scene. We were quietly ushered around the red carpet, ah well. Amy's shoes deserved to have a prance before the papparazzi!

Amy's shoes. Actually, she had to mince, not prance.

The awards ceremony, which this year honored Women in Food, lasted three and a half hours, and although many deserving (and terrific) chefs won (including San Francisco's Nate Appleman and Maria Hines of Seattle), we were as famished as wolves by the time it was over. We dashed out and devoured tidbits put out by some of the top female chefs in the country (my favorite: Anita Lo's steak tartare with anchovy broth).

It was Quite a Scene. Besides the best and most celebrated chefs in the country, we spotted Salman Rushdie (we unabashedly had our pictures taken with him, on a camera that, alas, was lost at JFK).

Amy, Johanna, and me in the thick of it.                                   Top Chef Jeff McInnis and Erika.              

We had a very, very good time, piling happily into taxis for an after-party at Prune, Gabrielle Hamilton's tiny, excellent, jewel of a restaurant down in the East Village. (She'd been nominated for Best Chef New York City.) Gabrielle makes the best hamburgers EVER, intensely flavorful and so juicy they squirt.

I remember the clock saying 3:30 when I closed my eyes.

--------

Now, back we are at Sunset with all of us winners together, in front of the crazy-tall hops that we'll be using in an upcoming batch of beer:

Left to right, Sunset's Beard-winning bloggers: Elizabeth Jardina (with Honey), Rick LaFrentz, Amy Machnak, me (with Ophelia), Johanna Silver, Margaret Sloan, and Erika Ehmsen.

and because they were part of it too...the very patient Honey and Ophelia, representing the coop:

:

By Erika Ehmsen, Sunset copy chief

We’re looking over a four-leaf clover that Chicago’s French Pastry School sent to wish us luck at this Sunday’s James Beard Foundation Awards. (Thanks, guys!) Four of us are headed to New York for the ceremony, and we’re excited and nervous—and not just about what to wear!

Our One-Block project is in great company in the Best Food Blog category: Our fellow nominees are Bon Appétit columnist Andrew Knowlton’s The BA Foodist and Sacramento omnivore Hank Shaw’s Hunter Angler Gardener Cook, which takes locavore to a near-complete DIY level. We’re looking forward to swapping stories with Shaw, Knowlton, and all of the other food and wine writers we’ll be meeting this weekend.

Want to hear who we’re talking to and find out if we win? We’ll be posting live updates from the Media Awards ceremony on Sunset’s Twitter page. Sign up to follow us by clicking here—it’s free, easy, fun, and admittedly a bit addictive. Wish us luck, and see you on the Interweb!

By Margo True, Sunset food editor

It is so hard to get vegetables to ripen on schedule.

Our beets, favas, carrots, and radishes don't care that we've planned a nice little ending for them in mid-May, when they're supposed to all be ready simultaneously for our spring one-block feast. Instead, the favas--a giant ungainly green explosion of stalks—had to be harvested yesterday. The bean pods were practically the size of cucumbers. And the radishes were bulging up out of the ground. When that happens, chances are they'll be stinging hot or fibrous. They almost look like they're begging to be picked, don't they?

 Overgrown radishes.

So, we got up from our desks, went out into the garden, and picked.

That giant clump yielded 25 pounds of favas in about half an hour. Along with the radishes, they gave us this classic spring nibble, which we ate in the afternoon:

"Easter Egg II" radishes with shelled favas, soft butter, and sea salt.

We did what the French do: Spread each radish or bean with just a bit of butter, sprinkle with salt, and eat. A glass of sauvignon blanc, rosé, or pastis tastes wonderful with this. (By the way, the radishes were slightly spicy, but probably because of our recent heat wave--not because of their size. I had a big one last week and it was sweet as could be.)

When favas get large, like ours are, they need to be double-shelled. It's kind of fun.


HOW TO DOUBLE-SHELL A FAVA BEAN

1. Slit the pod, lined inside with a downy white fuzz that cradles each individual bean. Pick out the beans.

2. Plop the beans in well-salted boiling water for exactly two minutes. Drain them and pour them into a bowl of cold water. You'll notice that a leathery skin has begun to separate from the inner bean.

3. When the beans are cool enough to handle, slit the skins with your fingernail or a paring knife and pop the inner beans out. What you see in the photo above are the naked beans. Fresh, green, and delicious.


