Hungry Times Two

I read A LOT .. so I can't remember now where I first saw this.  Oh yeah, it was on a planning listserv that I follow.  I recall reading a Linus Pauling quote noting, "The best way to get a good idea is to get lots of ideas."  I'm a community gardener and think this is a great idea - for the elderly (or "HonoredCitizens" as Tri-Met aptly notes) and anyone looking to meet new people. Grey fingers: Ageing Singapore uses gardening to fight loneliness http://www.thisisplace.org/i/?id=57e0917e-7682-4585-a77e-78b47072a724 The article has a great video in it as well, and if you're not familiar with the Queen's English (Singapore was part of the British Empire), an "allotment" is simply a garden plot and a "scheme" is simply a program - think of "schematic" (i.e. diagram) rather than "scheming" (up to no good). Simply put, community gardening combats loneliness, depression, and dementia, all of which can...

My preciouses Can you tell what I've been up to in my first summer in Oregon? It turns out if you put 12+ tomato plants in your garden, you best be ready for the tomatoes. Despite a historically hot and dry Summer 2018 here in Multnomah County, our Early Girls, Oregon Springs and San Marzanos thrived. Being "job free" this summer had its perks. After breakfast and feeling fully caffeinated, every other morning I'd take my best garden assistant, Loretta the pup, for a walk to the community garden at Gresham City Hall. I'd tether her to a garden stake under a tree and give her a bucket of water, and she'd turn full Goat, nibbling at the weeds along the border of the nearby garden plots. While Loretta grazed and supervised as my personal Garden Security Guard, I'd water every plant twice, filling up the "dirt collars" Scott built around each plant, which served as nice trenches for water. Then I'd pick off the ripe or nearly ripe...

One of our first garden hauls, on the best tea towel ever. Three zucchini plants. Three! Were we mad with garden fever, or just not paying attention when we planted two green and one golden/yellow zucchini in our community garden plot in June? It's now August, and at one point last week, I couldn't tuck anything else in our crisper drawers because the zucchini crowded everything else out. I can't complain, though, because it's turning out to be a versatile item in our kitchen this summer. Here's a brief rundown of ways we're using these summer squashes, which are fruits, botanically, but we won't tell them that: Raw zucchini salad with tomato vinaigrette, from Sheri Castle's The New Southern Garden Cookbook. Taking a vegetable peeler to a cold zucchini turns out to be a very good idea when you top the ribbons with a flavorful tomato dressing. Easy, fast, delicious.  Creamy zucchini lime dressing, from Cooking Light July 2018. The s...

64 degrees, friends.  That's the current temperature here in Gresham, Oregon, at 1:30pm PT on Monday, July 2.  This southern-born transplant is in awe. Yesterday while reading on our patio in mid-afternoon, I donned a long sleeve because of a light, cool breeze. If I was back in Charlotte right about now, I'd be removing as many layers as legally possible. It's a transition that's a welcome change. No more sweating off sunscreen or makeup, and goodbye frizzy hair that can claim it's own zip code? (Well, the hair is still kinda big.) I'm in! And Scott is no longer having summertime humidity  Nicolas Cage-style freak outs . Yet when it comes to gardening, the cooler temps and surprisingly dry weather so far are perplexing. After a bit of wrangling, we secured a large 20'x20' plot at Gresham City Hall community garden, which is walkable from our apartment. It took a full day to hack weeds out of the very rocky soil and hand-turn/till with ...

My favorite milk glass windowsill vases have been kicked to the side. They had such a good run early in the summer, holding herbs and flowers from our yard.  Instead, today we visited our community garden plots and HELLO LOVELIES. Our first two Brandywine tomatoes are nearly ripe and we found nearly 2 pounds of San Marzanos ready and waiting.  The windowsill is crammed today with these fruits. Yes, a tomato is a fruit. Tomorrow I'll find a small batch recipe for tomato sauce for the Marzanos. Food in Jars is typically a resource for that. This will be my first rodeo making sauce to can, so if anyone has tips, please share!

