Port Potager

While scrolling through some photos on my phone this afternoon, I came across this one that I took back in August: This is a weed I pulled from the garden when I was working my way through the backlog of chores awaiting me upon my return from Costa Rica . As you can see, it is shallow-rooted but quite tall, with a sturdy (but not woody stem). It looks like a small tree, especially with its broad leaves:  But it's obviously not a tree, given the soft stem and shallow root system. It also has some white flowers that look like morning glories and smell very sweet, like a vanilla honeysuckle: They were closed when I pulled the weed in the afternoon, but you could still smell their strong perfume. But weirdest of all is the fruit: That thing is a killer! I had to wear gloves to pick it off the plant and handle it (and I never wear gloves). Those spines are for real . Fruit might not quite be the right word. Maybe it's more a seed pod, since ...

For the last entry in this month's grocery series, the kids are going to take another one for the team. They might not notice, though, since all we're planning to do is Swap out expensive cereals for their generic counterparts.  This, then, is our last box of Cheerios for awhile. They will be replaced by Market Basket Tasteeos, which taste pretty much exactly the same and have all the same nutritional stats. Speaking of nutrition, the part of the cereal maneuver that the kids are likely to notice is the part where we stop buying them sugary cereals. We usually provide them things like Frosted Mini-Wheats and Special K Red Berries, and that shit is expensive . And they go through it like it's nothing, scarfing it down for every breakfast as well as an after school snack. Well, no more. We're thinking that if they only have (fake) Cheerios, they'll be bored enough to eat something else for their snacks. Like, um, vegetables from the garden, maybe. Or a...

Sometimes, Sundays are about slow roasting meats and veggies and hanging around the house, enjoying the aroma. And sometimes Sundays are about running half-marathons and going to baby showers and playing with the neighbor kids until the sun goes down. This kind of Sunday is fun, too, but it doesn't leave much room for a big, beautiful dinner. Enter tarts: I've sung their praises before, because they work in the summer  and they work in the fall, they work with veggies and they work with fruit . They are like fast food for gardeners, and tonight they helped us use up a lot of extra Swiss chard that we had to cut to make room for our greenhouse tunnels earlier this week. (They also helped us not blow our entertainment money on junk food when we didn't much feel like cooking.) For our quick dinner, Kirk made two tarts: The  Red and Blue beet tart  we've had before, but the Swiss chard and feta one is new. To make it, he steamed about a dozen chard...

There's nothing quite like coming home to a house full of good baking smells — especially after a day as dreary and raw as the ones we've been having this week. While lately I've come to expect the warm deliciousness of homemade bread , today I walked into something different. Really different. Yes, it's a brownie. But not just any old brownie. That there is a beet  brownie. We're no strangers to the mingling of chocolate and beets . It's a surprisingly good favor combination, as the beets add a complexity and texture to the chocolate that is really interesting. Kirk got this idea from his favorite gardening cook, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. The original Chocolate and Beetroot Brownie recipe is from River Cottage , but Kirk ended up modifying it to make the beet more prominent. Because Kirk loves beets, and we've got about a zillion giant ones to use up. Here's Kirk's version of beet brownies. You should make some, because we won...

This should be a no-brainer, but up to this point we haven't displayed the willpower to Eliminate the sugary drinks from our grocery budget (and our diet). I'll admit, this idea came about purely from a fit of jealousy on my part. You see, I like a glass of delicious chocolate milk every now and then. Once in a while, it can serve as a quick dessert when there's nothing else around, and I eagerly open the fridge … … only to find that, once again, my children have used up the entire bottle of Hershey's syrup in just five days. I never get any . Well, joke's on you, greedy ones. If I can't have it, no one can. Mwah hah hah. Though I never seem to get any chocolate milk, I do always get more the my fair share of Mexican Coke. It is our only fizzy vice, and it is such a delicious one. It's so good with homemade pizza or nachos or tacos. And it definitely tastes better that regular Coke what with its real cane sugar and glass bottle. But, ...

This has been an all-around excellent growing season, especially for our cool-weather crops. Despite their slow start , we had cabbages all summer long, and we still have a couple left in the garden that weren't krauted. I am also still snipping side shoots of broccoli (just had some for dinner!), which means that we've been harvesting broccoli for three and a half months now. That's definitely a new record for us.  But most glorious of all has been our kale crop this fall: We planted the kale back in August, and it has done very well this season, thanks to our relatively wet and cool summer. The kale above is a Russian variety, although there is also some Swiss chard behind it. This was a bonus round of kale that Kirk put in by transplanting some of the thinnings from the main bed. They totally took off, and now we have almost twice as much kale as we had originally planned. Our main kale bed (above) is a four by eight foot box of 32 plants. The half ...

A couple weekends ago we had brunch with a good friend in Boston. This friend is an excellent cook and hostess, so it is sometimes hard to know what to bring to the table. The solution? Our kit for home-grown Bloody Marys: Turns out that this is the time of year that the ingredients for Bloody Marys are perfectly in season. Well, vodka is always in season, but tomatoes, celery, and horseradish are ready for harvest at the end of summer and into the fall. To make our kit, we used a box from a set of Mason jars, which still had its handy dividers intact. I suppose a more market-minded farmer would make nice wooden divided boxes, but we were mostly concerned with portability. Anyway, the compartments are stuffed with a bottle of vodka, four quarts of fresh tomato juice (made by running newly-picked tomatoes through the food mill ), a whole bunch of celery, some lemons, a bottle of Worcestershire sauce (from the store, but I have designs on making our own some day), a sm...