In partnership with Wild Goose Creative, I am pleased to announce a new series of home preserving classes. Join me on third Tuesdays from 6:30 – 8:30 to preserve local fresh foods by freezing, canning, drying and curing. Each workshop will include hands on experience, tastings, recipes, and a sample to take home. Schedule 6/21: Jam Canning -  We will use a seasonal fruit to make jam and freeze berries. The basic water bath methods [...]

Ingredients and Inspiration: We have an abundance of vegetables in the fridge Our strawberries are finally ripening and we hope to go pick from a local farm this week No classes or special events after Monday Meal Plan: Monday – Homemade sausage demo at a friend’s house for a cookout; we also brought fennel apple slaw. Tuesday – Date night featuring the beet cocktail at Rossi Wednesday – Grilled fish, asparagus pasta salad Thursday – [...]

It seems like forever since I returned from BlogHer Food ’11 in Atlanta, but in reality it was only a few days ago. Here are five things I want to remember: 1) Homemade popsicles are the best. Amongst my wanderings in downtown Atlanta, I visited King of Pops, a handmade popsicle stand. The salty chocolate was a perfect midday chiller to the humid Atlanta heat. 2) Sugar-coated Radical is doing amazing work, through candy. I [...]

The chickens eye the tomatoes, the dogs walk all over the bean bed, and the squirrels want into everything. What’s a space intensive gardener to do? Fence around the beds. Yet every spring I resist. Fencing is ugly and expensive. It is a pain (literally, I have a hole healing in my finger from a wire poke) to install and remove. Grass is hard to cut around the edges. This year I was intentional about [...]

This is the foot of Speckles after Alex cured it for months in salt. He and Lil arranged a rock in the claw and set it aside to air dry into a Halloween decoration. In other words, ours is a very strange family. And, if you ever questioned whether dinosaurs came from birds, I submit this reptilian-like claw as evidence.

BlogHer Food ended Friday with a keynote from movie producer, author, and activist Laurie David and chef turned educator Asata Reid. What follows in a recap of their informative and inspirational discussion on family dinner and living green. Laurie and Asata each had an ‘aha!’ moment that led them from carrying on their lives and drove them to engage in environmental activism. For Asata, the moment came when she surveyed the shopping carts of fellow [...]

  The Hound family is together again! We know no better way to enjoy each other’s company than to eat and cook together. Ingredients & Inspiration meatballs, chicken, pork in the freezer broccoli, salad greens, asparagus in the fridge homegrown herbs coming into season two cousins graduating from high school this weekend warm, wet weather forecast Menu Monday – Lil’s dance parent observation day, Sushi Ting dinner to celebrate Tuesday – spaghetti, homemade meatballs, homemade [...]