The never-ending stock pot

     I used to think boxed chicken stock was great. Sure I preferred to make my own, but I didn't always have a chicken carcass on hand, and It's an easy way to add a bit of flavor to your meal without too much work, it stacks easy in the pantry, and at $2 a pop at Trader Joes, it doesn't cost much. But now $2 is a quarter of our daily food budget! That means either we give up boxed stock, or we don't eat much else...

   I gather that back in the good old days, when food was important (and women stayed chained to the stove) every household had a stock pot that simmered away at the back of the stove all the time. A busy housewife would toss in all the the scraps and trimmings that a busy home kitchen produced, keep it topped up with water, and have good stock or broth on hand all the time! My solution after the jump.

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Ragu a la Napoletana

     I love to cook, I love to write about cooking, I love to take pictures about food (that's why I started this whole thing). But I'm a bad blogger. Half the time I start cooking, get absorbed in it, then when I'm elbow deep in crushed tomatoes or hands covered in dough,  hey, I should blog this! So pardon the incomplete photography on this one...

     A16 Food+Wine is my favorite kind of cookbook. I could never afford to eat at Nate Appleman's restaurant, but his book doesn't skip on serious techniques and brings the humble, gutsy cuisine of Campagnia (the province including Naples) within reach of a talented amateur cook like myself. During this Lent experiment, I've found myself delving through the book and finding some very satisfying and surprisingly inexpensive dishes like Cavatelli a short, eggless pasta that's great with cauliflower, anchovy, and chiles; and onion and tomato paste soffrito that brings extra depth to earthy greens like kale. This week we're trying a rich Ragu a la Napoletana with another Campagnian noodle, maccarronara. Recipe follows after the jump!

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And we're off!

Yesterday I took a quick peak under the cold frame, and it looks like our radishes are just beginning to sprout. The 2010 gardening season is officially off and running, but we're still waiting on the peas...

I'm surprised by the amount of light that gets through the fleece and by the amount of heat that doesn't escape. The material looks so flimsy, but my high-tech climate monitoring system (a meat thermometer stuck in the soil) shows that the soil temperature is staying around 60 degrees, even with nighttime low temperatures reaching 45 degrees on a few nights!

A "Kickstart" to something great

All winter I've mulled over the idea of selling my produce commercially. I love gardening and most of what I grow goes into the kitchen - I'm certainly not in this for the money! But I haven't had a regular job for a few months, freelance stuff is far from lucrative, and amendments, seed, and horticultural fleece cost money! So if I can sell the produce of one or two beds to cover the cost of the other three I'll be happy. And I'll helping to forge an innovative new food system. I thought I was the only one thinking of this kind of thing (when I bring this idea up in conversation I get a lot of what I like to call "supportive puzzlement") but there are two young women in the Mission district who are taking things even further and looking to make a real, honest, living-wage-paying job out of growing food here in the city. Look over their charming blog, and check out a great little video on their project fundraising page at Kickstarter.com.

More stirrings in the garden

It's February, a difficult month for gardeners in San Francisco, or at least for me. On the one hand, night time low temperatures are edging up into the 50s and this past week we had a delicious amuse bouche of early spring sun. I can practically feel myself germinating! On the other hand, the ground is still soggy and the rain won't officially leave our reliable Mediterranean climate until the end of March at the earliest. I can get around some of this problem by planting reliable cool weather crops like shelling peas and radishes. They thrive in the cool, moist conditions, and actually prefer to be harvested by the time we start getting our first hot days around May and June. But the February planting I did last year got caught by some freak cold weather and got bogged down (quite literally) in some of the March downpours.

As usual, more after the jump

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