Healthy Recipes

41. Chocolate Zucchini Cake recipe

Do you think you'll die if you see another zucchini? Well then here's a recipe to die for. The photographer made hers in a Bundt pan, but the recipe below suggest a 13 x 9 baking pan. Either way, you're going to love this cake. Before you know it, you'll be out in the garden pulling back leaves looking for one or two zucchini for another batch.

Ingredients
2 1/4 cups sifted all purpose flour
1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 3/4 cups sugar
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, room temperature
1/2 cup vegetable oil
2 large eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 cup buttermilk
2 cups grated unpeeled zucchini (about 2 1/2 medium)
1 6-ounce package (about 1 cup) semisweet chocolate chips
3/4 cup chopped walnuts

Procedure:
Preheat oven to 325°F. Butter and flour 13 x 9 x 2-inch baking pan. Sift flour, cocoa powder, baking soda and salt into medium bowl. Beat sugar, butter and oil in large bowl until well blended. Add eggs 1 at a time, beating well after each addition. Beat in vanilla extract. Mix in dry ingredients alternately with buttermilk in 3 additions each. Mix in grated zucchini. Pour batter into prepared pan. Sprinkle chocolate chips and nuts over.

Bake cake until tester inserted into center comes out clean, about 50 minutes. Cool cake completely in pan.

Serves 12.

Recipe source: Bon Appétit, November 1995
Photo credit: Tania Ho

Category : From the Garden

Date Added: Sep 13, 2007 Rating: 0.00 Votes: 0



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42. Garlic's Unexpected Gems

By Barbara Damrosch, published Thursday, September 6, 2007 in The Washington Post



Some of the best garden discoveries are made by accident. Last fall a friend gave my husband and me some family heirloom garlic. Against the standard advice, he hadn't removed the flower stems, known as scapes, when they appeared, and when he harvested he pulled up the whole plants -- bulbs, stems and flower heads. Inside the flower heads were tiny bulbils (above-ground bulbs) the size of rice grains. We broke apart the regular garlic bulbs at the base of the plants and poked the individual cloves into the ground the way you normally would plant fall garlic. On a whim, we also planted those tiny bulbils, one by one, just to see what would happen.

What we expected to find, come spring, was green garlic, a tasty scallion-like treat you get by planting any small garlic cloves you think aren't big enough to make full-sized heads. But the green shoots the bulbils sent up were so spindly they weren't worth eating, so we let them grow through the summer.

Category : From the Garden

Date Added: Sep 13, 2007 Rating: 0.00 Votes: 0



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43. Whither the Mediterranean Diet?

Story excerpted from a report by by Joseph Shapiro for National Public Radio



When Hitler's armies and Axis powers occupied Greece during World War II, they pretty much stripped Greece of its food, which was sent to German soldiers on battle fronts across Europe.

By the end of the war, at least a quarter of a million Greek men, women and children had died from starvation.

Just three years after the war, American scientists arrived on the Greek island of Crete to help rebuild. The wartime survivors still scraped by on the tiniest portions of food, so the scientists were amazed by what they saw.

Scientists found the people of Crete in excellent health even after the war, explained Dr. Anthony Kafatos of the University of Crete's School of Medicine. He said that after the war, there was no malnutrition.

"The families here in Crete, they produced everything they wanted at home," Kafatos said. "And they had no supermarkets, no electricity, no refrigerator. So they had only seasonal foods."

But now, that kind of homegrown eating is vanishing.

Category : From the Garden

Date Added: Sep 13, 2007 Rating: 0.00 Votes: 0



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44. How to make compost

With autumn leaves falling, lush grassy lawns springing back from summer's heat and drought, and gardens generating heaps of tired vines and other vegetable wastes, this is the perfect time to start a new compost pile or breath some new life into your old one. Our latest how-to video shows you what you need to know to create a pile that smokin' hot.

Category : From the Garden

Date Added: Oct 7, 2007 Rating: 0.00 Votes: 0



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45. September 2007 Newsletter

To read the full newsletter, please see: http://www.kitchengardeners.org/newsletterseptember07.html



 
 
Dear Kitchen Gardener,

I hope you're either enjoying or planning bumper harvests.  We
harvested a great crop of participation and awareness raising at this
year's Kitchen Garden Day celebration and have put together

a short video to share some of what happened that day.
 
