creative vegetable and mushroom soup ideas, with alexandra stafford

Cold Winter days call for warm, comforting soups. This is one of my family’s favorite on a cold Winter’s day! Roasting the vegetables helps to bring out their flavor, allowing for minimal added fat and salt, while not compromising on flavor. This recipe makes a hearty vegetable soup thick with tomatoes, onion, green bell peppers, mushrooms, potatoes, carrots, and barley. You can add additional broth if you prefer, and the soup also freezes well. To learn more about the safe handling of vegetables, check out HGIC 3517, Safe Handling of Fresh Fruits and Vegetables. Enjoy!

WI TOLD ANDRE ABOUT the male Eastern Bluebird’s annual rite of spring, the so-called Nest Demonstration Display, I didn’t think he believed me. It’s a little bait and switch in which the boy bird (in Andre Jordan‘s depiction, Darius) carries a twig or two around in his beak and makes a big show near the entrance to his proposed nest box or tree cavity. In and out he goes with those twigs as props, as if to say, “Look, gorgeous, I’m decorating a house for us. I’m your man.” But you know how it goes with men, don’t you? (Aren’t I just awful?) The thing is, the male bluebird never lifts a beak to really build the nest. He’s a faker, but a handsome one (in real life, his back and head are a brilliant royal blue and only his breast is reddish). No matter the hijinks; the female falls for it, happily giving up the goods. Then she has to build herself and the kids a nest and tackle all the other housekeeping chores, too. A woman’s work, as it has been said, is never done.

If you said Heuchera, you’re right. Perhaps you’re going to reshuffle some shady beds this spring, and know that Heuchera, with their great foliage, can help make garden pictures work–but wonder which ones, and how best to use them. I invited George Coombs, trial garden manager at the must-visit Mt. Cuba Center in Delaware, with 50 acres of native-plant display gardens and 500 acres of natural land, back to the radio show to help make the best choices and grow them to perfection.George knows from Heuchera, having trialed 83 varieties side by side (the exhaustive results are in this pdf). “I say to people, ‘I’m doing Consumer Reports for plants,'” he explains. Though there are countless varieties on the market, many are duplicative in appearance or just not distinctive. “I can honestly say that when it

When Alexandra Stafford, author of the book “Bread Toast Crumbs” and creator of the website alexandracooks.com, has visited the podcast before in recent years, we’ve usually talked vegetable cookery or soups, because we’re both big soup-makers. But 2020 is no normal year. And so what the hell? Let’s bake.Plus: Comment in the box at the bottom of the page for a chance to win one of the books we’re featuring—all five will be given away here to five readers. Then head over to Ali’s website for a chance to win each book, too (details below).Read along as you listen to the November 30, 2020 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on Apple Podcasts (iTunes) or Spotify or Stitcher

Peter is one of the world’s master bread-makers, and the author of six books on bread baking, including multiple James Beard Award winners such as “Whole Grain Breads,” “The Bread Baker’s Apprentice,” and “Crust and Crumb.” He is a baking instructor on the faculty of Johnson and Wales University in Charlotte, North Carolina, and has even delivered a popular TED talk on the subject.So when was the last time you baked bread—which to my taste competes with homemade soup as the ultimate comfort this time of year, when we gardeners head mostly indoors for the long wait? I interviewed Peter Reinhart on my public-radio show for inspiration on the best-tasting, healthiest ingredients—including some that are gluten free. The transcript of our chat follows:‘bread

Katrina and I have celebrated our similarities and differences since we met a couple of years ago at a book-industry trade show(read the whole story on her website). We both have corporate-publishing backgrounds, but then chose country, not city, as backdrops for our “second half” of life. Our differences aren’t really so different, we learned when reading the manuscripts last year to each other’s new books-to-be, “Magical Journey: An Apprenticeship in Contentment,” and“The Backyard Parables: Lessons on Gardening, and Life.”Katrina has been nurturing a husband and two sons for 25 years, the same time I’ve been mothering a sometimes-unruly gaggle of plants. (Yes, the garden has proven to be as worthy and complicated a life partner as any human mate.) Her new book isn’t about gardening, like mine is; it’s about finding herself with an empty nest. But we both explore themes like impermanence, adaptability, and the “what’s next” question we all find ourselves facing over and again—in the seasons of a garden, or a human life.Maybe owing to decades of cooking for her three hungry guys, Katrina is the kind of guest who always arrives

