Search Results for: label/food/page/2/2010/06/the-urban-homestead/2011/04/making-it

805 results

Two Vegetable Gardening Commandments

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
9 Comments
ntime, I’ll share two of the commandments: 1. Thou shalt not have more vegetable beds than thou canst maintain in a worthy condition. We’ve already reduced the amount of vegetable space in our garden and replaced it with native perennials. I’m considering cutting more vegetable space. Having a lot of poorly maintained vegetable beds sends out a big invitation to the sorts of insect visitors we don’t want in our gardens. B...

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Our favorite way to cook zucchini

Mrs. Homegrown
Food, Recipes
26 Comments
It’s that time of year again. Put aside those zucchini bread recipes and try this instead. This recipe–or technique, rather– sounds too simple to be good, but it really works. As one friend said of the dish, “It tastes like there’s a lot going on, but there’s not.” All you’ve got to do is shred your zucchini up on the large holes of your kitchen grater. Saute the shreds in an uncovered s...

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Growing and Preparing Cardoons (Cynara cardunculus)

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
20 Comments
It’s the ultimate pain in the ass vegetable to prepare and I’ll probably get in big trouble in native plant circles for even mentioning it, but just last night I fried up my first successful plate of homegrown cardoons (Cynara cardunculus). Not the most attractive blanching job, admittedly. All ready to prepare The cardoon is a close relative of artichoke, identical in appearance, except that the flowers are much smaller and t...

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California Buckwheat

Mr. Homegrown
Food, Foraging
RLeave a comment
Here’s a plant SurviveLA would like to see in more Southern California gardens. California buckwheat (Eriogonum fasciculatum foliolosum) has multiple uses–it provides cover and nectar for animals, grows with almost no water, and best of all it produces edible seeds. We’ve gathered the seeds we’ve found in fields and baked it into bread and added it to cereal to both boost nutritional value and to add a nutty flavor. The...

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Bird Flu and Industrial Agriculture

Mr. Homegrown
Animals, Chickens
2 Comments
While I have not seen this new documentary, Shall We Gather at the River, its website contains three provocative interview clips with Michael Greger M.D., the U.S. Humane Society’s Director of Public Health and Animal Agriculture. In these excerpts Dr. Greger asserts that industrial agriculture’s penchant for cramming thousands of animals into sheds is the most likely vector for a host of scary diseases such as bird flu and mad cow d...

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Nasturtium Leaf Pesto

Mr. Homegrown
Food, Foraging, Recipes
9 Comments
Chicago artist and permaculturalist Nancy Klehm gave me this idea. Funny how it takes an out of town visitor to make you aware of a resource at your own home–right now our yard is choked with nasturtium and I’ve never made good use of the leaves. I have used the flowers for a pesto, but it’s kinda labor intensive. Nancy made a pesto with the leaves and I had to try my own version: Nasturtium leaf pesto 2 fistfuls of nasturtium...

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Sundiner

Mr. Homegrown
Solar
8 Comments
Beekeeper Dennis made one of those once in a lifetime garage sale finds earlier this year: a solar oven from the 1960s called the “Sundiner.” I couldn’t find much on the interwebs about it except for a brief mention in the  April 1963 issue of Desert Magazine, “Here’s a new product that suits desert living as few others can—it collects and concentrates the heat of the sun and allows outdoor cooking without fuel...

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Fermentation Update–Filmjölk

Mr. Homegrown
Fermentation, Food
6 Comments
ntracting food poisoning. One of our most successful ferments was a Swedish milk product called filmjölk. This starter came to us as an unexpected gift. We’d never been filmjölk drinkers before, but were willing to give it a go. There are three ways to get the culture you need to produce this beverage: live in Sweden and buy a carton of it in the store, order the culture from a supplier such as G.E.M. Cultures, or what we did–meet som...

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Radical Beekeeper Michael Thiele Ventures Into New Territory

Mr. Homegrown
Animals, Bees
9 Comments
Thiele with an unorthodox hive–picture from his website Gaia Bees. One of the lectures I went to at the National Heirloom Exposition in Santa Rosa earlier this month has really stuck with me. It was a talk by radical biodynamic beekeeper Michael Thiele that, frankly, I walked into biased against. But by the conclusion I could tell that the whole audience, including myself, left deeply moved by what Thiele had to say. The reason fo...

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