WHEN YOU WANT A REALLY LARGE FAVA BEAN (AND WHEN YOU WANT A SMALL ONE)

For the kind of appetizer we just made, or for salads, monstrous favas are perfect because the beans are nice and fat and a couple make a good mouthful. Peeling tiny beans is maddening and plus it doesn't yield much.

When fava pods are really small--no longer than the length of your little finger--they can be boiled in salted water for a couple of minutes, drained, and cooled. They taste similar to green beans, only richer. Don't try this with bigger pods. You'll be chewing on boiled leather.

A big fava with its beans, and a little pod for eating whole.

Excuse us while we do a little crowing.

We've been nominated for a James Beard Foundation Award! Yes, this very blog.

The category is: Blog Focusing on Food, Beverage, Restaurants, or Nutrition. (Yep, that sounds like us.) The winner will be announced at a ceremony in New York City on May 3.

And this is right on the heels of the news that our One-Block Feast story from August '08 was nominated for an International Association of Culinary Professionals award.

Spring is feeling very springy indeed.

By Johanna Silver, Sunset test garden coordinator

We hinted of it here and here, and now it seems there will actually be an organic veggie garden at the White House.

The White House has even released the planting plan. Looks great!

I'm disappointed Obama confessed to disliking beets. Who dislikes beets?! Then again, it seems like an easy out for a disliked vegetable. Can you imagine the uproar from mothers across the country had he chosen broccoli?

By Margo True, Sunset food editor

Good news! Our print story last August about our summer one-block feast, We Had a Dream, has been nominated for an International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP) journalism award.

To read our story, click here.

We're thrilled about the nomination, since the IACP has thousands of members—and other nominees include such food-magazine luminaries as Gourmet, Saveur, and Food & Wine. The winners of the awards will be announced at a gala ceremony in Denver on April 4.

We'll let you know how we do!

By Margo True, Sunset food editor

We began with salad, wheatberry ciabatta, and homemade butter.

Our winter feast started with a happy accident.

Back in September, Team Kitchen and Team Garden drew up a list of cool-season crops that would do well in our area, and planned a menu around it. First we'd have a salad of Belgian endive and escarole, with a fresh poached egg on top and croutons from extremely homemade wheat bread (as in, we grew the wheat and ground it).

Well, the endive never sprouted. And we couldn't find escarole seeds. Who knew there'd be a run on escarole seeds?

Moral: Be flexible. Johanna, our test garden coordinator, had also planted some red butterhead lettuce and arugula, so Team Kitchen adapted.

It was easy; the lettuces were beautiful. We hardcooked the egg instead of poaching it, because a liquidy poached yolk, great on crisp endive and escarole, would've turned the tender lettuces into a sticky clump. We added small chunks of sweet, juicy tangerines from our tree, garlic-rubbed croutons, and a vinaigrette made with tangerine juice, our olive oil, and sea salt.

Red butterhead lettuce and arugula salad with tangerines and hard-cooked eggs.

We had plenty of wine to go with the food. The Syrah was in bottle at last and had recovered from its bottle-shock; it was back to its original blackberry suaveness. The Chardonnay still tasted fine—like a crisp green apple.

Sunset Chardonnay and Syrah, left; right, wine editor Sara Schneider sips the white as managing editor Alan Phinney tears off a chunk of ciabatta. (By the way, that construction site you see through the windows here will be a big outdoor kitchen, to be completed by June.
Come to our Celebration Weekend and see it for yourself.)

The stunning brassicas from the garden—cauliflower, broccoli romanesco, Savoy cabbage, kale, broccoli rabe, mustard greens—gave us our main courses: a winter vegetable chowder and spicy braised greens with preserved lemon.

Our chowder was packed with cauliflower, broccoli romanesco, and broccoli rabe,
plus a few potatoes saved from fall. On top: broccoli rabe flowers and purple rosemary blooms.

Braised Savoy cabbage, mustard greens, and
Tuscan kale with preserved lemon and chile.

The broccoli romanesco was so beautiful and strange that we used it as decor, too.

We ended not with our original dessert—olive oil tangerine cake, which turned out to be a total clunker given we were destroying the original recipe—but with something that arose naturally from our short list of available ingredients, which included honey, eggs, "imported" cream, and tangerines.

Tangerine honey crème caramel.

We had a very nice afternoon.

Recipe editor Amy Machnak and researcher Elizabeth Jardina.

Test garden coordinator Johanna Silver in the middle of
what must've been a vivid story.

