Megan Scott has been both a cheese maker and a goat herder. Currently, she’s working with her fiancé, John Becker, on updates to the American classic cookbook ‘The Joy of Cooking’ and has recently overseen production of their new website. She lives, writes, and keeps chickens in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee.

Ramp land

The exploitation of an unusual vegetable

By Megan Scott

May 25, 2012

Growing up, I was given doses of family stories the way some kids are given Flintstone vitamins. As my family hails from Appalachia, I heard the requisite tales of ancestral moonshining, of apple orchards tucked between the hills, and of sylvan homesteads brimming with dent corn, collard greens, and freshly laid eggs.

My grandfather recounted an expedition for ginseng (or “sang,” as the old-timers called it) when he and a fellow forager upset a hornet nest and had to leave their bounty on the hillside, only to have another hunter poach it from their stomping grounds before they could return for it.

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Originally from Houston, Texas, Jacob Grier is the lead bartender at Metrovino in Portland, Oregon. He writes the drink-and-policy weblog Liquidity Preference.

Sweet on liqueurs

Take another look at these spirits

By Jacob Grier

May 15, 2012

The liqueur aisle at the liquor store used to be a scary place, offering row upon row of cheap, neon-colored bottles made with artificial flavors. In the decades during which making craft cocktails was a forgotten art, these spirits found their way into sickly sweet concoctions better left forgotten.

But the recent revival of quality cocktails brought with it a reaction against drinks that are too sugary, with tastes leaning toward subtle, complex, and often challenging flavors. Bartenders have fallen in love with bitter liqueurs like Fernet and herbal elixirs like Chartreuse.

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Joan Menefee has never been a picky eater. She and her husband live in Menomonie, Wisconsin, where they tend gardens in two counties and eat plums and grapes in public parks.

Wabi-sabi cookery

Cooking is a constant history lesson

By Joan Menefee

May 7, 2012

In this corner of eternity called the kitchen, I am constantly making space. Too often, I think, we consider our kitchen tasks as beginning the moment our hands touch food or food-making tools. To make dinner is to open that first drawer or door and grasp an object, be it a pot, a spoon, or a box of noodles.

Cookbooks nowadays give readers a time-to-table estimate, as if knowing how long it takes to make a dish is of much consequence. People tell me that this is a planning aid, but I don’t believe that time is the true barrier to home cooking. And in any case, these estimates also limit cooking time to the moment we begin a particular recipe or preparation.

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Megan Scott has been both a cheese maker and a goat herder. Currently, she’s working with her fiancé, John Becker, on updates to the American classic cookbook ‘The Joy of Cooking’ and has recently overseen production of their new website. She lives, writes, and keeps chickens in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee.

A quiche lesson

The crux is the crust

By Megan Scott

April 26, 2012

When I am at my most harried and discouraged, I remember quiche.

When two hailstorms in three days tatter my spring garden. When taxes are due, the chicken coop needs cleaning, and the aspic recipe I was testing sticks, irreconcilably, in its mold.

As days lengthen, it seems there is less time than ever for the luxurious pleasure of cooking for the sake of cooking.

When cooking falls off the back burner, a jar of peanut butter with a long spoon often provides my nourishment. I make a big batch of granola and reach far back in the freezer for the half loaf of stale bread I couldn’t bring myself to throw away. Dinner’s served.

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Caroline Lewis is a gardener and cook in Portland, Oregon, and the proprietor of Verdura Culinary Gardens. She also teaches cooking classes at In Good Taste.

Kids thrive in the garden

Little farmers

By Caroline Lewis

April 10, 2012

There are many reasons to involve your kids in vegetable gardening. They learn where their food comes from, they develop healthier eating habits, and they spend more time outside. But to me, the best reason is a somewhat selfish one: seeing the look on their faces the first time they pull a carrot out of the ground or taste a sugar snap pea right off the vine.

We have worked with quite a few families over the years, learning from experience that children are much more likely to eat vegetables they’ve grown themselves than anything from the store. Kids are smart — homegrown veggies taste better. And when they’ve nurtured the plants themselves, they’re curious to taste them.

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Megan Scott has been both a cheese maker and a goat herder. Currently, she’s working with her fiancé, John Becker, on updates to the American classic cookbook ‘The Joy of Cooking’ and has recently overseen production of their new website. She lives, writes, and keeps chickens in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee.

Kitchen thrift

Using everything

By Megan Scott

March 23, 2012

Culinate editor’s note: We are pleased to welcome Tennessee-based writer and cook Megan Scott to the Dinner Guest Blog.

I grew up surrounded by frugal cooks.

