kayb

There's been a great deal written about smells from highly spiced foods settling into the silicone ring. I had made an Afghani chicken and rice dish spiced with saffron, turmeric, ginger and allspice. Not only did it smell like someone had just rolled and smoked a big ol' joint (or blunt, as the current vernacular would have it), but both the ring AND the steel liner itself now smell like that. Both are currently soaking in a solution of hot water, vinegar and dishwashing liquid. I was planning on making yogurt today, but weed-flavored yogurt just doesn't even sound appetizing, marijuana edibles in Colorado notwithstanding.

Tins...cans...(smacking hand to forehead). My apologies! Just went and looked in the pantry to see. They're 14 ounces. Less, of course, a spoon or two you've eaten along the way. The measures are pretty forgiving; for instance, I never worry about medium vs. large eggs, and I have on occasion used up to 3/4 cup lemon juice, for my ex-husband, who liked his pies TART. They're also good with a fruit compote spooned over for serving.

Nothing sounded good except Mexican, and I'm going out with a friend to eat Mexican tonight. So, fallback on an old favorite. Pears, blue cheese, ricotta, crackers, pickles.

Damn. Figures. What I get for trying to jump on what I figured was an error.

I often cheat and use the readymade crusts I get at the grocery store -- I think they're 8-inch, the deep dish kind. If I make my own crust (with almond meal, for the gluten-free child), I use my 9-inch pie plate, not deep dish.

For my family, it's lemon icebox pie. I make them two at a time, they need to be made a day in advance, and they take about 40 minutes from start to finish. There may be a simpler dessert, but I'm danged if I know what it is. Lemon Icebox Pie (makes 2 pies) two graham cracker crusts, or your choice of crust 3 cans condensed milk 4 eggs 1/2 cup fresh-squeezed lemon juice Beat eggs, then beat in condensed milk and lemon juice until completely incorporated. Divide filling between two pie shells. Bake in 325F oven for 25 minutes. Cool completely, then cover and refrigerate. Top with whipped cream to serve.

Thanks. These are on my "maybe" list for next year.

Are a couple of bushes enough to yield blueberries for one person to eat pretty much daily during their season? And how big are your containers they're planted in?

@dcarch, the photo of the tomato blossom is a beautiful thing. @JoNorvelleWalker -- I'm seriously contemplating trying blueberry bushes next year. How much sun do they want? How many berries (roughly) does a bush yield? Also contemplating a fig tree. It's getting to be a pain to go back to Hot Springs every year and pick figs.

Got the herb bed in today, save for some things I need to pick up. Always hard to find tarragon, for some reason. And watered the tomatoes. They all look pretty good after their first 24 hours in the ground. This was yesterday afternoon. Seedling translant tomorrow for lettuce, peas, cucumbers, cabbages, carrots, radishes, and sowing the remaining seed for same so maybe I'll have those things for a longer period. Everything else goes in Friday except for pole beans, which like the ground a little warmer. I'll give them until early May.

Let me see if mine produces anything, first! I set out 38 tomato plants (six different varieties) today. Tomorrow I'll transplant the lettuce, cabbage, pea, carrot, radish seedlings, and hopefully get all the herbs in the herb bed. Then it will be on to planting seeds next week!

Several, and I'll second those made by @Rebel Rose. Perhaps the easiest is to start calling churches near you and ask if they have a food pantry or other feeding program. Overhead is going to be slim to none at such operations, almost all volunteer run. Check out Share Our Strength, a national hunger relief project that works with affiliate organizations in each state. There is a site, charitynavigator.org, that willl give you ratings for all charities, based on how much they spend in different categories. I use it often. I'll put in a plug for another of my favorite charities, Heifer Project, which works toward sustainable agriculture chiefly in the Third World, but in this country as well. They addressed the issue @chromedome talked about upthread by helping put together and administer a logistics plan for a statewide (in Arkansas) livestock/poultry CSA/cooperative, so I can buy beef raised 250 miles away if I want, and pick it up 20 minutes from home.