This is an interesting time to garden. It's pretty hot outside - the kind of warm that makes you reconsider your ban on grandma linen capri pants that you bought 2 pairs of a few years ago in a moment of humidity-induced weakness. (Or not. Maybe that's just me. I have three summer wardrobes: one that's meant for external audiences, a dowdy but comfy look that is Borderline Bag Lady, and a few "breath-able" things that could make a pastor blush.) In Charlotte it rains nearly every other day, either as torrential downpours or blink-and-you-miss-'em showers. I love the rain -- thanks to Mother Nature I get more time to sleep in the a.m. instead of lugging the hose to our backyard raised beds and our two plots in the community garden.  And the vegetable plants in the garden are right on the verge of exploding... but not quite.  You see the flowers popping up on the tomato, cukes and squash plants. Your green bean plants double their height ove...

I spent two days in the rain at a music festival this weekend. My new sandals received a special spring initiation with a solid dunking in gooey mud. My "waterproof" parka proved to be not so much. My husband tried to convince me that our camp chairs made excellent umbrellas. But I didn't care. While the downpours kept coming, I thought numerous times, "HELL YES. We just put in our summer garden." Something in me has changed. I no longer scowl when I see those first drops of rain on the car windshield, when the first rumble of thunder clatters off in the distance, or I see "Chance of Rain" in the newspaper. I think I'm really a gardener now, y'all. Part of it stems from sheer laziness. Last summer in early June, Scott and I played "Rock Paper Scissors" nearly every morning to see which loser had to haul over to our community garden plots for watering. (He actually prefers the alternate version "Cat Microwave Tinfoil...

I know it's nearly spring because 1) I'm popping antihistamines and guzzling hot tea to soothe my allergies, and 2) we just planted broccoli, beets, carrots and broccoli rabe in the community garden plots this past weekend. At home I planted three containers of bibb lettuce and four containers of Red Russian Kale. The herb seeds we scored at a recent Grow Share Charlotte seed swap are now planted in some old pots I found in our shed and soaking up the daylight in my office windows on folding TV trays. (We are some cheap frugal resourceful types, I tell you.) Hopefully in a week or so we'll have Lemon, Thai and Genovese basils, tarragon, lavender, marjoram and thyme friends sprouting. Here are the herb pots below, transported in the Little Red Wagon Scott found abandoned and slightly paint-splattered on a property in Concord. Again, we're so cheap frugal resourceful. We had a productive workday at the community garden on Saturday. Over 15 garden members mulched...

A vegetable garden in February is just so sad. Just ask actor Ethan Hawke, aka "Troy Dyer." For a while we had our raised bed of vibrant carrot tops -- the  Scarlet Nantes  variety. Scott and I kept checking in on them, occasionally pulling a small carrot or two, just to make sure they were growing. They have a 65-75 day maturity cycle, so since we planted them in late September...   Paging quality control.  ...in the third week of January, four inches of snow came and the green carrot tops became drab and shriveled-up. So Scott grabbed a hoe and turned up all the dirt in the raised bed. And we found the carrots waiting for us to rescue them before they became too woody to eat. Filthy carrots. Clean carrots. I'd like to make a pot roast or beef stew (naturally the lazy way, in the slow cooker) with these carrots but for now a quick way to use them is Mark Bittman's recipe for Curried Carrot Lentil Soup. I can't find it online but it...

This is what happens when, despite some ungodly temperatures here in North Carolina, your garden decides to go forth & dispense some goodies. I have 30 cucumbers in my crisper drawer right now, y'all. What. The. Heck. Fortunately, I like a good cucumber challenge. (Get your mind out of the gutter.) The first thing I did when our Seed Savers Exchange A&C and White Wonder  cukes started showing up was to find a good pickling recipe. And with temperatures hanging in the 100 degree fun zone for nearly 2 weeks here, I needed one that didn't require processing them. Who could conceive of a hot water canning bath in that kind of weather?

Brushing off the old blog here... pardon the dust bunnies. It's a rainy gross day here in Charlotte and I have the day off. I started thinking about what I do when I'm not working like a Doozer. (Sidebar: I tried to find the Fraggle Rock " Work Your Cares Away" song to link to but I nearly fell down a YouTube rabbit hole. If you're a proper child of the '80s you shouldn't need the link anyway.) I miss writing but I think I've shied away from it due to an aversion to more time looking at a glowing screen. I get plenty of that in my daily schedule and with these smartphones we're all addicted to now. I thought about maybe going old school and writing with pen and paper. But I remembered this blog, and the other I started with very nice intentions a few years ago, and so here I am. It wasn't until I cancelled my subscription to Bon Appetit and started getting annoyed by all the food photos in my Facebook and Twitter feed that I realized my ...

