Check it out, Columbus!  We’re getting our own restaurant week! Organized by Dine Originals, Columbus’ independent restaurant association, Restaruant Week is your chance to enjoy 40+ prix fix menus for $15 or $30 each.  Menus are being posted now on their Restaurant Week page. (If you’ve never heard of Dine Originals and love great deals, check out the gift certificate program.) Why make time for Restaurant Week?  I could probably list 10 reasons, but I’m [...]

We are taking off for a week to Orlando, Florida.  We would love to hear your restaurant and activity recommendations. Expect plenty of posts while we are gone.  We won’t have dogs or dishes or orders to pack, so there should be lots of time to write!

Readers have been asking me about recommendations for Summer CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) subscriptions.  Wikipedia has a good entry on CSAs if you are not familiar. The truth is that this year, we will not participate in one.  We think we can grow everything we need in our backyard garden supplemented with trips to the farmers market every once in awhile. For two years we participated in small CSA. We can’t remember the name at [...]

To this point I haven’t posted much on our kitchen/food blog. Rachel has been after me to remedy this oversight and now the Restaurant Widow has taken me to task over not posting about my meat CSA. First off, what is a CSA? If you are reading a food blog, I expect you know already. For those who do not know, CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture. The basic concept is that at the start [...]

Do you grow your own food?  How about sharing some with those who can’t?  This isn’t a new idea, but a group of gardeners is hosting a Garden Challenge this season on The Barnyard. We are still finalizing plans for this upcoming year.  We know what grew well last season and we will add enough plantings to give 10% of the harvest away. Ours will go to the local settlement house, the Clintonville Beechwold Community [...]

A long time ago, my high school boyfriend did a winter maple sugar study.  He tracked data on trees in the forest behind our school, tapped them, and made maple syrup.  It required hours of work boiling off the sap from late January through March, and since I wanted to be with him, I helped with the sugaring. Since then, I’ve had a soft spot for sugaring.  As it turns out Alex (my husband) tapped [...]

Building on the popularity of our Homemade Eating post, we’re starting a series of posts called Make it Yourself. Each one will include tips and ideas to make for yourself foods that are often store bought. First up is bread. We have experimented with yeast bread baking for years. We now have it down to a routine where Alex bakes as we need it, about once a week. Lil almost always helps him. Here’s her [...]