Garlic Kale Soup

I would like to present one of the best soups I've ever eaten. It was restaurant-quality delicious and very easy to make. It uses kale and garlic from the garden (save this for your upcoming garlic harvest) and shiitake mushrooms from the farmers' market.

Garlic Kale Soup - Vegetarian Times, February 2010

I ran across the recipe recently in an Anti-Inflammatory eBook put together by Vegetarian Times. It showcases inflammation fighting ...

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Cabbage Muthias

Our ongoing effort to use up the bounty of cabbages harvested this winter continues. This week, try this recipe for cabbage muthias, an Indian spiced dumpling that is sure to please.

The recipe recommends using Bob's Red Mill Garbanzo & Fava Flour, but I didn't have that, so I used straight Garbanzo flour. I suspect that the dumplings would have held together better during the process of making them. The end result held together fine, and tasted ...

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Do You Bokashi? – Part 1

I'm delighted to present a guest post from Mark Rainville, one of my fellow gardeners at Ocean View Farms, who has been experimenting with E.M. Bokashi over the last year. This is the first installment to get you started down the fabulous road to fermented tea as fertilizer / soil conditioner. Take it away, Mark:

With all of the home composting options available, the bokashi food scrap fermentation system is one of the easiest and can be the ...

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Cabbage and Caramelized Onion Soup

'Tis the season to harvest cabbage, and we've been on a campaign to find tasty uses for it this month. Our crop consists of Vertus Savoy cabbage (with seeds from Bountiful Gardens). It grew well in Southern California, and it was a delight to finally be able to grow an open-pollinated variety of savoy cabbage (hard to find).  

Here is another savory and delicious way to incorporate this healthy brassica ...

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Fried Green Tomatoes – in Winter?

Yes, Dorothy, there still are tomatoes in February - if you live in Los Angeles. It's one of the many oddities of living in a warm winter climate. Up until last week, we were picking tomatoes from a volunteer tomato that had entwined itself through a giant Cecil Brunner rose, but with recent pruning, it all came to a delicious end.

The vine had ...

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Tasty Cabbage Season

It's time to harvest those cabbages that have been growing over winter. As readers may remember, we planted a newly discovered variety of open pollinated Vertus savoy cabbage from Bountiful Gardens this past fall, and now we're reaping the benefits. It's hard to find an open pollinated or heirloom variety of savoy cabbage, so we were very excited to test this one out.

The results are in, and they ...

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Homesteading: Making Yogurt…Again

After seeing Vegucated, the vegan documentary that shows the underside of our country's meat and dairy industry, I was highly motivated to find organic milk products from truly trustworthy suppliers. Many of our organic dairy manufacturers like Horizon and Organic Valley still utilize confined feedlot techniques and, without going in to details, they don't treat their cows very well. I wanted control over my dairy ASAP.

I did ...

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Romanesco Broccoli: Fibonacci of the Garden

Growing new varieties each season keeps the garden interesting. Since we focus on heirlooms and open pollinated varieties here at Gardenerd, our choices are not new, but rather newly discovered. After a slight seed debacle last year where we grew seeds from an (unnamed) seed company that purchased Romanesco seeds from an untrustworthy supplier, resulting in Romanesco that looked nothing like Romanesco, we tried again this year with guaranteed seed.

What ...

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Easy Homesteading: Making Paneer

Paneer is an Indian cheese that could be considered the gateway cheese to cheese making. It's so easy and uses readily available ingredients, so if you are interested in trying cheese making, here's a good one to start with.

This recipe comes from an old Indian cookbook I picked up in a discount bookstore about 15 years ago called Step by Step Indian Vegetarian Cooking by Louise Steele. It has some great ...

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True Red Velvet (beet) Brownies

After last week's Tip of the Week on beets, it got me thinking about red velvet cake. Where did it come from? How was it made before the introduction of Red #40?  A quick search revealed that prior to the availability of more alkaline "Dutch processed cocoa", bakers could count on the reaction between cocoa and acidic ingredients like vinegar or buttermilk to create a red tinge to the ...

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