We’ve hit what I think of as the trifecta of harvest-season perfection: Tomatoes, sweet corn and peaches. Lots of other stuff, too, but I could (and at this time of year, often do) live on tomatoes, sweet corn and peaches. I bought a half-dozen ears of pretty, yellow-and-white sweet corn at the market yesterday for [.

Our little farmers’ market is getting more sophisticated by the month. One of the latest, and most welcomed additions: Brandywine Fisheries, a family fishing operation out of Charleston, trucking caught-the-day-before fish inland to satisfy my seafood cravings when I can’t make it to the coast. Yesterday, they h

… because I don’t make promises to myself that I can’t keep, but I really do intend to ramp up the food blogging in the New Year. I’ve tucked away so many good recipes over the past several months with the intention of writing about them here, and never quite managed to get around to [...]

I just got back from a trip to New Orleans – my first, and long overdue. I was there for a conference, and much of my four days there was taken up with meetings – but the organizers were smart enough to leave us free in the evenings, so I was able to do what [...]

Finding a delicious recipe is wonderful. Finding a way to simplify its preparation but still retain every bit of the deliciousness is even better. I first posted the recipe for pan-roasted mushrooms nearly two years ago; I’d got it from a LiveJournal friend, and found it among the most tasty mushroom side dishes IR

Some people get flowers on opening night of a play. I got beets. No kidding: My friend (and the stage manager of the show I’ve been directing) came into an excess of beets and, after asking if I liked them (oh, yes!), brought in a bag of beets bigger than my fist, probably 2-3 pounds [...]

I haven’t quite reached the point where I have so many ripe tomatoes that I need to start cooking them, or to where I’m bored with the basics (BLTs!), but I’m getting 3-4 ripe ones a day out of my modest garden, and I know some of you have a lot more. So here’s a [...]

Over at The Mom Food Project, Serene posts about Spanish tortillas – not the flatbread sort, but the oven-baked omelette of egg, potato and onion. And me with no potatoes in the house.

Harvest season is in full swing, and the only thing better than having my own garden right now is knowing other gardeners who planted things I didn’t get around to planting this year. Because it seems like all of us overestimated something, and food-swapping is happening all over the place. Last week I offloaded a [..

We all know what Mom Food is, even though its specifics may vary: It’s the food you grew up with, the food that instantly evokes feelings of home and comfort and being cared for. For some it might be potroast with all the fixings on Sunday evening; for others it might be frozen fish sticks [...]

The temperature here hit somewhere between 100 and 102 today, depending on which weather site you believe. All I know is it was hot enough to keep me indoors all day, half wishing I hadn’t set that lovely piece of Pacific albacore to thaw in the fridge last night, because I could just as easily [...]

Ahhhh, peaches. The Willamette Valley is not a huge peach-growing region – the season is brief, the potential problems from weather and pests are many, the delicacy of the ripe fruit can make transporting it to and from the markets a challenge. But a few hardy growers make the effort, and when the time comes, [...]

(Warning: This is a long post, because I’m indulging in some pastry-geeking. Don’t let that deter you. The pie itself took much less time to make than to write about.) I’m the kind of cook who sees no contradition between a love of the home-made and a love of expedient shortcuts. I’d rather spend an

Still cooking. Still eating. Loving the advancing growing season, and the increasing variety of local foodstuffs available from the farmers’ market, various farmstands and the wonderful Corvallis Local Foods online ordering site. My garden, rebuilt from scratch to move food production to the only south-facing, full-su

When I was growing up, greens came to our table in one of two forms:  lettuce (generally iceberg), raw in salads, and – on rare occasions,  what my Southern-bred mother called “a mess o’ greens,” boiled to within an inch of their lives with a chunk of ham hock. The result was salty, greasy and [...

… since I posted anything here. But the season of local food is ramping up, and this was so very, very good that I need to share. Scott Penter was back at the Albany Farmers’ Market yesterday with his traveling chiller and a load of fresh-caught Dungeness crab. After getting his feet wet, so to [...]

I’m spending Christmas the way I generally prefer to: By myself. Least I sound like a latter-day Scrooge or some sad shut-in, let me state for the record that I love the winter holidays, every single one of them, that I spend most of December in the company of friends, and that I always wind [...]

… the next-best thing is having the coast come to me – in the form of impeccably fresh seafood at my local farmers’ market. And now it has, in the person of Scott Penter, an entrepreneurial young fisherman from Newport who’s invested in a state-of-the-art traveling seawater tank and chiller in hopes

The local farmers’ market may be closed till spring, but that doesn’t mean the end of locally harvested food. Here in the Willamette Valley, we’re just a hop over the Coast Range from the Pacific Ocean, where December marks the start of Dungeness crab season. Say what you like about the scary-big Alaskan K

Last weekend, belatedly, I found time to get out to the garden and strip the last tomatoes from the vines. For all my complaining about the late ripening - and for all my desultory gardening habits - it was a good year for tomatoes; once they finally got around to ripening, my six heirloom [...]