My longtime friend Ken, an award-winning garden photographer and author of many books, including “The New Shade Garden” and “Making More Plants,” produced his own “Real Dirt” podcast for 10 years, all available on KenDruse dot com.Read along as you listen to the May 15, 2017 edition of the program using the player below (or at this link). The May show is a doubleheader, and includes a whole “overtime” segment (starting at about 24 minutes into the audio file), which I’ve separated into its own transcript and is at this link (and includes questions and answers on what to do next, after you pull or dig invasives like garlic m

I almost went for Nigel Slater‘s baked onions with Parmesan and cream, and oh, the chickpea and sweet potato curry called out, too (it calls for pumpkin and onions both).“The Kitchen Diaries” is a book about “right food, right place, right time,” in Slater’s words, and though the precise diary days he fills in this delicious year may not match mine, exactly—Slater is in England—they unfold in similar order.  “Learning to eat with the ebb and flow of the seasons is the single thing that has made my eating more enjoyable,” he writes, eschewing the modern-day supermarket’s all-possibilities-all-the-time approach.Slater’s kitchen doors open onto a small urban London garden, and as I read the recipes and other musings on the weeks and months in the year, I can imagine him moving in and o

In this increasingly bountiful produce season, whether from the CSA, farmers’ market, or backyard, I’ve been turning to inspiration to my friend Alexandra Stafford’s website, Alexandra’s Kitchen, and to her Instagram feed, too. In a Q&A on my public-radio show and podcast, Ali’s shared how to store vegetables to make them last longest (hint: cut green off those roots at once, for instance) to recipes for pasta carbonara that uses a ton of them, or grilled-veggie tacos (photo, top of page), plus various sauces, quick pickles and pestos, too.Plus: Enter to win a copy of Ali’s cookbook “Bread Toast Crumbs” by using the comment form at the very bottom of the page. Read along as you listen to the June 25, 2018 edition of the podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes or

FULL SUN (or light shade in hotter zones), and well-drained soil that’s high in organic matter is the basic regimen (though the sweetbay magnolia, M. virginiana, can also take a wet spot). Give the others those requirements, plus a light layer of aged organic mulch, and they generally will thrive. Fertilizing isn’t needed, says Andrew. (At Scott they only mulch the circles of trees in lawn areas, using a combination of leaf compost and one-year-old composted wood chips.)Magnolias are not the easiest to plant under, however, because of their fleshy, moisture-hogging root systems.  “Some plants that can take dry shade will make a go of it,” he says, suggesting Epimedium, or Asarum, or Christmas fern. Among bulbs, try Scilla, or Chionodoxa, or even toadlilies (Tricyrtis), he recommends.Magnolia grandiflora, the so-called Southern magnol

That’s my rex begonia vine up top, Cissus discolor, one of my recent victories in last winter’s experiments in finding the right offseason storage spot for the right plant.Read along as you listen to the Sept. 24, 2018 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).begonia boliviensis and eucomisQ. We’ve have our first taste in the Northeast of fall in some recent days. So I thought it was a good time to sort of talk about bringing things in and getting ready, even if it’s not time urgently yet. We had a question from Amy, who wrote in

Alexandra Stafford, who creates AlexandraCooks.com and wrote the cookbook “Bread Toast Crumbs,” recently shared creative ideas for using herbs, with lots of recipe links of her own and from cookbooks she admires. I’ve added ideas for storing them for offseason use. We also fill you in on which ones it’s not too late to sow again right now, this summer (even up North where I garden), and at the bottom of the story: links to get you to another whole directory of herb recipes Ali has compiled to accompany this conversation, herb by herb. Read along as you listen to the August 7, 2017 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below (or at this link). Enter to win a copy of Ali’s book “Bread Toast Crumbs” in the comment box at the very bottom of the page.cooking with and preserving herbs: a q&a with alexandra staffordQ. Are you up to your neck