ooh, stinging nettle spaetzle! I must try it. I’ve been eating stinging nettles for the past year and have discovered that they’re a fabulous way to test the mettle of your dinner & lunch guests. my brother-in-law demurred; a friend, nervously, dove in to try my stinging nettle pesto pasta. I do it without basil, but with lots of sour cream or creme fraiche, and it’s wonderful.

I love this, Laura, and have read through it with a growing desire to help with the ketchup recipe project :)

Matthew! do you know about miso butter cookies? Proves your theory about miso + butter.g Miso does belong in everything...

Thanksgiving is finally time to start taking advantage of all those preserves; I’m planning to make a couple of jars of harvest-type pie filling (I just made apple-quince-cranberry-maple and it was awesome!) and several jars of cranberry-walnut-orange conserve to go with the turkey. and for finger food? green bean pickles and hot pepper carrots. all I have to do is open some jars. I’m also making pie crust ahead and freezing it in the pans so dessert won’t create a bit of mess or fuss.

thank you Emma J! it always heartens me to see other families rethinking the little ways we stand up as individuals for community and sustainability -- for the future -- and not for the corporate “efficiency” models that have really hurt us and taken away the quiet sweet connectedness of our society. whether it’s raising our own chickens or biking on our errands, it’s an easy way to a better world.

sorry Emily-- I didn’t see your comment until now! my pie crust recipe was long an ordinary shortening pie crust recipe altered to use butter -- it’s here -- and I now always refrigerate the dough for an hour or so before I roll it out.

lately I’ve begun to use a combination of lard and butter, and whole wheat flour (either ww pastry flour or some of the huge bag of shepherd’s grain ww bread flour i have in the pantry) more often. I don’t measure much!

I love every bit of this. I, too, have come across those color-drunk bees, splayed out on a sunflower as if murdered by an invisible arrow. they never move while I’m watching, but an hour later, they’ll be gone, perhaps having drug themselves on a walk of shame back to the hive.

and it’s such a release to leave the landscaping up to the plants. the pumpkins have pushed through my picket fence and are trying to take over the sidewalk. the cannellini beans are crawling up the Russian Mammoth sunflowers and down the gone-to-seed lettuce. beneath it all, a tiny strawberry fruits for a second time this season. surprise! and are those a bunch of tiny kale plants sprouting on the top of that bare mound of dirt?

whenever I wonder if I shouldn’t pull out a plant or make things look a little neater, I remember, hey! I’ll be able to eat that one day. let it be. and everyone who walks by our house stares at our bewildering array of sprouting-blooming-fruiting-gone wild vegetables. gusto indeed.

great piece.

Jean: well, yes and no. any meat that’s sold commercially (through farmer’s markets or stores) must be inspected and regulated. direct-to-consumer sales often don’t have the same rules. if I buy a chicken from my friend’s backyard, no: no inspection. in that case, though, I’ll be pretty intimate with the slaughtering process (I’ve been begging Chris, who’s linked in my piece, to let me come the next time she gets together with friends to harvest chickens!).

there are some slaughterhouses where you can take backyard chickens who start crowing to be killed and prepped; I believe these have to undergo the same inspections that any other meat processing plant would.

and thanks for all your thoughtful and passionate comments.

I grew these for the first time this year! (well, I tried last year, but they didn’t fruit due to chicken invaders.) They’re yummy. So far I’ve only eaten them whole but here is what I’m planning to do with them:

-- “pineapple” salsa with cherry tomatoes, red onions and lime juice. chop everything really small and then add herbs to taste (cilantro, if you like it).
-- a marmalade with either lemons or limes (depending on what’s at the co-op) and pineapple tomatilloes. I don’t have a recipe for you but I’ll try and write one down eventually. I made a plum-lime marmalade that was delicious and added chipotle pepper, so this is my inspiration.
-- a really interesting enchilada sauce. peel tomatilloes and then whir them in a cuisinart (or food mill or blender). chop a little onion really fine, saute (with garlic if desired) in olive oil or lard until tender, add in a teaspoon of cumin, your tomatilloes (and some peeled, seeded, pureed tomatoes if you don’t have enough tomatilloes -- I’d do half and half), and let cook until thick. add in a couple tablespoons of cream, creme fraiche, sour cream, or other creamy substance right before you serve it and season with salt, pepper and cayenne/chipotle/paprika to taste.

also, these are also called “ground cherries”, which may help in recipe searches.