Me (at left) and copy chief Erika Ehmsen.

SO WHERE ARE THE RECIPES?

They and the story of how we raised the ingredients for this winter menu will be showing up in larger form at some point in the months ahead—I promise.

For now, please have some salad. It's hearty enough to eat when it's cold, but bright and lively, too—which suits our California March, the month when winter slides into spring.

Red Butterhead Lettuce and Arugula Salad with Tangerines and Hard-Cooked Eggs

MAKES 6 to 8 servings TIME About 1 hour

We used our own chickens’ eggs, but we let them sit in the fridge for at least a week to let the air pocket inside each shell expand and make the eggs easier to peel.

6 to 8 eggs (not super-fresh)
2 tsp. fresh tangerine juice
1/2 tsp. each finely grated tangerine zest and sea salt
1/2 cup extra-virgin olive oil, divided
3 to 4 thin slices wheatberry ciabatta or other whole wheat bread,
     cut into 1/2-in. dice (about 1 1/2 cups)
2 cloves garlic, mashed to a paste with 1/4 tsp. sea salt
5 loosely packed cups arugula leaves
6 loosely packed cups red butterhead lettuce leaves
     (about 1/2 small head)
2 large or 4 small tangerines

1. Preheat oven to 400°. Put eggs in a small pot and cover with about 1 in. of water. Bring to a boil; immediately lower heat to a simmer and cook 10 minutes. When eggs are finished, transfer to ice water; let cool 1 minute. Crack eggs all over on counter and return to ice water for 5 minutes. Peel under cold water. Set aside.
2. Meanwhile, whisk tangerine juice, zest, and salt together in a small bowl. Whisk in 1/4 cup olive oil. Set aside.
3. In a heatproof cup, microwave remaining 1/4 cup olive oil with mashed garlic for 10 seconds. Put bread cubes on a baking pan and drizzle with garlic oil, tossing to coat. Spread in a single layer and bake about 15 minutes, or until crisp, stirring once or twice. Set aside.
4. Rinse greens and dry twice in a salad spinner. Peel tangerines and remove thready white pith; then cut fruit crosswise into chunks, removing any seeds.
5. In a large bowl, toss greens gently but thoroughly with only enough dressing to coat. Add tangerines and croutons and toss just to mix. Divide salad among plates. Add a quartered egg to each plate and drizzle eggs with a little more dressing. Or pile it all on a platter if you like, so people can help themselves.

By Margo True, Sunset food editor

As we were planning the menu for our one-block winter feast, we remembered a wonderful recipe, developed a while back by Editorial Services Coordinator Stephanie Dean, for a tangerine olive oil cake with roussane, a lovely floral wine, as an ingredient. All-purpose white flour and baking powder gave it lightness, and vanilla rounded out its sweet appeal.

Stephanie's tangerine olive oil cake.

The recipe had been hanging around in inventory, awaiting its moment in the sun. Now, in the cold season, our garden was giving us wonderful tangerines. We still had olive oil. And we were grinding our own flour for bread anyway. We had what we needed for Stephanie's cake! It would be a fancy sweet ending to our winter feast.

Then Stephanie made the recipe. She couldn't use sugar, because we didn't grow sugar cane. Honey went into the cake instead. No white flour, just rough whole wheat, ground from wheat berries. No baking powder (though she tried her best to argue for it). No vanilla for sure. And instead of Roussane, our homemade Chardonnay.

The one-block diet version: heavy, heavy, heavy.

I don't have a photo of Stephanie's expression when she took a taste, but let's just say it was not the face of a happy cook.

So she's created a honey tangerine creme caramel instead. And it's delicious!

We realize that we were so steeped in our everyday access-to-everything attitude that we weren't paying attention to what the garden wanted to give us. Now we are, and our food tastes better.

Coming soon: Our winter feast.

By Margo True, Sunset food editor

Simmered eggs (aka hard-boiled eggs). These were a breeze to peel, and they're tender.


Every cook of any experience knows the frustration of boiling a nice fresh egg—and then losing half of it in the peeling. We've been through this a few times with our flock's output. Now we're patient: We wait three days for the membrane to loosen up.  Otherwise, it clings to the white like Kevlar on Batman. For the scientific particulars of why this happens (with the egg, I mean), see the wonderful chapter on eggs in Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking.

Beyond patience, it's important to simmer, not boil, your egg if you want tender whites. That's why some cookbooks and magazine recipes call for "hard-cooked" instead of "hard-boiled" eggs, out of worry that readers will rush to the stove and boil their half-dozen till they're practically bouncy.

