What is it? Garlic scapes are the magical-wand-like flower shoots of the garlic plant. They emerge in late spring and contain a small bud that will become a flower if left on the plant. Many farmers, including me, prefer to cut the scapes away. The theory is that instead of the garlic spending energy growing the allium blossom, it will focus on the bulb. The scape is edible at this early age. Many farmers include [...]

It has been one strange week here. On Sunday I was awash with disappointment as the chance to travel to California with Alex slipped from our hands. On Monday, I made no plans. Good thing, because the next three days were spent nursing an ill Lillian and surviving the ice storm. She tested positive for strep and has a viral cough on top of that. Today she is still home from play dates and school [...]

Annette of Sustainable Eats recently shared a day in her life and challenged others in the slow food lifestyle to do the same. It is an interesting idea to compare our individual days. What chores do we share? What aspects of our routine are unique? What can we learn from each other? Why call it ‘slow life’ when we are so busy? At any rate, here’s what I did this Tuesday October 19, 2010: 7:45 [...]

I recently revealed that on a fairly average week, we spend a little less than 13 hours cooking.  That’s a lot for some families, but there are ways to spend your time in the kitchen efficiently and still prepare whole food driven meals.  Here are some tips: Prepare or pack lunch the night before, ideally as you are cleaning up dinner leftovers. Prep veggies for the week on a single day.  Cut apples can be [...]

We aim to make most things from scratch.  To that end, we spend plenty of time cooking.  Because we love to eat, cooking does not feel like a chore.  Still, I was curious exactly how much time we spend in the kitchen. Like last year’s gardening time study, I recorded every person hour in the kitchen this week.  This was a fairly typical week for our three person family with one lunch at a conference, [...]

We cook a lot and most people don’t seem to do that these days.  We’ll blog about interesting food finds here, as well as updates to our kitchen.  We plan to renovate it in December 2008 – January 2009 to make cooking and eating even more enjoyable.