Prairie kimchi adventures

At last week’s Food Preservation Drop In, we started a batch of prairie kimchi. What on earth is such a thing, you may be asking? Well, if you’ve ever eaten Korean food, you’ve probably tried kimchi. Traditionally, it’s Chinese cabbage, radishes, scallions and other vegetables seasoned with garlic, hot peppers and ginger fermented until it

Back on the horse: growing onions & peppers from seed

Having had limited success starting onions and peppers from seed, I regrouped and got a good start on both this year. We rigged up some grow lights on a rickety old utility shelf in our otherwise dark and inhospitable basement, and I planted seeds early, putting in four varieties of onions and five varieties of

Further adventures with naked seeded pumpkin

The naked seeded pumpkin experiment continued this week with attempts at pumpkin gnocchi and seed saving (click here to read my last pumpkin post). We came across a recipe for pumpkin gnocchi in Amy Jo Ehman’s wonderful local eating resource Prairie Feast: A writer’s journey home for dinner, and since gnocchi is (in my experience)

Naked-seeded pumpkin success…sort of

As a kid, my mom would scrape out the seeds from a pumpkin (usually a Jack O’Lantern) and bake and season them for a snack. As an adult I discovered the kind of pumpkin seeds you can buy in the store, and started adding them to all manner of things: on top of salads, in