Ok, I know i just did a post about how inedible bitter melon is, but this is actually becoming a recipe I crave. I love the way all the flavors blend together! In Chinese medicine the flavors influence our different organ systems. Having a balance of all the five flavors brings balance to your whole…
Tag: Florida gardening
LATE SUMMER VEGETABLE GROWING AND EATING GUIDE #2: Bitter melon
Most people I’ve met who have had a culinary adventure with bitter melon share stories of horror. When I first tried to feed it to my family years ago I got the same reaction I get from trying to feed the piggies something they don’t consider food: outraged squealing and disgruntled criticisms. I didn’t grow…
LATE SUMMER GROWING AND EATING GUIDE #3: Callaloo
Callaloo or amaranth greens, are of if my favorite summer vegetables. They cook down to be very tender, and have such a delicious flavor. When cooked they are very much like spinach. Apparently any amaranth leaves can be eaten, even the thorny wild one if you’re so inclined, but some are better eating quality than…
LATE SUMMER VEGETABLE GROWING AND EATING GUIDE #1: Late Summer Asian Cucumbers
Let’s be honest – the late summer garden vegetables are gorgeously colorful and tasty, but they are definitely unusual. For a long time, I thought nothing would grow this time of year, and it rested in my gardening mind like a deep winter of sorts. That was before I discovered the wonderful selection of vegetables…
Sky Blue Sticky Rice With Blue Butterfly Pea
I just love the wild and twisting shapes, the intense, slippery flavors, and the bright colors of the late summer garden. A good late summer garden in Florida should look and feel like anything could happen, like a loud Saturday night party scene. The crickets and cicadas blare their loud music day and night, and…
Breakfast Parsnips And Bacon
We are in those baking hot, long sun days now, the hard drought time of the early summer when even the wild plants wilt and long for rain. At my new farm, the dry afternoon wind blows through the herby meadows and smells fragrant and good from the wild croton and the skullcap. This year…
Buttery Cauliflower With Toasted Pecans
I love the power surge that comes from the earth and sky in the beginning of spring. It happens so quickly. One drowsy winter day you fall asleep in the damp chill, and suddenly you are picked up and shaken awake in a whirl of pink and pure white and new green, and the bright…
CRISPY SESAME GARLIC EGGPLANT
The first frosts of the winter have come through. I am missing the woodstoves I left behind in my old life, but I remember, too, when we had first moved, and nothing was finished yet, and the slow process over eight years where life felt more and more comfortable. Little details, like which direction a…
Roselle Sweet And Sour Pork
The weather is so cool and sweet after the latest storm. I love those quiet moments that always seem to happen this time of year, when the afternoon sun sweeps glorious golden arms through the tops of the trees, and the bare branches of the sleeping trees look so lonely… Melancholy settles on me…
Harissa
I often get ideas for recipes not in the kitchen, but in the garden. The plants, they talk. They give you hints and nudges. Not in words, of course, but in little whiffs of smells – or the irresistible beauty of their fruits and roots and leaves. I’m trying again with the garden. It’s hard…
Summer Eggplant Curry With Millet Dumplings
Midsummer is such a strange time – just like the winter solstice, when you can faintly feel the little flicker of light behind the darkness, here you can sense the dark shadows behind the stark brightness of summer. The garden is still beautiful, even in the middle of summer. This year it has been the…
Harvest
This year has lacked a dry season, making the pastures already green and beautiful and filled with flowers. Walking through the cow-paths, the starry Erigeron flowers swirl past in a green galaxy of grass. It isn’t the usual hot, blue, open skies of May, but chased all over with piled up clouds shadowed with silver…
Toadstools And Fairy Rings 