I love a potato, leftover or fresh. Leftover baked or boiled make potato cakes, or get used in hash. Leftover mashed go in potato cakes or in a ramekin to get twice baked the next day with eggs, cream and cheese, and maybe bacon, on top. Or I may use them, if I have leftover ham, in croquetas, the lovely little Cuban ham and potato fritters. I've also been known to freeze leftover latkes and heat the up in the CSO.

scooIn the event you do wind up with a surfeit of ground meat: Meat Loaf for a Horde serves about 50 10 pounds ground beef, pork, chicken, turkey or a combo 5 onions, diced 10 cloves garlic, minced 4large sweet peppers,diced (optional) 1 pound loaf white sandwich bread 1 quart milk 1 dozen eggs 1 large bottle ketchup thyme, oregano, salt,black pepper tear bread into small bits in a large bowl. Pour milk over it. Set aside. saute onion and sweet pepper until soft. Add garlic. Cook 1 minute more. Set aside. Crumble half of beef in a big mixing bowl. Add half of onion mixture, 6 eggs, spices. scoop out half the soaked bread, squeeze out excess liquid, add that. Add 1/2 cup ketchup. Squ.ish all together with hands to mix thoroughly. Shape into a big loaf on a sheet pan. Repeat with other half of ingredients. Glaze top of loaf with 1 cup ketchup each, spreading with a spoon or fingers to cover the entire loaf. Bake at 375F for an hour. Drain grease, let rest for 15 minutes, and serve. We served this with baked sweet potatoes and green beans, and people LOVED it.

Wonderful trip. I'm lusting with the desire to get back to Japan. Have begun looking at possibilities for next year. I need more time in Kyoto than I've had before. And a trip to Hanamaki for the hot springs. And Tsukiji. And...and...and... Those last photos of sushi -- dear sweet baby Jesus. Just astounding. And the lollipops! Thanks for taking us along!

I worried about that. It rests on the ground, and is held down by landscape staples in between the fenceposts. We don't have groundhogs, just bunnies; I'm hoping the fence, with landscape timbers, will be enough.

A sponsoring organization that will take on the garden and run with it is critical. In one town I'm familiar with, it grew out of the local Methodist church (we Methodists have a tendency toward feeding people). The church had managed to set up a homeless shelter (you don't think of homelessness in a town of 5,000, but it exists!), and then faced the issue of how to feed the people they housed. They got the city to give them use of some vacant lots it owned, and between church members, community volunteers and shelter residents, started the garden. A "produce stand" that dispenses the harvests, at no charge is operated by a couple of volunteers five days a week, two or three hours a day, and actually generates some money from people who use it as a regular farmers' market and pay for their vegetables. Excess goes to the food bank in a larger city 20 minutes away for disbursing as needed. I've seen it work with just community groups who get permission from the owner, or just take up squatters' rights in the case of some absentee landlords, and use a vacant lot in their neighborhood. And I've seen school groups who incorporate gardening into the curriculum as well as furnishing produce for the cafeteria as well as selling to the public/donating to the food bank. I'll PM you some contact info for people with the Arkansas Hunger Relief Alliance who serve as resource people for community gardens and who work with restaurants and grocers and wholesalers on gleaning projects. You might pick their brains for some ideas.

Thought about that. I bought landscape fabric to put down between rows. Daddy would be horrified. I, on the other hand, will enjoy a weedless garden while drinking a cup of coffee and looking at it.

From the standpoint of having been involved in hunger relief efforts on a rural basis (in the Arkansas Delta, one of the richest agricultural regions in the world, but also one which raises the smallest percentages of produce per acre in the world, and one of the poorest regions in America), the quick answer is it's much more efficient and effective to feed large numbers of poor where they tend to congregate -- in urban areas. I live in a small city of 75,000 in the middle of a BIG rural area that encompasses both delta and hill country. I volunteer at a weekly soup kitchen as well as working with the local food bank. The food bank, in turn, provides food to a number of food pantries in smaller communities in the region. That doesn't count as food "delivered" to rural areas -- because food pantry volunteers from Cherry Valley United Methodist Church, et. al., come get it. Pantries work better in rural areas than do feeding programs, because of the transportation issue; people who can get to town once a week to pick up staples at a pantry likely could not get there every day for a hot meal. We've also seen some success with community gardens. This is a commodity row-crop agricultural economy around here: cotton, corn, soybeans, rice, winter wheat. Many rural folk will at least have a kitchen garden and a few chickens, at least those who live out in the country. In town, churches and public schools have taken the lead in community garden programs. There has been some success with feeding programs for children in the summer, using school buses for transportation, or conversely, paying for delivery of meals to rural centers like churches. But with the current administration, funding for that is threatened. None of which touches your post's central point, about the farmer getting only a small portion of the ultimate price paid for the food he produces. All we can do, I reckon, is keep on buying as directly from the farmer as we can, as consistently as we can. I know I spend a lot less at the grocery store than I used to. It makes me crazy that anyone in this, the wealthiest nation in the world, should be hungry.

