Category Archives: gardening

Fried Green Tomatoes & Burrata for Impatient Gardeners

Chilly Bay Area summers make waiting for that first green tomato to ripen like waiting for Congress to negotiate a budget. Thankfully green tomatoes have a lot more going for them than our typical legislators. They’re way more fun; they have a movie AND a book named after them; they’re tasty; and, instead of making [...]
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When Life Gives You Zucchini Make O Konomi Yaki

Evidently I’m pretty good at growing summer squash, and not much else. Of all my garden plants the only two that bore much of anything edible are two very different heirloom squash varieties. They sit next to a trumpet vine so they were pollinated and pollinated and pollinated. Did I mention I live alone? I’m [...]
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DIY Delicious Promo Video

Check out this super fun DIY Delicious Video. Shot and conceived by the talented folks at 4SP films. I love it! And it was so much fun to shoot! Thanks to Chronicle Books for making it possible and Peter Perez, Marketing Manager at Chronicle, for loaning his kitchen, community garden and slightly goofy (yet totally [...]
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What to cook when there's nothing to eat

One of my favorite MFK Fisher books is How to Cook a Wolf. The wolf, of course, is hunger. The point being that a resourceful cook is one who can find something to eat when the larder is empty and the wolf is at the door. I cooked my own wolf the other night. True [...]
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Jolly Green (and yellow!) Giants

Get a load of this! This is one proud, tall sunflower…I'd say about 12-14 feet? Crazy! It makes me happy every time I look at it. Here's our beloved pumpkin. This baby will turn a dark, bumpy orange and be gorgeous and delicious. There are at least 2 more where this came from. Does anyone [...]
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Gardening Mishaps and Triumphs—Too bad we can’t live on sunflowers.

The first year gardening has been a mixture of successes and failures so far. It’s a good thing we don’t actually have to grow our own food (yet) because we’d certainly starve. It’s all a learning process and I don’t get too upset about it. Today we’re going to pull out some of our failures [...]
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First Harvest Salad Bouquet

The first tender leaves of arugula and speckled butter lettuce started from seed back in March. I tossed them with roasted beets, goat cheese and Champagne vinaigrette.
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Community is alive and well…Or, in danger of becoming a gardening blog.

What do you do if you have a couple new raised beds in your backyard and a big pile of rich, black, smelly dirt in the driveway? Make soup! That’s right, make soup. Then call some people up and invite them over for lunch in exchange for hauling a few wheelbarrows full of dirt into [...]
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    The recipes and images on this site belong to Vanessa Barrington. Feel free to link here and if you’d like to use a recipe or image, please ask permission first. Thank you.