Our last pearl of wisdom: Immediately plunge the cooked egg into ice water. This forces the membrane to release its grip from the white. Then crack it gently all over and put it back in the ice bath for a few minutes, so water can seep in beneath the shell, further loosening what's below.

Here's a foolproof formula for

Simmered Eggs

Put eggs that are at least 3 days old in a small saucepan and cover with about an inch of water. Bring almost to a boil. Right before the boiling point, turn heat down to a simmer and cook eggs, partly covered, for 10 minutes. Scoop them out with a slotted spoon and plunge them into a bowl of ice and cold water. After a minute, take each one out, crack it gently all over and then roll it gently on the counter, and plop it back in the water.

Let sit 5 minutes. Peel under cold water and enjoy feeling the shell slip off the smooth surface of the egg.

By Margo True, Sunset food editor

A tray of our sodden, post-brew malted barley and wheat. Good only for livestock? We think not.

Yesterday, Team Beer gathered all its painstakingly malted grain and forged ahead with brewing. More to come on what was an epic and we hope ultimately rewarding day of beermaking.

For now, though, I have to ask a question of any all-grain beermakers who might be reading this:

Can that wet mash (all the sodden, crushed barley and wheat left from brewing) be used to make bread?

I've read about this "spent grain" being used to grow shiitake mushrooms and to feed cattle, pigs, and yaks, of all things. Supposedly it makes great compost.

Determined searching reveals a recipe for Beer Bread   (thank you, weekendbrewer.com) and one for a wild yeast bread using spent grains (from a great little blog called Homegrown Evolution).  Now it's Team Kitchen's turn. Our goal: a few shaggy, crusty loaves using nothing but spent grain and whatever else we've produced as part of our one-block diet.

Any and all advice appreciated.

Just buzz cream in a food processor

By Elaine Johnson, Sunset associate food editor

As crops for our winter one-block feast get bigger, we’re getting serious about the payoff: dinner! And to go with all the vegetable-centric dishes we’ve been dreaming up, we’ve gotta have good bread and butter.

Wheat we know about—we grew it for making beer. As for the cow, we don't have her just yet, but we’re working on the details. I kid you not: we’re looking into going in on a “cow share” so we can get good local milk and cream. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, we’re experimenting making butter with cream from the store.

I’ve tried making butter in little jars with preschoolers. The idea is they shake and shake the cream, and after awhile, it forms a dab of wonderfully sweet butter and some sweet buttermilk, and then they understand where butter comes from, and get to slather it on a cracker, and become lifetime supporters of the dairy industry. Right?

As it turns out, their hot little hands warm up the cream so it doesn’t clump into butter, their wrists tire out, and pretty soon, you have a lot of moms shaking jars.

In fact there’s a much easier way to go: a food processor.

Just pour in the cream, and let ‘er rip.

In a couple of minutes, voilà—the cream separates into buttermilk and little clumps of butter that look like fluffy scrambled eggs, then the clumps form a bigger mass of butter

Next you pour everything into a strainer and squeeze the rest of the milk from the butter. This just takes a few minutes.

The butter is incredibly sweet and fresh tasting—and no tedious shaking required. You can use the milk in any recipe where you’d use plain milk—maybe some good homemade bread.

P.S. If you want to make butter this way with kids, just be sure to keep their fingers away from the sharp food processor blade.

Sweet homemade butter

MAKES 1 cup butter and 1 cup sweet buttermilk TIME 10 minutes

Here’s your chance to ignore all those rules you ever learned about not overbeating whipping cream. Commercial butter has small amounts of culture added, so when you make your own, it tastes extra sweet and fresh.

1 pt. whipping cream
Kosher salt (optional)

1. Whirl cream in a food processor until it separates into buttermilk and clumps of butter that look like fluffy scrambled eggs, then keep whirling until butter forms bigger clumps; this takes 1 to 2 minutes total.

2. Set a fine strainer over a bowl. Pour milk and butter into strainer and let drain briefly. Squeeze butter with your hands to extract remaining milk (it’s okay if there’s a little left).

3. Turn butter into another bowl and stir in salt to taste, if you like.

By Margo True, Sunset Food Editor

It's been way too long since Team Chicken's last group egg-feast. So when Sunset researcher (and Team Chicken member) Elizabeth Jardina came back from the Pacific Northwest last week with a bagful of knobbly wild Oregon truffles—both white (Tuber oregonense) and black (Leucangium carthusianum)—we decided it was time.

