I’m back, at least a little bit. I finished the manuscript I was working on and took a wee breather. I also presented the two classes I’d signed up for at the Community Mercantile, and signed on as a new member of the Lawrence Farmers Market board of directors. (This post’s photos are from the market this past Saturday.)

You could say I’ve been busy. And now, suddenly, I am not.

I’ve been freelancing 20 years, and these lulls occur. Inevitably, as now, these lulls provoke some deliberation about what I should be doing with my career. The last big lull prompted the beginning of this blog, back in March 2007. I enjoy it immensely, but it hasn’t exactly provoked a surge in income for a number of reasons, including the plethora of food blogs out there and my apparently inherent dislike of self-promotion. (Makes you wonder how I’ve survived as a freelancer all these years, doesn’t it?)

On the other hand, it led me to connect with Ethicurean.com—a great site for anyone interested in sustainable, organic, local and ethical (SOLE) food—and to get the contract for the book that is in production.

In any event, current deliberations include whether to continue this blog and another I started, homecookingrevival.com, which has suffered technical difficulties sufficient that I pretty much abandoned it, except to keep it on line; I haven’t updated in months.

What I think I’ll do for the time being is to aim for posting twice a week at this venue and see how it goes. If you have anything you would particularly like to see, let me know. Otherwise, I guess I’ll continue my mix of recipes, rants and news.

I’d heard through the grapevine that such a thing was in the offing, and now that it’s sort of semi-official, I wanted to call it to your attention. If you’d seen any of Ken Meter’s presentations here, which local reporters have not, you’d know the potential is huge.

So here’s what I hope a few of you will do: Contact the county commissioners (they’re the three at the top of the page) and let them know you think it’s a great idea. And if you’re really motivated, educate yourself a bit more:

• Read a little on Foodperson.
• And on Ethicurean.
• Or check out the K-State presentation on historical fruit and vegetable production in the Kansas River Valley (PDF). I believe that was put together by Pete Garfinkel.
• Or view Meter’s outline (PDF, from Kansas Rural Center) from his May 2008 presentation, which probably gives more information that you want, let alone his whole presentation last year (also from Kansas Rural Center, 17.4 MB PDF).
• This KRC page also has links to PDFs of Ronda Janke’s and Scott Allegrucci’s presentations the same day.

Lots of facts. Lots of good info if you have time to wade through it all.

I’ve signed on to teach two cooking classes this fall at the Community Mercantile, and I need your help. The first class, on September 22, will be Cooking 101. Here’s the current class description, which is subject to revision:

Cooking 101. So you want to cook your own meals but you don’t know boil from broil? This crash course on home cooking will teach you how to read recipes, measure and use simple cooking techniques plus choose supplies and equipment. You’ll try slicing and dicing and learn such basics as cooking rice and eggs, sautéing vegetables and more. You’ll have the tools to create a week’s worth of menus that you can prepare. With volunteers from the class, we’ll make and sample an Omelet, from-scratch Herbed Biscuits, a Fruit Salad and Brownies like you’ve never had from a box.

How does that sound to you? The class will last two hours, and I’ll have plenty of handouts covering things like measuring conversions (such as 1 tablespoon = 3 teaspoons), temperatures at which meat is safely done, supply list and so forth.

Please help!

What I’d love to hear from you are any of the following:

• The most important thing or things you needed to know when you were learning to cook.
• The concepts or principles that were most interesting and beneficial to your child/friend/spouse when you were teaching him or her how to cook.
• The thing you learned years into your cooking experience that you wish you had known years earlier.

I’ve given cooking classes before, but never in front of a group that could well include people I know personally, so I’m a little nervous! I’m also worried no one will sign up, so if you know any possible candidates, I hope you’ll let them know about it. At the moment, the class isn’t posted to the Merc’s web site, but I trust it will be before too long.

Second class

The second class, by the way, is tentatively as follows:

How to Cook Grass-Fed Beef, Pastured Pork & Pastured Poultry. Cooking beef, pork and chicken raised the old-fashioned way may be a little different from what you are used to. Learn how to get the most flavor and best texture from these nutritionally superior meats that most people think taste better too. We’ll make and sample a Better All-American Hamburger, a savory Chicken & Garlic Stew, Spicy Pork & Cellophane Noodles and Marinated Chuck Steak with Herb Sauce.

It’s scheduled for Tuesday, October 20.

Speak up!

OK, now. Let me have it! What would you have wanted to learn if you’d taken Cooking 101?

If the whole “edible landscape” notion has seemed unrealistic to you, the Heartland Harvest Garden at Powell Gardens in Missouri just might make you reconsider. Heartland Harvest Garden, which officially opened Sunday (June 14, 2009) is 12 acres of edible landscape, which garden officials claim make it the biggest such garden in the country.

