Port Potager

This past weekend we spent some time on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica, in a small town called Uvita. When we weren't busy ziplining through the jungle or diving into waterfall pools, we enjoyed lots of local dishes in the town's sodas , or diners.    The most common dish in Costa Rica is the casado , or "marriage." The marriage is of rice and beans, which are always served together. Along with this base comes a piece of meat (or fish on the coast), some fried plantain, a salad, and a picadillo , which is a vegetable side cut into small pieces. It's a full plate of food, and one in which the meat is only a small portion of the well-balanced plate. Kirk's casado  in the photo above has, clockwise from the top, sweet fried plantain, fried fish, mixed salad (which is somewhat less common than the typical cabbage slaw), red beans, white rice, and pieces of ayote , a summer squash similar to zucchini.  Costa Rican cuisine is typically not spicy, alth...

It's the last weekend of winter! Next weekend we'll be beyond the equinox, and the days will be ever-so-slightly longer than the nights.  We still have snow on the ground, lots of wind, and temperatures in the 30s, but we plowed ahead with our almost-spring garden chores anyway. Here's what we did this weekend: 1. Got the chickens out on the raised bed where to prep the soil for planting greens: 2. Poked around the greenhouse tunnels to harvest the last veggies: parsnips and a couple leeks, plus a few leftover fall cabbages for the chickens (which they were very  excited about). We do still have some spinach, mache and kale left as well, but not much. 3. Improved the maple sugaring set-up by building a bigger firebox: Kirk used leftover bricks we had lying around to make a floor (so as not to ruin the bricks on our patio), then got nine cinderblocks to make the three walls of the firebox (solid side toward the fire). He also picked up some steel...

The turkeys didn't get all of our broccoli, and one head was starting to open up in the heat. Once it does that, it still tastes good, but it's a little hard to work with. This one was just the right amount to chop up and top a homemade pizza: Kirk made the sauce today with our own garlic , oregano, and basil, and we topped this pizza with the garden broccoli (chopped small), some scallions, and a bit of goat cheese. Yum! As you can see, we also had salad on the side. The greens were a little wilty from the intense sun today, but I managed to find some lettuce that wasn't too bitter from the heat (the older ones are all starting to bolt). Also in the mix are some scallions, beet greens, mint, tarragon, radishes, and lovage. Mint and tarragon are great for making a salad taste really fresh and cool, and lovage is the greatest herb of all time. But more on that later.

Today was an absolutely gorgeous day here in Newburyport: 75 degrees and not a cloud in the sky. In the morning we hit a local nursery to see if they had any herbs we could plant (we need to transplant some to their new locations in the back of the garden as well). To be honest, we were trying to find something to do in the garden. Alas, all they had were some flats of pansies. It really is too early to expect to put out plants yet in Massachusetts, and this probably spared us a lot of trouble protecting things when (if?) temperatures settle back into some kind of normal range.  There's just not much to do in the garden yet, so we took a hike on a local trail (which was amazing, by the way, drowned fisher cat and/or beaver and all). When we got home from our little five-mile trek, we had dinner on the patio . And not just any humdrum, mid-March dinner: burgers from the grill and salad picked fresh from the garden . Check it: That salad contains some of the kale, mac...

Our garden clean-up last weekend  wasn't just about pulling out dead things and battening down for winter. There was also a harvest involved. Looking at the bounty below, I am reminded that a lot of our late-fall gardening experiments were pretty successful, even if the season has finally drawn to a close for us. These are things that used to be growing under the greenhouse hoop that we dismantled: Lots of carrots. Many of them were eaten that very night! Salad greens. You can see some spinach and beet greens mixed in with a good deal of arugula. Those guys just won't quit! The herbs here are the last bits of the cilantro we cut before giving up on the straggly remains. Underneath (where you can't really see it) are mint leaves and a few stems of marjoram that hadn't yet died back, although most of those plants were finally killed back by the temps in the teens this past weekend. There is also a bit of sage on top. You may recall that I cut it back...

It is, at last, getting very cold. Last night I went out and picked what I'm pretty certain was one of the last salads of the year for us. Our greenhouse hoops with carrots, lettuce, and the cilantro is on its last legs: the cilantro has started to succumb to the cold, and there's not much lettuce left in there to pick. In preparation for some really cold (low 20s) nights this weekend, I picked a lot of unprotected greens, carrots, and herbs. Here's what I ended up with: The mixed greens included arugula, spinach, beet greens, mache, mesclun, and a bit of romaine I found growing back on a stem we had cut months ago. I also added some mint, cilantro, and chives that were hanging on through the cold.  The carrots, by the way, are true baby carrots. "Baby carrots" from the grocery store are usually actually regular carrots that are whittled down to standard sizes and shapes. (I don't even want to think about what happens to the wasted carrot shavings....

My original plan was to take some pictures of all the vegetables we used from the garden for Thanksgiving dinner, then show how we prepared them in a series of before and after photos. This plan went well first thing in the morning when we went out to pick what we needed: Clockwise from the top we have mixed greens and herb salad (lettuces, arugula, kale, beet greens, mint, and cilantro), cabbage and broccoli, frozen green beans from earlier in the season, frozen peas from earlier in the season, a jar of dried sage, chives, and carrots. My Thanksgiving photography took a nosedive as the day went on, though. I took only one other picture all day, and it wasn't of prepared food or even of the kids. So instead of a big recipe extravaganza, here's what I learned yesterday: 1. It takes three times as long to pick damp vegetables on a freezing morning than it does to pick them later in the afternoon. This is because you have to stop several times to thaw your wet, frozen ...