Team Chicken's breakfast on Friday: omelets and soft-scrambled eggs from our flock out back, with shavings of white truffle (left, in back) and black truffle.

This may seem extravagant until you consider that Elizabeth spent less than $25 on nearly 2 ounces of these things...which is a fraction of what truffles cost in Italy (T. magnatum) or France (T. melanosporum).

To be honest, Oregon truffles don't taste like Italian or French truffles. They're much, much milder. Still good and worth eating, though, especially at these prices. The blacks  have an interesting pineapply sweetness I think I'd like to get to know better. The whites have a wonderful ripe earthiness, but it's just a whisper of what a white truffle from Alba, in northern Italy, can do. A good Alba truffle will suffuse the room, the house (or restaurant), and the inside of your head with its crazy, musky fragrance...in the best possible way.

The best way to concentrate the flavor of these truffles is actually not to eat them over or folded into eggs, although they were just fine that way. Later that day, we discovered that they were most powerful when finely shredded on a Microplane and mixed with butter. We dolloped the truffle butter onto hot linguine and spread it on toast. Slurp, slurp. The rest we've saved (in the freezer, where its flavor will, we're told, keep developing) for our next egg feast.

By Margo True, Sunset Food Editor

Here's what we're giving for Christmas this year:

Photograph by Spencer Toy

Yes! The fruits of our summer one-block diet.

Happy Holidays, everybody.

By Margo True, Sunset food editor

In mid-September, I picked our last few trombetta zucchini for the season and commemorated them in brine. I.e., I made pickles.

Zucchini don't usually make good pickles—they're too soft and mushy—but I had high hopes for the trombettas, because they're firm and crisp, like cucumbers.

And you know what? They make fantastic pickles. Snappy in texture and tart-sweet. I've been eating them with burgers, grilled steak, and pan-seared fish.

Trombetta Zucchini Pickles

MAKES about 4 cups TIME About 30 minutes

2 cups cider vinegar
1 cup sugar
1/2 tsp. turmeric
5 whole cloves
2 tsp. yellow mustard seeds
1 tsp. celery seed
1/4 tsp. ground ginger
1/2 tsp. red chile flakes
2 tsp. salt
1 onion, sliced into half-moons
1 lb. trombetta zucchini, cut into 1/4-in. slices

1. Put all ingredients except the onion and the zucchini in a large saucepan and bring to a boil over high heat. Reduce heat to maintain a steady simmer; simmer your pickling liquid for 10 minutes, then return the heat to high and bring back to a boil. Add onion and cook 1 minute. Add zucchini, bring to a boil, and cook for 2 minutes, pressing slices down under the surface of the liquid with a spoon. Remove from heat and let cool.
2. Transfer pickle to 2 very clean pint jars. Pickle keeps, chilled, up to 4 months. 

By Margo True, Sunset food editor

Have you ever had Spanish Roja garlic? It's a beauty, with big fat juicy red-skinned cloves. We grew it for our one-block feast this summer.

Our plot yielded dozens of chubby heads of garlic. We've been working it into regular recipes, but it seemed a shame not to pay homage to it with a pickle. A pickle that would be all about the garlic--loads and loads of whole cloves, nothing else except spices--and be a good memory of the pungent, fresh garlic we pulled up from the warm soil.

So I decided to make my mom's pickled garlic. It's just a footnote to a  bread-and-butter cucumber pickle recipe, written on an index card in her flowing script. She's had it for ages and isn't sure where it came from. Maybe she invented it; maybe it's from a friend or a magazine long ago. Anyway, it's delicious. The cloves get all buttery soft but are still tangy. They're great spooned to the side of roasted beef or pork...or fish...or pasta...or even with a wedge of good Cheddar cheese. You can eat a lot of garlic this way. 

Sally True's Pickled Garlic

Peeling this much garlic is a wee bit tiresome, I must admit, so put on some good music and know that once you've finished the prep work, you're basically done: The cloves only cook for 3 minutes.

