Notes on Mark Bittman’s “Behind the Scenes of What We Eat”

...emphasized you don’t have shop at Whole Foods. It’s more important to eat vegetables in general, however you source them, than to obsess about eating local organic vegetables. Maybe he’s flexible because things are pretty desperate. Bittman says that in the U.S. only 1 meal in 4 includes an unprocessed vegetable. And that number is actually 1 in 5, because the 1 in 4 number comes about from counting burger toppings as vegetables. Then think about...

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My Favorite Lettuce Mix

Earlier this week when I decried the sorry state of our winter vegetable garden, I neglected to mention the one big success: lettuce. We grow lettuce mixes almost every year and we’ve never been disappointed. Homegrown salad greens are much better than store bought. Plus, at least where we live, they are easy to grow. We just sow the seed directly and water them in. We thin by eating the seedlings. Judging from the crowding in the photo above, we...

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The Strange World of Artificial Plants

...s a Hollywood art director, grabbed me late one evening to help her fake a vegetable garden for a movie. From her I that learned that their are businesses in Hollywood that do nothing other than provide fake plants. Not just flowers, but everything from corn to . . . hemp. Having a bad year with your tomatoes? Green Set Inc. will set you up with some fake ones: They even have a very large (and suspiciously shiny) fake zucchini: But I think my favo...

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Matt’s Wild Cherry Tomato

...s a wild-type tomato that grows without supplemental irrigation. Many avid vegetable gardeners have probably had the experience of tomatoes that reseed and grow without care. In my experience these hardy rogue tomatoes are invariably on the cherry side of the tomato size spectrum. This makes sense as the tomato’s wild ancestor is much smaller than modern beefsteak varieties. Matt’s Wild Cherry was obtained in Hidalgo, Mexico by Teresa Arellanos de...

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One Secret for Delicious Soup–A Parmesan Cheese Rind

...you are already using meat or bacon fat or the like in your soup, but for vegetable-based dishes, it really adds a nice touch. As to how much rind you should add, it’s kind of hard to say, since rinds vary in thickness. I don’t think it’s necessary to use a whole rind per pot–I usually break my rinds into two halves. The average chunk that goes in my pots is probably less than an inch high by maybe 3 inches long. It doesn’t really matter how much...

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