Timely gardens

It’s a timely spectacle, opening as interest in food gardening surges. The Heartland Harvest Garden has numerous spaces both educational and beautiful: home-style kitchen gardens, fruit and vegetable parterres with designs based on quilt patterns, a vineyard, fruit tree plazas and the children’s Fun Food Farm. It is a feast for the eyes as well as the appetite. (Click below for larger images of, from left, a portion of parterre, vineyard and Fun Food Farm sign.)

In addition, the “Missouri barn” will house Fresh: A Garden Café, which will use produce from the garden; an interpretive center; and a silo/overlook of the parterres inspired by the gardens at the French chateau, Villandry. Although visitors aren’t supposed to eat the landscape as they browse, “tasting stations” offer bites of what’s ripe.

Particularly appealing is the garden’s identification labels: Not only is virtually every plant labeled, but the labels include comments about the plant’s use.

Growing impressions

My visit left me with a couple of impressions regarding growing food:

• Container gardening can mean far more than a patio tomato in a plastic pot, which is how I’ve tended to regard it. The garden is awash in large, beautiful containers filled with a variety of edible plants. Now, I admit I’m curious as to how well some of these will do when, for instance, vines get big and herbs bolt. But even if they become unwieldy, it’s clear that if you have only a tiny spot in the sun (such as my back porch) you can still have something both ornamental and good to eat.
• There are many ways to go vertical when gardening in a confined space. Besides trellises, simple wire fences can be used to carry the load of squash, beans, tomatoes and other vining food plants, at least if you choose the right varieties.
• Inclusion of edible flowers, from nasturtiums to roses and many more, adds gorgeous splashes of color.

Star attractions

Powell Gardens brought in two big-name authors to design gardens. Rosalind Creasy, an early edible garden promoter, designed one, and Barbara Damrosch, Washington Post columnist and author of The Garden Primer
created another. Creasy’s books include The Complete Book of Edible Landscaping published in 1982 and most recently, Recipes from the Garden. This spring’s cool, damp weather has put their gardens behind where we might expect them to be at this late date, but it’s still valuable to see what the pros do.

I’ll be very interested to see how the gardens fare as summer’s heat sets in. For those not from this part of the world, let me tell you that the weather can and does assault crops in all sorts of ways. Will those potted plants need five-a-day watering? Will heat radiating off paving cook herbs?

And if the plants do survive, even thrive, will climbing tomatoes fall down when laden with fruit? Will pests beset the squash and melon vines? What happens when all that Swiss chard bolts? I guess I’ll have to go back and find out.

Unfinished business

The biggest disappointment about the garden is simply that it isn’t entirely ready. Any garden is inevitably a work in progress, but the silo overlook and Fresh: A Garden Café weren’t yet open (and, yes, I was visiting for the food!); there was no interpretative guide or map to the edible gardens (yet, anyway); and the children’s area was far from complete. I wanted to see the berry-bush maze in action! So far I’ve been unable to confirm whether the entire Heartland Harvest garden is being grown with organic methods, although Damrosch, who was on hand Sunday, said her garden there was organic.

The bright side of those shortcomings: I’ll have to visit again. Alas, it’s unlikely there will be another such mild day to visit in the next month or two.

For an overview of the Heartland Harvest Garden, check out Jill Silva’s story in the Kansas City Star or Garden Fest page (which you might not think to look at) on the Powell Gardens web site. The gardens provide a map and hours.

The results revealed themselves this year. Their mother commented a couple of weeks ago that the two older boys, ages 4 and 6 (I think), had spotted the little green cherries in the tree. She reported that “they are so excited” and wanted to know when they’d be ready.

Well, last week they were ready. On Friday, the two guys rang my doorbell (repeatedly) and held up a stainless steel bowl with a couple dozen cherries in the bottom.

“Look! The cherries are ready!” they said. These guys are delights. They are big-eyed, wiry bundles of energy, with the oldest in particular having an astonishingly sunny disposition, and this day they burst with happy energy.

I told them I’d be down to pick some the next day. They said “great!” and ran off.

Ripe for eating

The next day, I saw their dad at the Farmers Market with their equally engaging 1 1/2-year-old brother. Andy said I wouldn’t believe how excited those boys were, adding that all three boys and a neighbor girl, who’s 2 or 3, had spent a lot of time sitting under the tree and eating the cherries straight up.

Amazing, I thought. These are sour cherries, not Bing cherries, and I’m betting they’d have declined to eat them if they hadn’t come from their very own tree.

Later that day I picked cherries with help from Hillary with the plan to bake a pie on Sunday. Before I got to it, though, the door bell rang again. Repeatedly. There at the door was the oldest boy. He held out his hand and opened it. Four bright-red cherries, one slightly squished, lay in the palm of his hand.

“See, the cherries are ready,” he said.

