Long Island is entering the 4th week of Work From Home orders during the pandemic and "home" has suddenly become the center of many people's lives in a way it has not been for a few generations.
I am looking out over the closest thing to my own Eden that I have ever found. One half acre of a southern facing backyard that backs to a canal of the Connetquot River. It was the productive capacity of this backyard as much as anything else that drew me to this home. From what I saw at the home and garden store yesterday, carefully socially distanced of course, many people are thinking about the productive capacities of their yards right now as well.
My first step in setting up my LI garden is starting a container garden for my herbs. The planters left by the previous owners added with my own should give me an full herb garden close to my back door. The containers a fairly large, but the first winter will be a test to see who overwinters and who does not.
Read MoreChef John from Food Wishes (on YouTube and BlogSpot) has become a permanent presence on my laptop and in my kitchen over the past 6 months. In addition to being an award winning chef, he is a gifted educator and my go-to guy for recipe ideas for farmer's market finds, cooking techniques and new takes on old dishes.Recently I have made two of his recipes that were particular standouts for me. They were easy, delicious and used parts of the vegetable or animal normally thrown away without a second thought.I have been cooking with broccoli stems for years, but it is not often I see them in recipes. For his broccoli angel hair pasta recipe he calls for simmering the diced stems until soft as part of the garlic sauce and for his paella recipe, he calls for sauteing the shrimp shells to add extra flavor and body to the sauce.Briefly my results followed by Chef John's fantastic recipe videos:
Read MoreI grew up in America's rural heartland calling catfish and crappie 'seafood', but in truth, it would be far more accurate to call it riverfood or lakefood. Real seafood was reserved for restaurant dining and with cautions from in-the-know types to not order on certain days of the week based on restaurant order delivery norms.When I moved to the Raleigh area 3 years ago, one of the bragging points about this region is that we are 2.5 hours from the mountains and 2.5 hours from the coast. But knowing that still did nothing to prepare me for this sign at my local farmer's market:Most Saturdays, Carolina Catch Seafood has a stand at the Apex Farmers Market, selling fresh fish and shellfish, caught the day before and packed on ice, but never frozen. It's like winning the Local Food Lottery!The NC Catch organization has this handy chart of seasonal availability of NC seafood which will be used like the seasonal produce charts to help me meal plan around the season's best. I love shopping the farmer's markets to supplement what I grow and support local, sustainable food producers. Getting to support local fishermen (and women) is a new concept for me, but one that I (sorry, mandatory bad pun) will take to like fish to water!
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