Thought I'd update y'all on the non-progress of my garden to date. We have a fence: The 24 x 24 portion is fenced. That will be where everything except tomatoes and onions go. I planned to start planting that today with transplants from my seedling trays, but Mother Nature, in the form of an unexpected rain, interfered. The fence is 32-inch "rabbit guard" wire mesh, with holes in the bottom 18 inches being 1 x 4, while the remainder is 2 x 4. I have it snugged down to the ground with landscape staples in between the posts. No. 1 daughter suggested I line the inside with landscape timbers, and I think that's an admirable idea and will do so. (I could hear my father, rest his soul, chiding me on the workmanship. It's not what he'd have done. But it's what I could manage.) And none too soon, as I sat out in the back yard yesterday with a glass of wine and watched three, count them, THREE, very fat bunnies cavorting about my neighbor's back yard and the green space that separates our rear property lines from a retirement village and assisted living facility. Damn dogs did not so much as bark. My finger itched for the trigger of my 16-gauge, but I feared the local constabulary would not take kindly to that, nor, indeed, might the neighbors. Damn rabbits. The rear strip, which is about 8 x 40, is reserved for tomatoes and onions. I expect I shall plant them both this weekend, although I can just hear my father's disapproving voice remonstrating with me not to plant the garden before Good Friday. But Easter's late this year, I remind myself. And we are predicted to have lows no lower than 45F from here on out. Tomatoes. I HAVE tomatoes, ready to go in the ground. I tried starting them from seed, but did not get a good germination rate (roughly 50 percent) and they're VERY slow. So I've been buying them as I spot them. To date I have: Big Beef, Beefsteak and Early Girl hybrids; Roma paste tomatoes (a dozen seedlings, and I may go get more); both yellow and red cherry tomatoes; and Carolina Gold, Arkansas Traveler, Celebrity, Marglobe and Rutgers heirlooms. I think I have in the neighborhood of 40 tomato seedlings. What can I say? We LIKE tomatoes, and I plan to can a BUNCH, in a number of different iterations. It was my experience last year the bunnies will not touch tomatoes, and I'm hoping the same holds true for onions. I bought Georgia Sweet onion sets, because I love a sweet onion. I also laid out the fenced garden, at least on paper: Two early rows of lettuce and radishes, one of seedlings and the other sowed from seed, in the hopes of extending the season for them. One row of early peas, one of cabbage. Those to be replaced later on by okra, and possibly some kind of field peas. One row each of pole beans, bush lima beans, eggplant, squash, zucchini and cucumbers. One row split between fennel and a few pepper plants. I may yet go back and get seedlings for broccoli, brussels sprouts and cauliflower, none of which I have grown before, and which I believe may be better suited for cooler weather than where I am, but hey, experimentation, yes? One row each of Sugar Baby watermelons and canteloupe. I probably need to find something to share the eggplant row; can't fathom I'll eat a whole row of eggplant. Ditto yellow squash and zucchini. I have, I think, waited too late to plant artichokes. I may wind up with potatoes, which I had thought about but disregarded; they may come back. Not growing corn; it's too easy and cheap to buy a bushel, and it's space-intensive. The front flower bed is going into herbs and asparagus. I have asparagus seed, but am looking for crowns. I got seed, again, but probably waited too long to start it, so I have been buying seedlings when I find stuff I like. So far, parsley, cilantro, sage, thyme, oregano, rosemary, marjoram, two kinds of mint, dill, chives, bronze fennel (the kind that doesn't make bulbs). Badly need to find tarragon. Am also looking for pimiento pepper plants, as my pepper seeds have failed to sprout. I have already gotten seedlings for sweet banana peppers (Cubanelles), red bell peppers, New Mexico peppers that, at least in the picture, LOOKED like Hatch chiles, jalapeno, and serrano. If we can stay out of a lot of rain between now and this weekend, I'll have lots of it in. The rest is to come in the next few weeks.

A Cubano is, fortunately, a relatively easy thing to make, especially if you make a big pork roast into mojo pork and then freeze it in meal-sized portions. I get in the notion periodically and make them, along with some moros y cristianos and fried plantains.

Stake out the bacon and tomatoes.

It's probably so old it's completely out of style, but I purely love the carrot cake from the Silver Palate cookbook.

Well...you're good for chicken for a while.

Favorite less-than-30-minutes dinner: pasta kinda-carbonara, with Canadian bacon subbed for guanciale, and with the addition of some asparagus and some sugar snaps.