Aliza, your post makes me both mourn the Venice that was and long for the Venice that is. what a fitting tribute to the power of food rituals (and salumi and red wine). perhaps we can help Venice live with us by adapting and teaching our children to savor and honor food as a daily celebration of artistry and community.

pscheel: sorry I didn’t respond until now! here is my recipe for currant jelly -- it’s inspired by harriet of course :)

harriet: here’s my take on the worm problem based on totally unscientific observation of sour cherry picking. I think that they’re far more likely in fruit that’s been left on the tree/bush/vine past ripening; in one cherry tree in my neighborhood that had gone totally unharvested, the first picking yielded a bountiful quantity of cherries with barely any worms. the second picking, during which I noticed a huge quantity of flies sitting on the ripe fruit, yielded a much larger quantity of worms (I found myself picking them out, throwing a lot of cherries to the chickens, and finally skimming a bunch of worms from the top of my cooked cherries -- where fortunately they came to the surface). I can’t imagine how many worms I must have consumed!

so that’s my thoughts. there were no worms at all in the currants from square peg farm, nor from the ones I picked from my sister-in-law’s rental, though of course I’m straining them too so if they’re present, I haven’t eaten them raw and whole at least :)

this is lovely, and it reminds me of so many distant relatives and in-laws whose choices can be so confounding and yet spark into your memory with unusual bits of glorious love.

yay for hippies! I keep looking back to the late 70s, when I was a little girl, and wishing I’d adopted more of the hippie movement all around me (I lived in inner SE Portland, the very nexus of northwest hippies) instead of waiting ‘til I was in my 30s. so many of the things they espoused then -- eat whole grains, reduce reliance on oil, grow your own veggies, don’t buy stuff from multi-national corporations -- seemed crazy then and now are the organizing tenets behind my life.

now I’m a CSA believer too. I haven’t made the plunge yet due to a dearth of cash in springtime, but a friend offered to let me pick up her CSA share this week, as she was going out of town and knew her husband wouldn’t get around to using the veggies. I went to my own husband, eagerly asking, “guess what? we get to pick up a CSA share!” as if this was the most amazing news we got all year. “Whee!” he said, sarcastically. “what’s that?” he’s IN the military and he was coming up with potential military acronyms... heehee.

anyway, I’ve been having a great time tracking the food I’ve made from her CSA and I plan to write about it... and make some pickles to drop off when she’s home from her trip.

Jacqueline, I just harvested a ton of scapes from my garlic (which I grew for the first time this year) and put a little in my pesto tonight, coincidentally. I think I’m going to make the rest of ‘em into pickles, just because they look so adorable. aren’t garlic scapes the best?

Rhubarb Soda by cafemama on May 31, 2009 at 6:26 PM PDT

Barbara, I also added in spearmint, I thought I was so brilliant :) it was delicious!

I think what the pesticide pushers fail to realize is that, before the 50s or 60s, everything was grown organically, and surprise! even though by the 1940s we’d already come through the industrial revolution with a vengeance, no starvation.

now, of course we’d starve if none of us knew how to cook vegetables or grow things. is it now elite to make soup? I’m starting to wonder.

Green Garlic Pesto by cafemama on May 28, 2009 at 11:08 PM PDT

tonight I made this in the mortar & pestle, and with chopped hazelnuts (freddy guys had ‘em cheap), and it’s swoon-worthy!

I agree with other commenters: this article was timely and thought-provoking. (and I used it as more reason why we shouldn’t buy orange juice and other Florida farm products.) I too think urban agriculture and supporting small farmers whose ethical standards prevent them from employing such inhumane labor practices is a big part of the answer. it’s not all grow-your-own, but a combination.

for legislative change, it’s all about raising awareness, and showing others photographs like the ones you included here. we need more housing like that at Nuevo Amanecer -- a lot more -- and more scrutiny of labor practices both here and abroad. that Americans are buying fair-trade coffee and chocolate, but boxes of tangelos picked by slaves stateside, is deplorable; and I shudder to think I’ve personally purchased hundreds, or thousands, of dollars of the fruit of exploited workers.

it’s not summer without Sol Pops :) my favorite is the coconut agave, but the basil lemonade is a close second. I can’t wait to have that flavor again! (and I’ve been thrilled to see they reduced their prices from $3 or 2/$5 to $2, yay)

Emily, white whole wheat flour would work great, I think. I’ve used it alone in past incarnations of this cake (without the lemon). it’s definitely a different texture than what I’ve made this week, but it’s more of a traditional yellow cake, and so I predict good things :)