Makes: About 2 pints Time: about 1 hour

1/4 cup sugar
1 cup cider vinegar
2 tsp. salt
1 bay leaf
1/4 tsp. mixed peppercorns
      (green, red, black, white; just one color is okay too)
1 1/2 tsp. yellow mustard seeds
1/2 tsp. celery seeds
8 heads fat-cloved garlic, peeled

Special equipment: 2 pint canning jars, sterilized*

Put all the ingredients in a saucepan and bring to a boil. Boil 3 minutes and pour into hot, sterilized jars. With tongs, set inner lid on top of jar rim, then the outer ring. Using potholders, screw the top on tight and let cool. Then chill it for at least a day before eating, to let the flavors develop.

The pickles keep in the fridge for up to a year unopened. (To test the seal, press the center of the lid; if it yields and makes a little popping sound, it's not sealed, and you should eat the pickle within a month.) You could probably keep it, sealed, at room temperature, but the pickle isn't heat-processed right in the jar after you fill it (most pickles are), so better be safe than sorry and keep it chilled.

* To sterilize jars: Fill them with hot water and put them in a deep pot. Drop the lids in alongside. Fill the pot with water and bring to a boil. Boil jars and lids for 10 minutes; then empty and fill right away, while still hot (use tongs to move them around).

By Elaine Johnson, Sunset associate food editor

It's been a week plus a few days since I clamped down the lid on the Nepalese lemon pickles, and they're coming along nicely. When I opened them up today, there was some fizzing action, which tells me they're fermenting, like old-fashioned dill pickles. You can see they've gotten really juicy, too.

I can tell they still need a little time, though. The liquidy stuff is tasting good—spicy and salty—but the peel on the lemons is still hard and chewy. Once they've finishing pickling, that should soften up.

A Sunset reader asks a good question: can you make these with regular (Eureka) lemons. No reason why it shouldn't work. Let me know if you try it.

By Margo True, Sunset food editor

For months now, I have been craving tomato chutney. Not just any tomato chutney, but a specific kind of explosively tangy, sweet-hot Indian chutney that I've had a few times in India. There's nothing better with grilled steak or lamb burgers, or with a comforting bowl of Indian lentils (dal) and cooling yogurt on the side.

I bought a few jars, but none of them were hot enough, or tangy enough. I needed one with a kick. So finally I just made it myself, using tomatoes from our one-block garden.

It's pretty close, I think; if I'd had time to go find some jaggery (Indian brown sugar) at an Indian grocery, I would have used that instead of light brown sugar. But brown sugar works just fine. You can make this chutney without going to an Indian market—although I highly recommend such an excursion, if you've never been. It's like a mini-trip to India—aromatic, bustling, and full of interesting foods to try.

Spicy-Sweet-Hot Tomato Chutney

Makes: 2 cups

Time: 1/2 hour, plus anywhere from 1 to 4 hours to simmer down, depending on how juicy your tomatoes are

This chutney is so intense that it tastes as though all the flavors were dancing on the head of a pin.

2 tbsp. each minced garlic (about 5 cloves) and fresh ginger
1 minced green serrano chile
3/4 cup finely chopped onion
3 tbsp. canola or safflower oil
1 tsp. each black mustard seeds and nigella seeds*
1 tsp. each cayenne and kosher salt
½ tsp. ground cumin
2 lb. coarsely chopped ripe tomatoes (about 5 cups)
½ cup each light brown sugar and cider vinegar

1. Put the garlic, ginger, chile, and onion in a bowl (you’ll need to toss them into the pot all together, quickly).

2. Heat oil and a few mustard seeds in a heavy-bottomed 3- to-4-qt. pot over medium-high heat, covered. When seeds begin to pop, quickly toss in the rest of the mustard seeds and the nigella seeds and slap on the lid to keep them from flying all over the place. Swirl the pot around on the burner for a few seconds to mix the seeds with the oil and help them pop.

3. Add the garlic, ginger, chile, and onion and lower heat to medium-low. Cook, stirring occasionally, until onions are soft, 6 or 7 minutes.

4. Stir in cayenne, salt, and cumin and cook for a minute or so. Add tomatoes, sugar, and vinegar; bring to a boil, then lower heat  and simmer uncovered until thick and jam-like, anywhere from 1 to 4 hours, depending on the juiciness of your tomatoes. Taste and add more vinegar, salt, or sugar if you like. Serve warm.

* Nigella is a little flowering plant native to southwest Asia. Its black, teardrop-shaped seeds taste strongly of celery; they're used in the Indian subcontinent (often in chutneys and pickles) and in the Near and Middle East to sprinkle on breads. You can find nigella seeds in upscale grocery stores or in Indian markets, where they're labeled kalonji.