While it'd be nice to bask in
the warm glow of those harvests, October is too busy a gardening month
to kick back.  In Maine, there's

pesto and
sauerkraut to be made, squash to be cured, apples to be picked, and
tomatoes to be canned or frozen.  October also offers some of the
crispest, best-tasting salads of the year just ready to be
cut, rinsed, and
spun.  Garlic traditionally goes in the ground on or around
Columbus Day, but that day seems to be slipping back a week or two in
our brave new, globally-warmed world. 
 
October's also a month for
adding new life to tired beds through the addition of compost.  For
those of you who don't have a heaping pile of chocolate cake-like
compost to dig into, autumn's a great time, the best time in fact, to
start a new pile using all those vines and stems that have stopped
delivering, fallen leaves, and the lush, nitrogen-rich grass clippings
that suburban lawns so effortlessly produce in the fall. 
 
The fall is also the best
time for planning and starting new garden projects.  Last week, I
paid a visit to the French School of Maine to help them identify a site
for a new "potager".  Monsieur le Directeur and a
group of professeurs directed me to a rolling,
field available for the school's use just a three minute's walk from the
school.  I felt a bit envious glancing over the grassy expanse,
doing quick math in my head at all the food that such a large plot could
generate.  While the field was gorgeous and had very tall weeds
(usually a reliable sign of soil fertility), I urged them to scope out a
spot closer to the school.  What holds for home gardens holds for
school gardens too: the closer to the kitchen, the better. 
 
We ultimately chose to site
the new garden in a high profile and high traffic spot right in front of
the school.  Not only is it the best spot in terms of sunlight and
promixity, but it sends a strong message that health and good food are
high on the school's agenda.  Once they've got their potager
dug and their systems in place, they can consider turning the larger
piece of land into a true farm capable of supplying their cafeteria. 
 
This experience and some
others I've been a part of recently have got me thinking about where our
schools' priorities are now and perhaps ought to be.  A few years
back, Maine boasted being the first state to prepare its children for
the "information age" by
providing every 7th
and 8th grade student and teacher with a laptop computer. 
Several years into the program, it's amazing to see how comfortable and
skilled Maine's young people have become with this important tool. 
 
This, of course, got me
pondering new "firsts" for Maine and other forward-looking states or
regions, in the US or abroad.  Which state or region will be the
first to prepare its students for the coming "ecology age" by mandating
that every primary or intermediate school in its area have an organic
kitchen garden and age-appropriate garden curriculum?  Surely,
there is no better way to teach health and healthy eating than to engage
young people in the process of heathy food production. 
 
As with the laptop initative,
such an idea would surely encounter resistance, but what revolutionary
idea hasn't?
 
Wishing you a delicious
October,
 

 
 
PS: It's still not too late
to win your chance at over $1000 in prizes through our

Grow-Off Show-Off Contest, but the clock is ticking.  As an
added bonus, the first 50 entries automatically win a free subscription
to Mother Earth News.  Deadline for entries is November 1st. 
Note sure what you can enter, then see

here.

Category : From the Garden

Date Added: Oct 7, 2007 Rating: 0.00 Votes: 0



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46. Kitchen Garden Day 2007 short video

Enjoying good food, good company, learning, teaching, and having lots of fun connecting with other people and the earth. That pretty much sums up what goes into a typical Kitchen Garden Day celebration. Although it's too late to organize an event for 2007, it's not too late at all to see what types of celebrations others organized. Thanks to all who were with us or with us in spirit that day!

Category : From the Garden

Date Added: Oct 7, 2007 Rating: 0.00 Votes: 0



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47. Seeing October in a new light

By Barbara Damrosch, published Thursday, September 20, 2007 in The Washington Post



When T.S. Eliot wrote "April is the cruelest month," he might have added, "October is seriously underrated."

Consider those two months. We expect from both a temperature range midway between hot and cold, with unpredictable doses of either. But gardeners, especially, embrace April with exaggerated hope and cheer, oblivious to the imminent onset of blistering heat, drought and bolted lettuce. By October many edge wearily and even gratefully into the shadow of oncoming winter, forgetting to enjoy the gardening year's best weather.