My great-grandmother saves sheets of tin foil and plastic wrap as well as sour-cream containers, and I happen to know that on Sundays, when the whole family gathers for a noontime feast, she saves the leftover coffee.

I always assumed these habits came from living through the Great Depression, but no. As she put it: “We didn’t know there was a Great Depression. We were already poor.”

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Based in Portland, Oregon, Harriet Fasenfest gardens, cooks, writes, teaches, and speaks on the issues of food security and justice. Her book, A Householder's Guide to the Universe, was published in fall 2010. She is currently working on a new book and curriculum guide for teaching householding.

What is a Householder CSA?

A preserver-friendly arrangement

By Harriet Fasenfest

March 13, 2012

It is CSA time. Farmers are planning, plotting, and planting their fields, while eaters are considering their seasonal needs. In a perfect show of mutual support, the two come together each year in a system of farm-direct purchasing known as community-supported agriculture.

The CSA system is brilliant: Eaters pay up front for a farm share (to offset some of the farmer’s early planting costs) and farmers, in return, offer the best their fields will yield. Together, they have nurtured a farming renaissance in this country.

There is a maturity to this union, since some years are better than others. As it turns out, the harvest will not be manhandled. The good earth can be fickle. A great year for tomatoes will not necessarily suggest a great year for potatoes. Those who cannot abide the vagrancy of CSA farming might balk; their sights have been set on a different model. They are yet looking for the blemish-free, perfectly shaped, tweaked, and modified bonbons of produce land. These shoppers are harder to win over.

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Joan Menefee has never been a picky eater. She and her husband live in Menomonie, Wisconsin, where they tend gardens in two counties and eat plums and grapes in public parks.

Thoreau and compost cookies

The sacred and the profane

By Joan Menefee

March 8, 2012

Honest to Pete, during class the other day, my Environmental Literature students asked me if I thought Henry David Thoreau hunted magic mushrooms in the woods near Walden Pond.

Bless their countercultural little hearts, I say. As good as it is to understand Thoreau as a purveyor of American Romanticism, it is almost equally important to see him in your mind’s eye, hunting for a juicy patch of ‘shrooms. Thoreau for real.

In Walden, as he begins his discourse on eating in a chapter called “Economy,” Thoreau writes,

“Bread I at first made of pure Indian meal and salt, genuine hoe-cakes, which I baked before my fire out of doors on a shingle or the end of a stick of timber sawed off in building my house; but it was wont to get smoked and have a piny flavor. I tried flour also; but have at last found a mixture of rye and Indian meal most convenient and agreeable. In cold weather it was no little amusement to bake several small loaves of this in succession, tending and turning them as carefully as an Egyptian his hatching eggs. They were a real cereal fruit which I ripened, and they had to my senses a fragrance like that of other noble fruits, which I kept in as long as possible by wrapping them in cloths.”

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Caroline Lewis is a gardener and cook in Portland, Oregon, and the proprietor of Verdura Culinary Gardens. She also teaches cooking classes at In Good Taste.

Preparing to plant

A garden checklist for March

By Caroline Lewis

March 5, 2012

Although it may still seem quite early, this is the time of year when we all need to get our gardens rolling: planning the plantings, building garden frames, ordering and starting seeds, cleaning up from winter, and amending soil.

Otherwise, we run the risk of missing out on the all-important early-spring season: peas, lettuce, spinach, arugula, onions and more. (And if you have never tasted home-grown peas, you’ll just have to trust me that this is well worth doing).

Remember that the key to growing vegetables year-round is planning — and to understanding that planting is not just something that takes place when the tomatoes go in the ground in May. Here are some tips on what to do this month.

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Joan Menefee has never been a picky eater. She and her husband live in Menomonie, Wisconsin, where they tend gardens in two counties and eat plums and grapes in public parks.

Do-over fever

Revisiting September’s efforts

By Joan Menefee

February 1, 2012

At times, I have believed that my greatest asset in life is my ability to live with my mistakes. In cooking, this often results in quick changes of plan or wolfing down the evidence before anyone else even knows I was trying to prepare food.

Phyllo dough dried out? Pop the sheets spritzed with water in the microwave and drape the resultant “noodles” in a baklava-ish pattern. Too much baking powder in the biscuits? Blam: six eaten at the stove.

In search of dramatic unities, television shows depict failed dishes as inedible. But the truth is that cooking failures are a gray area the size of Siberia. It’s not that the calories cannot be wrenched from the steaming tray before us without our retching; it’s that these calories do not represent the ideals we were chasing when we first opened our pretty cookbooks.

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