An Organic Urban Yard in Less Time Than a Sit-Com

It’s been a fantastic summer for eggplant in our garden. From our three plants, we’ve had a bounteous crop of eggplant– lovely, smooth, unblemished and unscathed by squirrels. We’ve had enough produce to make a couple batches of the spicy eggplant dip known as baba ganoush. The biggest discovery and delight this summer, however, has been Grilled Eggplant Parmesan.

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A “green” study group formed at our church last year, initially as a book study group. They have now transitioned into a group that meets monthly for a potluck and discussion. We’ve always missed the meetings for one reason or another, but today we decided to show up. The dish we planned to pass is a scaled up version of the Solar Apple Crisp. Scaling up a recipe for a solar oven still involves a lot of guesswork — for us, at least — because it tinkers with the important ratio of surface area to mass. The glory of solar cooking in a box style oven is that you really can’t over-cook many foods because the temperatures don’t get high enough to scorch — at least not in Michigan. Friends who’ve built parabolic style cookers, however, say they can easily burn food on one side before it’s cooked all the way through.

This version of Solar Apple Crisp stars a small cast of ingredients:

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Our pineapple sage is proving to be healthy and plentiful. Here’s some salsa that I concocted in order to use our new-this-year pineapple sage. [Read more →]

We first made raspberry daiquiris a couple summers ago, after a neighbor mentioned that that is what they did with their black raspberries. As fond as we are of pie, we decided we could sacrifice some of our berries to try out their recipe.
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The biggest bonus of growing berries in the garden, in our case black raspberries, is having enough to make a pie! I find it difficult to justify using fresh berries purchased from the store to make a pie when the cost is so astronomical. Berries from the garden, however, are like free gifts! And our plants produce enough to have provided the opportunity for me, over time, to perfect a black raspberry pie.
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