Make ahead: Keeps in the fridge for at least 2 weeks and 1 month in the freezer.

By Margo True, Sunset Food Editor

One of the cool things about growing your own potatoes is that you get all sizes of spuds. The medium-to-larges are great in standard potato recipes and for the big golden crunchy potatoes Anna from our one-block feast.

But I like the marble-size ones the best.

When you spot them at your farmer's market (or pull up a handful from your own yard), bring them into the kitchen and try this. It takes about 20 minutes.

1. Put the little guys in a pot, cover them (barely) with water, add a good amount of salt, and simmer them, covered, until tender.
2. While they're cooking, toast a handful of walnuts over medium heat in a heavy-bottomed pan until they're fragrant and golden. Chop some garlic.
3. Pour the toasted nuts into a bowl. Put the pan back on the fire and glug in some olive oil (however much you'd like on your potatoes). Add the garlic and sizzle it for a minute, just until fragrant.
3. Drain the potatoes and pour them, piping hot, into a bowl. Pour the garlicky oil all over the potatoes. Chop the toasted nuts and add them too, along with some torn mint or basil.

Good with steak, a glass of sturdy Cabernet, and some sliced ripe tomatoes from your garden.

by Margo True, Sunset food editor

                                  The chickens, eating yet another batch of pattypan squash.

As with every good thing, our summer garden is coming to an end. The cornstalks are so dried out and decrepit that they're starting to lean over. The pattypan leaves are mildewing, and even though the plants still produce squashes like crazy, we're totally sick of eating them. We've given armloads to the chickens, who have obligingly eaten them, but now even they seem unexcited.

It's time to move on to the winter one-block feast! We need to get planting, so we have to decide on the menu. There's nothing like planning a meal, oh, five or six months ahead. Talk about anticipation.

First, a flurry of ideas: Homemade sauerkraut! Hot bread with freshly made butter! Maybe amaranth, because it's such an interesting, beautiful, delicious, and prolific grain. Wedges of melting-fleshed orange squashes with some kind of topping involving our own chiles (dried from summer); piles of leafy greens, transformed into a stew. A dinner bursting with vitality and flavor.

Plus, we still have a good stockpile of our own olive oil, wine, and vinegar, and of course eggs and honey. We've pickled our tomatoes, garlic, and trombetta zucchini and made a pseudo-pesto with our garlic, basil, and oil. Our hardier herbs are still alive, and probably will be as long as we cover them when it freezes. Ditto our lemon tree.

We figure that's part of the job of a summer garden: to make some serious contributions to winter eating.

So, just as with the summer menu planting, we sat down with Team Garden for a reality check. Hard red winter wheat, the best bread variety that will grow in our area, is harvested in June or July--not great timing for a winter menu. Amaranth grows in summer and is harvested in fall. Mustard greens, which you do harvest in winter, don't yield seeds (we had visions of whipping up our own mustard). Rats. My dream of a walnut tree is nixed because a) we'd have to plant a baby tree, and there's no way it will yield in time for winter and b) they're very messy trees; the hulls stain everything black. And, the BIG disappointment, no golden, hearty winter squash, because--who knew?--we should've planted it right alongside the summer squash. It takes that long to mature.

After much discussion, we narrowed our choices to the following list:

* Broccoli Rabe

* Cauliflower

* Chard

* Savoy Cabbage

* Endive

* Escarole

* Kale (both regular and lacinato)

* Mustard greens

* Spinach

* Quinoa

Stay tuned for the progress of our plants (and feast).

By Margo True, Sunset food editor

While scavenging for squash and chiles yesterday in the garden, I noticed our nasturtiums. They grow in clumps wherever there's water. No one plants them--they just sprout, starting in spring and carrying through most of the summer. I picked some, big spicy leaves and peppery bright flowers both.

Tossed with some baby lettuces I had in the fridge and a light rice-wine-vinegar dressing, they made a wonderful salad. Now I'll have to restrain myself when walking by their pretty beds. I could really eat them all.

By Margo True, Sunset food editor

We're harvesting from the garden practically every day now. Cucumbers, corn, tomatoes, edamame, and a small army of pattypan squash—they're all on the table. There is the occasional letdown. But so much else makes up for it! For instance, these cucumbers.

I picked little ones—about 4 inches long—from our 'Diva' vines, which test garden coordinator Johanna Silver has cleverly trained to grow up a trellis so they don't flop all over the place.