We planted three cherry tomato plants earlier in the season and being novices, we had no idea what that would yield. We also had no idea that our compost in our abandoned raised beds would spawn six or seven cherry tomato plants. Surprise, us! We now have what could be quantified as a shit-ton (a technical term, I hear) of these little delights. Today I took five seconds to pop a few cups of them in the broiler. Five minutes later -- a tasty something to toss into pasta or, as I am doing now, topping a taco in place of salsa. One of my fave things to do with broiled tomatoes - blend with cold butter. Easy, delicious and did I mention it's easy and delicious?  Hope you are enjoying tomatoes this summer!

There's been a lull here at Hungry Times Two (staring at computer all day for work, or job-search), but a recent community garden visit inspired this post.  I always joke that I hate yard work/landscaping and love gardening because you can't eat mown grass and tomatoes are worth the effort. In essence, it's the debate between flower/ornamental gardening and fruit/vegetable gardening.  There's definitely one crop that achieves a beautiful, edible balance between these two camps: okra! We're growing a red okra (delicious when grilled) and this lovely flower's currently on one of four okra bushes (below). The okra shot was taken with a chain link fence in the foreground, which keeps out riff-raff (rabbits, squirrels, etc.) and is also supporting our prolific burpless cucumber plant (below). We've had a bumper crop of cukes and yellow squash, which we've discovered grows FAST in just a day or so!  Erin made sure to document "Attack of the ...

Where Does General Tso Chicken Actually Come From? From TED Radio Hour -- Takeaways: It's pronounced "Tsow" (rhymes with "Ow"). Fortune cookies don't exist in China. All the food we Americans think we know as Chinese really isn't. (It's still sweet and spicy goodness, though.) Friendship Trays & Friendship Gardens We volunteered last week with these orgs, planting radishes and carrots in their plots at their main distribution center. It was great to meet some new people, get our hands dirty, and help out.  And they have a  garden sign made of metal utensils - I want to make one for our yard.  Second Helpings  A carry-out and catering shop on the East side that employs women with records. The service was slow but the chocolate cake rocked, as did the kale soup loaded with veggies and the grilled pimento cheese sandwich. They're trying to attract more business, so CLT peeps get on it.  Nashville I'm visiting in a few week...

That's carrots and eggs for all you gringos who aren't into practicing your Spanish.  We harvested a handful of  Scarlet Nantes carrots from our garden recently, so here's the harvest.  Erin botched up the French pronunciation (she said "nan-tees", correct is "non-t" with super-soft French hint of "t"), so we had a good laugh at that.  And I, of course, am not a French speaker, and have been known to say "Salad Nick-o-zee" for Salad Nicoise - ain't nobody perfec t. Also, here's a side-by-side comparison of grocery store brown egg vs. a backyard heirloom egg.  We got the heirloom egg as $1-change on a table we bought from a guy in Matthews, NC, the southeast suburban edge of Charlotte.  Aren't country purchases the best?

Holy hot sauce! One lousy post in the month of July. I think it's safe to say HTT abandoned this blog to rot out in cyberland. My apologies, but it's been a bastardy beast of a month, capping off with an end of the month move to the east side of Nashville, across the Cumberland River. Our new place - the fourth now in three years living in Music City, USA - is loverly, with a river bluff view and a big narrow yard. The owners left a strange circle of river rocks in the backyard and we're thinking it'd be perfect for a G-A-R-D-E-N. No, our struggling containers of basil, mint, rosemary and Thai basil don't count as far as digging in the dirt is concerned. Scott is jonesin' for the opportunity to get his hands messy and grow his own organic fall and winter veggies and I'm curious to see what the fuss is all about. I have photos of some of the things I am about to describe, but in the move I have buried my USB cord somewhere deep down below and I'm too gh...