One of my favorite bloggers is Susan over at Farmgirl Fare.
I discovered her a few years ago and have followed her ever since. She has a talented
and unique style of writing and a simply wonderful sense of humor! She shares almost daily photos of her 240
acre Missouri farm and some of the joys and heartbreaks that all farmers endure
due to the nature of their craft. She is also a gardener and after looking through just a handful of her recipe posts it is obvious to any
reader that she has some mad skills in the kitchen too!
There are many reasons that I admire her work, among them are
that we’re both Missouri girls and we deal with the same change in seasons, the
same freakish weather, and just about the same gardening schedule and issues
that arise due to our location. Also, we are both of the very strong opinion
that food should for the most part be acquired locally whenever possible and
produced according to organic principals and methods. We also seem to have
developed the same approach to cooking, which Susan has dubbed “Less Fuss, More
Flavor”. Read: simple and natural ingredients put together in humble, and
therefore tasty, combinations. I hope that doesn’t come across as an insult,
but rather a compliment. This is, in my opinion, cooking at its very best.
Taking fresh and seasonal ingredients and creating spectacular results with
minimal effort. Throw in a good amount of enthusiasm and passion for what
you’re doing and contentment will swiftly follow. I thoroughly enjoy Susan’s
almost experimental style when it comes to her recipe creations, I share I very
healthy amount of that mentality. I am not skittish in the kitchen, and tend to
alter recipes with reckless abandon based simply on the fact that “if it only
included that it would probably taste
better” or “if it didn’t include this,
I would probably enjoy it more”. Yes, this approach has led me down the path of
disaster more than once but more often than not I get some really delicious
results!
So I was ecstatic to read that Susan will be publishing her
own cookbook in the spring of 2010. The focus will be getting the most out of
your seasonal foods that you possibly can, whether that food comes from a CSA,
the farmers market, your own backyard garden, or even the generous and
overloaded co-workers that missed the mark and over planted (all of us who work
in an office have one or several of those
people, you know, like the guy who leaves an obscene bag of zucchini on the
break room table every day for a month). Susan reports that “canning, freezing,
drying, and storing, along with my favorite ways to savor everything fresh” will
be included. I am already eagerly anticipating the arrival of her printed words
in my mailbox, but of course I have over a year to wait.
In order to manage this huge undertaking, Susan will be
asking for input with a series of questions addressed to her readers on her
second blog, In My Kitchen Garden. Her first question is “How big is your garden
and how much food does it produce”?
So, here’s the point (boy, I can be long winded…huh?), I
have decided that in order to answer Susan’s first question I will be creating
an ongoing series of posts which will be devoted to the development of my new
garden beds and what they produce. By the end of the summer, she might have some useful information, or at least I'm hoping so. You see, when we had that greenhouse
delivered last fall it arrived in two separate pieces strapped onto the
back of a very long trailer (in turn attached to a very large pickup truck), we
had no choice but to tear out my established garden beds so that the shed &
greenhouse could be deposited in the very back of the yard. It was late fall,
and rather than getting a head start on the re-establishment of the garden, we
decided to wait until spring. Bad decision, but there it is. We were lazy,
winter was coming, and spring seemed such a long way off.
Now, spring is almost here, and I realized a month ago I had
no garden beds for the early plantings of lettuce, peas, spinach, and potatoes.
I’ve begun work on the solution, and will have pictures for you soon!