“I know,” I said, “I picked some this morning!”

He continued to hold out his hand.

“Are those for me?” I said. He nodded and placed them into my hand. “Would you like some pie when I get it baked?”

“No thanks,” he said. “Bye!”

And off he scampered.

Pie for sharing

Sunday morning Gordon and Eileen helped me pit the cherries, and I got the pie in the oven before the house heated up. That evening, they and another couple came over for pie. I saved a piece for Hillary and took the last two pieces to an older couple down the alley. Health problems have ended their pie-baking days.

Thanks to that cherry tree, we have four kids excited about a healthy food and the memory of one delicious pie that fed eight adult neighbors, half who had a hand in its creation.

Isn’t it cool how good food brings people together? And isn’t it cool that seeing food grow on a tree has gotten those kids excited?

I think it is. And, hmm, I couldn’t help but notice this morning that more cherries are in that tree, waiting to be picked if the birds don’t get them first. Maybe another community effort is called for. I feel certain I could get some help.

Did I mention I was moving? Well I was, and I have…to an office that’s not in my house. It’s a big, perhaps crazy, move given the economy, but I feel good about it. Here’s a photo of moving out of the home office, and in my new office. Yea!

At home (eek!)

Not messed up yet

Not only is it not in my house, which has been my primary work domain for (gasp) 20 years) but it’s also in a suite of offices with old friend Lynn Byczynski, of Growing for Market fame, who’s also moved from her home office. Double yea!

Meanwhile, I’ve had a book proposal I’m working on and am modestly hopeful of getting a contract, and I decided to upgrade the software on HomecookingRevival.com, which has been a headache. It involved making adjustments beyond my technical abilities—or beyond my patience, at any rate. It’s almost back up to speed, and should be a positive improvement in the end, but in the short run, well…headache and crabbiness.

So…that’s what I’ve been doing. I decided to post this separate from the next post I’m about to write which, I’m happy to report is about food!

We’ve been here before. Enough already. Tell your lawmakers. The Center for Food Safety makes it easy.

The weeding provided an interesting lesson in how things have changed, at least technologically. No surprise there, of course, but it provided a concrete reminder of the days BI and AI (before and after widespread use of the Internet). In any event, I’ll get back to work here at last, away from the distractions and temptations of working at home.

My hope is that I’ll be more productive. I intend to do more with Homecooking Revival, and I have a few other work-related things I intend to be working on. For now, wish me luck, and I’ll be back with more food later this week.

As to food, well, I keep meaning to post about a delicious pork stew I made, and I will! But not now…as I need to find something to eat.

Thanks for your patience. Hope all’s well with you.

The weird part is that JCCC is situated smack in the middle of Johnson County, a fine example of U.S. suburban sprawl-in other words, probably not the first place that comes to mind for sustainable agriculture. But that’s the wonderful part too. JCCC and the Johnson County suburbs just happen to be sprawling over what was, in the not-distant past, fine prairie farmland where for generations farmers grew their own food. What’s old is new again.

Students who complete the three-semester JCCC sustainable agriculture entrepreneurship program (a joint project of JCCC’s hospitality management, horticulture and entrepreneurship programs and Kansas State University) earn a Sustainable Agriculture Entrepreneurship Certificate. Better yet, the students are prepared to grow not only their own crops but also their own businesses based on sustainable ag. Heck, there are some big yards in the area that could produce quite a lot of food.

Meanwhile, JCCC this summer will become the delivery point to not one CSA program, but two. For several years now, the Rolling Prairie Farmers Alliance has delivered to subscribers at JCCC, although it’s fully subscribed already for 2009. This year students doing practicums at the associated K-State Research & Extension Center in Olathe will be contributing to the RPFA deliveries at the college.

Now, a second CSA program is starting, sponsored (I think) by the college and available to JCCC employees. Executive Chef Tim Johnson (PDF) said in the college’s employee news list that program details and sign-up opportunities will come in April. He also said participants would pay $25 a week for a bag full of goods, delivered on Fridays, plus a $25 registration fee. They will receive a cookbook, reusable grocery bags, clothing, coupons and other items, including news about participating farmers. If I find out that the program will be open to the community at large, I’ll let you know.

Very nice. In the meantime, JCCC also has an edible schoolyard and a few other sustainable food programs. (See p. 11 in the JCCC Report to the Community, 1.6 MB PDF.)

Maybe part of the interest is fashion, but who cares? K-State wasn’t exactly in the vanguard of researching and promoting sustainable agriculture, and it’s great to see its Olathe station and JCCC working together on sustainable ag. Even if only a few students complete the sustainable ag entrepreneurship program, its mere existence and the support of the administration and the school’s other food programs certainly raise awareness for JCCC students and staff.

Every little bit helps, and these programs deserve recognition and, dare I say, growth.