Poke your head outside the cocoon of artificial lighting and controlled indoor temperature, and you'll better understand the rhythm of the seasons' lag time, a planetary dance in which reality and symbol rarely mesh. What we call summer solstice (around June 21) runs about two months ahead of the year's hottest weather, and the winter solstice (around Dec. 21) two months ahead of its coldest. "As the days begin to lengthen, the cold begins to strengthen," the old saying goes.

The number of daylight hours on the spring equinox (around March 21) is the same as that on the fall equinox (around Sept. 22), but while the sun in March seems feeble, in September it feels strong, thanks to the slowness with which the earth absorbs and releases the sun's heat. In spring the warming of the soil surface can lag a month and a half behind that of the air on a mild day, and six feet below, the lag can be as much as three months. In fall, the ground is comparably slow to chill.

This all adds up to fall gardening nirvana. The earth is still warm, even if you start the day with a thick sweater. Pest insects are bundling themselves up in pupae to hibernate or seeking refuge underground. The shortening days let you get away with feats impossible in spring. Lettuce and spinach, whose impulse to go to seed is triggered by lengthening days, do not bolt cruelly, but bide their time, allowing a gloriously long harvest. Arugula loses its harsh bite. Carrots, beets, turnips, parsnips and Brussels sprouts begin the magical sweetening-up that comes with the cold.

As maples turn scarlet, Tuscan kale glows with the deep green of chlorophyll. By the time such summer crops as tomatoes, cucumbers and melons have frozen or lost their flavor, far more crops have reached the perfect moment. You're then ready to compost all those tired vines and embrace the garden's benign season.

Article copyright of Barbara Damrosch. Reprinted with permission.
Photo credit: Veronica Lynn

Category : From the Garden

Date Added: Oct 7, 2007 Rating: 0.00 Votes: 0



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48. Interview with food writer Nancy Harmon Jenkins

Food writer Nancy Harmon Jenkins has established herself as one of the authoritative voices on Mediterranean cuisine. She has lived and traveled extensively within the region and divides her time between homes in Maine and Tuscany. We recently caught up with her to talk with her latest book Cucina del Sole.

KGI: In the intro to your book, you describe the essence of Southern Italian cuisine as the simplicity of “natural ingredients� made using “straightforward, uncomplicated techniques.� What are a few of the ingredients and flavors that define the region for you and what makes them different from their counterparts available elsewhere?

NHJ: The natural ingredients I'm thinking of are the products of Southern Italian fields and gardens, the vegetables and fruits especially, that have such extraordinary depths of flavor, quite unlike those available elsewhere in the world. I put this down primarily to geography--also climate to a certain extent. Mild rainy winters and hot dry summers seem to be ideal for vegetable gardening. But the volcanic geography of much of the south--I think especially of the areas around Etna in Sicily and Vesuvius in Campania, but also, lesser known, the Monte Vulture in Basilicata. In Campania they call the soil arapilla and it means specifically soil that evolves from volcanic ash. In some places it goes down as much as three meters and it is peculiarly rich in minerals. That to me is one source of the flavor of tomatoes from the slopes of Vesuvius or the great array of citrus from around Etna, not to mention the wine grapes from all three regions. Puglia's geography is not volcanic but it represents another advantage--a porous limestone karst that soaks up rainwater and acts as a giant sponge beneath the fields of Puglia, where a large portion of Europe's organic vegetables are raised. Obviously everywhere in the world there are unique combinations of geography and climate that lead to the production of certain vegetables, but I think there are few places where such high quality is so consistent around the year and across the board as it is in the south of Italy.

Category : From the Garden

Date Added: Oct 7, 2007 Rating: 0.00 Votes: 0



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49. Healthier Halloween

Halloween is truly a kid’s
holiday –- good friends, creative costumes, event-filled parties –- all with a
cool spooky theme -- who...

Category : From the Garden

Date Added: Oct 23, 2007 Rating: 0.00 Votes: 0



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50. Community Supported Agriculture for Organic Food

Having trouble buying the highest-quality seasonal organic produce? Unable to find a wide variety of natural and organic fruits and...

Category : From the Garden

Date Added: Oct 23, 2007 Rating: 0.00 Votes: 0



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