London Holland Park’s water feature in Kyoto Garden.
21.07.2023 - 22:25 / awaytogarden.com
I SMILED as I first opened Deborah Madison’s latest cookbook to the table of contents, and saw that the introductory section was modestly titled, “A Few Things I’ve Learned About Vegetarian Cooking.” Oh, to know those same “few” things as Madison, the vegetarian chef and teacher and author who is often rightly referred to as a culinary icon and is also a champion of farmers, owing to her longtime activism in their behalf.The latest book also feels very personal, and no wonder: It’s called “In My Kitchen,” and includes her “new and favorite vegetarian recipes.”
Deborah Madison learned these “few” things along the way in her life adventure that so far includes stints cooking at Chez Panisse and then at the restaurant called Greens, one of the first in the Bay Area to feature a farm-inspired cuisine. She has authored 14 cookbooks, including “The New Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone” and “Vegetable Literacy,” earning four James Beard Awards and many other honors in the process.Deborah generously agreed to share some of those few key things she’s learned, and a recipe. Read along as you listen to the June 5, 2107 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes or Stitcher (and browse my archive of podcasts here).
Plus: enter to win a copy of “In My Kitchen” by commenting in the box at the bottom of the page.
q&a on the ‘in my kitchen’ cookbook, with deborah madisonQ. I don’t mean to tease you about the “few” thing, but it would be like my saying I had a “few” plants over here. [Laughter.]
A. Right.[Laughter.]
Q. I just have a few, Deborah.
A. I just have a few, too. But really they do boil down to just a few essential things, and that’s just what these are about.
London Holland Park’s water feature in Kyoto Garden.
Our transatlantic cousins still benefit from the Pilgrim fathers gardening knowledge taken to their shores centuries ago. The potato famine of 1845-50 caused Irish farmers to discover the Idaho potato. Now these and other horticultural favours can be returned by this book of organic homespun tips.
Before cooking your turkey, it is highly recommended to make sure it is completely defrosted.
If you are anything like me, you are constantly adding to your gardening toolbox. Below are a few tools that I cannot live without in my gardening adventures. The best news is that for $40, you can enjoy these tools and the entertainment they provide for years.
It’s turkey time!
It never fails that come March and April, the desire for many of our lawns to begin to breaking dormancy is met with the horror that the only things that seem to be green are the weeds that we have been ignoring throughout winter. This may include white clover, dandelions, chickweed, the painful lawn burweed, or so any other species. These weeds may be welcome to some homeowners as some serve as early pollen sources for pollinators, but they can also be a nuisance to others.
It is time to think about how you are going to prepare your Thanksgiving turkey. How do you prepare yours? Have you ever tried brining to add flavor and moisture? Brining meat is the process of adding salt before cooking to add moisture and flavor. A turkey can be brined using a wet or dry process. It is important to consider both methods before choosing which one you want to use. Both ways produce a flavorful and moist turkey but have other important considerations that may impact your choice.
I‘VE HAD NO INTERNET FOR 5 DAYS, but that isn’t the only monkey-business going on. The daily antics include many summits by local chippies to the top of Big Buddha (and in fact all my Buddhas).
I first met Deb Perelman in my former life, when I worked for Martha Stewart. It was late 2007 or early 2008—a millennium ago in internet years—and we’d invited in a group of bloggers we admired to get better acquainted. Deb sat to my left (and beyond her was Heidi Swanson of 101Cookbooks.com, with the founders of Apartment Therapy and theKitchn.com across the table, and more). I think that gathering is what crystallized my intention to start a website: such an inspiring group.But I digress. If you haven’t visited Smitten Kitchen, prepare to be entertained, educated, and called to action.DEB PERELMAN is a self-taught home cook, and is funny in that self-deprecating way I love (often using the cross-out strikethrough key on her editing dashboard to good effect). On the blog, and in the new cookbook, Deb invites you into her kitchen, and family, teaching you (her Tips section online alone is worth a visit, let alone all her recipes) while tempting you. You always come away hungry…until you get out the ingredients
IF YOU ARE STILL USING any synthetic chemicals on your lawn, I hope you will stop. So does Paul Tukey. When he founded SafeLawns in 2006, Paul says, “It didn’t occur to people that their lawns could be dangerous.”“The sad reality is that we know that a lot of the chemicals used to grow the lawn (the fertilizers), or the chemicals used to control weeds or insects or fungal diseases—all of these chemicals are designed to kill things, and they can make us very sick, and they make the water very sick, and the soil very sick, and the air very unhealthy.”Giving up chemicals doesn’t mean you have to pave over your front yard.“We will have lawns long after all these chemicals are banned in the United States, as they have been banned in Canada,” says Paul—explaining that more than 80 percent of Canadians cannot use weed and feed products, or glyphosate (the active ingredient in Roundup herbicide) because they are
DID I MENTION THAT I COUNT BIRDS? (…4 tree swallows, 2 pileated, 5 turkey vultures, 4 bluebirds…no partridge in a pear tree but close. I could go on and on.) Everybody’s returning as fast as the plants are blooming: warblers, catbirds, hummingbirds are all here, with voices (and nests) galore.
AS IF IT KNOWS THAT FIREWORKS ARE CALLED FOR this weekend, the biggest old bottlebrush buckeye here, Aesculus parviflora (above), is in full bloom. Pow! A 15-foot-wide by 12-foot-tall mass of high energy, with each bloom more than a foot tall.