Young vegetables are another perk of gardening yourself. You can buy little vegetables, of course, but they rapidly lose their vitality once picked—even faster than mature vegetables do, I've found. Eat the little ones a few hours off the vine and you'll have a reward for all your faithful watering and weeding.

These little divas were probably the best cucumbers I've had. They were extremely crisp and sweet, with not a trace of that typical cucumbery bitterness. I didn't really do anything to them. I just sliced them and put them on a platter with a few of our juicy Early Girl tomatoes and some slivered basil, coarse salt and fresh pepper, and plenty of our own extra-virgin olive oil.

You often hear vintners proclaiming that their wines are made in the vineyard.

This salad was made in the garden.

Our one-block feast

By Margo True, Sunset Food Editor

A few days ago, proud and beaming, Sunset test garden coordinator Johanna Silver came into the kitchen with the whole One-Block Feast crop of Yukon Golds in a box: 22 pounds of fresh spuds.

She also had a small bag of spade victims, which she'd accidentally mauled while digging around in the bed.

“You can still eat them,” she said. “But they’ll only last a couple of days.” That’s because bacteria love a freshly cut potato.

Determined to use any scrap of edibleness coming out of our garden, I took them home that night, cut off the blackened bits (Johanna wasn’t kidding—some were already starting to go), peeled them, and boiled them in salted water. When they were just tender (I could slide the tip of a sharp knife into them easily), I drained them and put them in a bowl with a hunk of butter. As the butter started melting, I sprinkled on some black pepper and chopped parsley and gave them a slow stir.

The whole thing took about 20 minutes. What great potatoes. They were unusually dense and slightly creamy, and they tasted—I don’t know how else to put it—young. Not just fresh, but sweet and light. If the wrecked potatoes can taste this good, I can’t wait to try the whole ones.

At last, after much trial and error, we eat! See how our crops became a summer feast. | Jump to the recipes.

Coming up next: How we're eating from the garden every day.

Veggie-garden primer | Sunset guides to growing edibles

By Margo True, Sunset food editor

A few of the choices for our summer feast.

Over in the Food Department, we're dreaming of what to cook (and plant) for our summer feast. Arugula salads with a rainbow of ripe tomatoes, from yellow to orange to deep red. Fresh corn on the cob. A classic California avocado salad with crisp red onions, olives, and parsley. Warm figs. But with what--maybe honey? Or blue cheese? Almost instantly, we're craving foods that can't be raised from seed or seedling. We're so used to getting what we want, all the time.

Even fruits and vegetables get a reality check once Team Garden steps in to look at our wish list. Arugula, it turns out, withers in the heat of the summer growing season; it does best in spring. Our fig vine was pruned so severely last year that it probably won't bear much fruit in August, not enough to plan on, anyway. Avocados take at least five years to bear fruit. Ah well.

Team Garden is reassuringly full of ideas for what we can grow, though. Tomatoes--no problem, although they'll be on the small side. Corn will work, but we won't get the deep, corny flavor that you do in the Midwest; this just isn't ideal corn country. Ours will be sweet and juicy instead. Chiles might be mild, because our summers are. Potatoes ought to be fine; squashes, too, and a curvaceous zucchini called trombetta (it's on the right in the photo above). Herbs will take off. Lemongrass--who knows? Fresh chickpeas, which you can nibble right from the stalk, could be a complete crapshoot because it's very late to be planting summer crops. (Oops.) We'll just try it and see what happens.

It's becoming clear that this menu is going to be as light as a little summer dress. We're starting to worry that we’ll have to go get pizza afterward, or a steak. So, for substance, we're going to try to raise some chickens, in a spot in the test garden where a koi experiment once took place (they were eaten, I think, by raccoons, and the remnants of their pond are all that's left behind). We already took a vote as to whether we'd cook these chickens, and we won't--we'll use their eggs instead. (Six birds won't last us long, but dozens and dozens of eggs will.)

We'll need cooking fat, too. Peanuts seemed easiest--you just whirl them up in a food processor and wait for the oil to separate--but they won't grow outside a Southern climate. Corn--? Extracting oil from the ears seems impossible and requiring of much intricate equipment. We do have olive trees, but have no idea whether the fruit is edible or how to press it. Time to find out!

What about sugar, for some kind of dessert? Growing sugar beets seems crazy. Sugar cane grows in the south but not here. Honey seems like our best bet. Maybe we'll think about raising some bees.

It's coming together. Before long, we hope we'll have some plants poking up. And some good, fresh food.