Archive For The “Soups” Category
On our new allotment, there are no nettles. I am sure I w ill be grateful for that in the long run, but right now, after the long winter largely devoid of fresh greens, nettles are my favorite vegetable. Luckily our neighbour’s allotment grows lots of nettles, in fact, there’s nothing but nettles. In the [...]
I have trouble growing parsnips. Well, not so much growing them, because they’re one of the vegetables that mostly grow themselves. The problem is, I often forget to sow them. I think it has to do with the fact that in parsnips the moment of sowing and the moment of harvesting are about as much [...]
Last week we went to England. It was spooky-misty, like a set for a Sherlock Homes mystery. We enjoyed it. The little figure in the sea is my son, who was not going to let the fact that it was late October stop him from making the most of this year’s only trip to the [...]
I’ll always be grateful to my parents for teaching me to recognize different kinds of wild mushrooms. In an extreme case, it’s a survival skill – my daughter who is currently obsessed with the Hunger Games series, commented how strange it was that although the heroine forages for edible plants and shoots deer with a [...]
For all the frantic sowing, March is probably the leanest month in the vegetable garden. The window sills are getting crowded with seedlings, and many a bed in the vegetable garden has been sown under the protection of fleece, but there is precious little to harvest. The winter vegetables have either already been eaten or [...]
The Elfstedentocht was cancelled. We were this close! Even the date was set (last Sunday) and hundreds of volunteers were sweeping the snow off the ice and transplanting ice to places were it was not thick enough. And I imagine kind Frisian housewives were already cooking large batches of split pea soup that they traditionally [...]
I have 2 large jars of porcini. Have I just made you jealous? Dried porcini mushrooms cost a fortune in the shops, I know. But mine were for free. We picked mushrooms in the summer, cut them in thin slices, spread them on racks, and dried them on top of the wood-stove in my parents’ [...]
Much in cooking is about finding the right balance – the elusive point when all the components of a meal are complementing each other while none is overshadowing the others. Only then does a meal taste “just right”. But there needs to be a certain tension between the ingredients to make a meal exciting. In [...]
This year our harvest of pumpkins and winter squash was dismal. That may sound a little dramatic, but here are some numbers: last year we harvested on average 20 spaghetti squash per plant, this year it was just 3. The pumpkin “Potimarron” started out really well, setting a lot of fruits in the warmth of [...]
