Quick Cherry Tomatoes and Pasta.

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A gardening friend gave me two Sweet 100 cherry tomato plants that have had us swimming in the teeniest, tinest tomatoes this summer.  I’ve been harvesting a few pints of them weekly and in order to keep up with them, I had to get creative.  I was slightly inspired by a recipe my friend Martha used in her cooking class last month, but because these tomatoes are so tiny that cutting them would be a complete pain (and waste of time), I decided to just throw them in the pan whole.

(They also have a slightly annoying habit of splitting upon being picked.)

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Stovetop Granola is totally a thing.

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My go-to summer breakfast is fruit with yogurt and granola. I typically buy my granola in the summer, not because it’s too hot to turn the oven on, but because I’ve fallen in love with a ginger granola that I’ve yet to be able to perfect at home and I find ginger granola to be the perfect complement to any fresh fruit combo I throw together.  That changed last week however, when not only was I out of granola, it was so incredibly hot outside that just the thought of getting in my car to go get granola was out of the realm of possibility. I began to wonder if stovetop granola was a thing and if it wasn’t, then could I make it a thing? Continue reading →

Getting Schooled.

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I spent three very delightful evenings this past week assisting down at the Charlottesville Cooking School with my friend Martha, who taught an Every Day Cooking Skills Series.  It’s a three part class that is usually taught over the course of three weeks, but Martha decided to teach it over three consecutive evenings in one week as a trial summer run.  The concept is sort of like a boot camp for cooking – it covers a variety of basic cooking techniques so that participants walk out  with skills to throw together simple seasonal and delicious dinners regularly.  Sounds too good to be true,  I know, but Martha is an amazing instructor who can make this happen and I don’t just say that because she’s a friend.  Martha is a trained chef, who has been teaching cooking classes longer than she wants to admit (which is also longer than I’ve been cooking).

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Pickled Cucumbers, every which way.

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Cucumbers are starting to come in and since I have a bit of reputation for pickling everything in sight, I’ve already started fielding requests for my favorite cucumber preserving recipes.  I thought I’d go ahead and put all my favorites into one post, so from here on out, I can just send this link in response to “What are your favorite cucumber pickle recipes?”

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Summer adventures.

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Edie and I took a quick road trip the other day – she chose to knock out next year’s PE requirement during a summer session, which put a bit of a damper on our usual June roadtrip plans.  We’ve been a bit more grounded and structured than I care to be during the summer, but such is life.

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Beyond Begonias.

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When people find out I do some free lance writing, they immediately ask what it is I usually write about, assuming most of the time that it’s food.  Actually, it’s gardening. Which then leads to them saying something like, ‘oh you must have a wonderful garden’. Actually, no I don’t.  Things get neglected and crowded and weeds take over and there is absolutely no plan to it whatsoever, in fact, sometimes I’m liable to just walk out and randomly dig holes in which to plant things because I just feel like digging. But this spring I decided that I going to start trying to take my own advice, I’m going to try to be the sort of gardener I wrote about. Continue reading →