A carefully dried tomato can carry the taste of summer’s sweet abundance through many seasons.  Dried tomatoes provide a distinct chewy texture and richness to pan sauces and stews.  They can be eaten as is for a quick burst of vitamin C.  Making your own during is not hard at all. Equipment Dried tomatoes are generally made in one of three ways: in a solar cooker or sun dehydrator in a very low temperature oven [...]

A week ago, after wandering the yard looking for a hand tool hiding in the garden, I did something rash: I had them painted.  Bright pink.  All over. My hand trowels and cultivators are camouflaged no longer.  I can find my tools wherever they were last dropped! It’s a wonder I didn’t do this years ago.

Please vote for this post to win a conference ticket. Simply click on @racheltayse is this poll. Thanks! Hounds in the Kitchen is growing not unlike the edible garden in our backyard.  I planted seeds in education, writing, and speaking from this blog.  Some have borne fruit already.  Some activities seem to reseed themselves, providing reward after reward while others are rife with weedy challenges. The garden is getting a little unruly.  It requires enough [...]

Have you heard of CSN, an online retailer with over 200 stores selling everything from dining room sets to cookware to clothing? Neither had I until a representative from CSN invited me to learn more. I peeked around and noticed they sell practically everything. Item pages are very clear for shoppers to read and include customer reviews, current inventory, and shipping times right on the page. CSN offered me a gift certificate to try their [...]

Oh, Julia Child, you dear pink tomato.  Your blushing beauty covers your spicy inside, tempting gardeners for decades. Cherokee Chocolate, dark enchantress of the bunch.  That Christmas colored skin of yours yields to a dark juicy flesh, dripping with sunlight transformed to sweetness. Then there’s you, Rutgers.  Your pleats, your bulbous inundations, inspire a thousand delicious thoughts. All together, you are a brothel of diversity, a color, size, and flavor for every preference. Sliced raw, [...]

One of the pleasures of living in Ohio on a small plot of land is that succession planting is relatively easy. Succession planting, or seeding crops right after another, extends your growing season from the same plot of land. It works very well if you fill the space from a plant gone by with a new one that will succeed in the coming weather conditions. We’re a little under two months away from the frost [...]

I realize that is has been an obscenely long time since I posted a garden update.  It’s not that we haven’t been gardening, but that our hands are so frequently covered in dirt that I haven’t updated.  Here’s what’s going on: Peas were a complete failure this year.  Boo!! We ate several meals of broccoli from our two plants. We over-planted tomatoes again.  They are a mess of vines and leaves and glorious fruit tearing [...]