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Garden Greens Quiche

Here’s the quiche mentioned in Patrick’s “Spring Plantings” post. It was divine. It is a riff off of my mother Mary’s famous spinach quiche. She would make it for the brunches we held every Christmas while I was growing up, and it remains one of my favorite foods. The girls have been laying so well [...]

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Chayote, Joy of Man’s Desiring



I learned to use a chayote in cooking from Diana Kennedy’s The Art of Mexican Cooking. It shows up in various moles as a cooked starchy vegetable. When we moved to the Bay Area I heard about people growing them in gardens. I have a wonderful book, Golden Gate Gardening, that describes plants and culture [...]

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Spring Plantings

Yesterday we spent a few hours in the garden doing some spring planting and general tidying-up. The garden looks a bit messy in the winter with its overgrowths of clover and fava beans, but all the rampant growth is a real payoff when we finally get down to work. The clover, favas, and the weeds [...]

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Seed Orders

In mid-February we gathered up all our notes and dog-eared seed catalogs, and finally made our seed orders. In past years we’ve mostly bought seeds from Seeds of Change. They have a really good selection of organic vegetables, herbs, and cover crops, and we like how all of their seeds are open-pollinated, which allows us [...]

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Cabbage and Bean Soup

This is a heavily-evolved version of Asparagus and White Bean Soup from Classic Spanish Cooking with Chef Ef. In essence, it’s a cabbage and potato soup (or stew) flavored with wine and bacon.

The dish is quite versatile and takes well to all sorts of vegetable additions. Last spring I added a cup of goatsmilk with [...]

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Barleyeggs

This is a good recipe for leftover cooked barley. It’s simple, filling, and tasty.

I’m not going to try and measure everything out here. Just use enough barley for each person, a handful of cheese and 1 or 2 eggs per person.

Ingredients
Cooked barley tossed with salt, pepper, and butter
Swiss cheese, grated, mixed with a little grated [...]

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Calm returns to the waller

Well, things seem to be settling down at last. We managed to get the croppy chicken back into the flock, with a mixture of bribes and strategic pairing.

First, we put a big mess of rolled oats, yoghurt, and chopped apples into the coop at the same time as we dropped Croppy in. That kept the [...]

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Spring crop or Hen fight, indeed

One of the challenges of urban farming for us is that while our fathers both grew up in rural areas, they both left that most adamantly behind, wanting for us what they wanted — freedom from the constrictions they felt growing up in that environment. No farm experience at all on the maternal sides, though [...]