Jon and I just got back from an awesome adventure in Alaska. Our trip included classic Alaskan experiences (floating on rivers, hiking up mountains), but we also managed to squeeze in a little garden time, including a tour of the agriculture exhibits at the Alaska State Fair and a visit to the incredible vegetable gardens at the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) in Palmer, Alaska. Now that we’re home, I thought I’d give you a little tour of a big Alaskan garden.

NOLS students stay at the Palmer camp on their way to and from mountaineering, sea kayaking, and backpacking courses, and they are lucky enough to eat fresh, organic vegetables grown right on the premises. Food scraps from the kitchen are composted or fed to the camp’s resident pigs…and they even raise and slaughter their own broiler chickens!

The NOLS Alaska garden features a gorgeous backdrop of mountains and huge rows of salad greens, broccoli, cabbage, beets, carrots, and rhubarb.

Peas line the fence of the salad garden, which includes incredible lettuces, arugula, and chard.

A hoop house keeps tomatoes, basil, and other culinary herbs toasty warm during the short growing season. I was definitely jealous to discover that this garden in Alaska had ripe tomatoes before me!

Even though the Alaskan summer is short and cool it has long, long days (almost 24 hours of light in June and July), which means that it’s possible to grow really big cool season crops like beets, turnips, cauliflower, and cabbage. At the state fair they have a whole section in the Agriculture exhibits devoted to enormous vegetables. While I have to admit that our encounter with a grizzly bear while hiking was certainly the most memorable part of the trip…seeing a 20 pound rutabaga was a close second!

At the beginning of the summer I decided to repurpose two of the flimsy wire tomato cages that were taking up space in our garage into cucumber trellises.

I simply tied the wire legs of each cage together with sisal twine and placed the conical shaped cages upside down in my garden. I secured the cages by pinning them to the soil with U-shaped garden staples (the kind used to hold landscape fabric in place). I then planted a cucumber in the middle of each cage.

I’ll admit that the trellises had a decidedly homemade appearance at first. But the vines quickly climbed up the wire scaffolding and now and they look like a mini cucumber mountain! By growing the cucumbers onto a trellis, I’ve freed up space for beets and baby lettuces, and I haven’t had any cucumbers rot because they aren’t in contact with the damp soil. Next year I think I’ll make these DIY trellises even sturdier by securing them to a bamboo pole that runs up the middle. But either way the trellis is a success. We’ve harvested 13 ‘Satsuki Madori’ slicing cucumbers (pictured below) and two pickling cucumbers, and have loads more of both on the way.

Blackberries, blueberries, raspberries, oh my! Markets and gardens are filled with berries right now and it is almost impossible to not think about making berry cobblers, fools, and crumbles. But these desserts probably won’t materialize on my dinner table. No, I’m not lazy. I just don’t have air conditioning. And it’s way too hot to think about cranking up the oven and baking.

At this time of year, I prefer to make tarts with graham cracker crusts. These buttery, crumbly crusts need to bake for only 10 minutes, and because my tart pan fits into our toaster over, I usually just bake the crust in there. This particular tart features a creamy mascarpone filling sweetened with honey and topped with fresh blackberries.

Blackberry Tart with Honeyed Mascarpone Filling
Blackberries are kind of sneaky. They turn a deep blackish, purple before they fully ripen. But these almost ripe berries are tart, firm, and just not as tasty as fully ripe ones. When picking blackberries (either off the canes or at the market) choose only the most luscious ones—they should be plump, soft, and have a dark (rather than whitish) core.

You can cover the entire tart with berries if you like, but I like to leave a pool of filing exposed in the middle because it looks so pretty.

What you’ll need:
1 7.5 ounce box of animal graham crackers (about 2 heaping cups)
¼ cup light brown sugar, packed
¼ cup unsalted butter, melted
2/3 cup mascarpone cheese
½ cup sour cream
1/3 cup honey
½ teaspoon vanilla extract
1 pint of blackberries (or more if you want to cover the entire tart)

Instructions:

1. Preheat your oven or toaster oven to 350 degrees F. Process the animal crackers and brown sugar in a food processor until the mixture looks like coarse sand (about 10 one second pulses). Then, with the processor blade running, pour in the melted butter and process until the crumbs are evenly moist. Press the crumbs into a 9 inch tart pan and bake for 10 minutes or until the crust is firm to the touch. Remove the crust from the oven and cool on a wire rack.

2. Meanwhile, beat the mascarpone cheese and sour cream in a medium bowl until smooth. Beat in the honey and the vanilla. Spread the filling onto the cooled crust and arrange the berries in concentric circles over the filling, starting at the outside and moving in. You can chill the tart, if you like, but I usually eat it right away!

I’m a total sucker for all things old fashioned, so when my mother-in-law gave me a packet of heirloom Scarlet Runner Beans from Monticello for Christmas, I was thrilled! I planted the plump, purple speckled seeds around a rusty wrought iron trellis and scattered cosmos seed at its base. My idea was for the lacy foliage of the cosmos to fill in the space at the center of the trellis and for the flowers to peek out from behind the beans’ heart shaped leaves. My plant combination ideas don’t always work out, but this one is pretty nice, don’t you think?

My tomatoes are very late this year (still not a single ripe one!). My patience finally wore out this past weekend when I found an entire booth stuffed with tomatoes at the farmer’s market. I bought a huge basket of cherry tomatoes and headed home, anxious to recreate a meal I recently enjoyed at the restaurant Clyde Common in Portland.

On the surface, this pasta dish seems a bit boring (Noodles and tomato sauce? Yawn.), but Jason Barwikowski, the chef at Clyde Common, threw in slivered garlic, fresh herbs, and most interestingly, orange and lemon zest. He then topped the dish off with a generous sprinkle of buttery breadcrumbs. So simple, so good, and so very easy to make.

Bucatini with Citrusy Cherry Tomatoes
Inspired by the Spaghettini with Cherry Tomatoes at Clyde Common
Serves 2

The addition of lemon and orange zest adds an unexpected, bright twist to this traditional summertime dish. Clyde Common served the tomatoes with spaghettini, but I like pasta with a little more substance, so I used bucatini—a fat cousin of spaghetti that retains a nice bite when cooked.

What you’ll need:
8 ounces bucatini or spaghetti
1 tablespoon salted butter
½ cup panko breadcrumbs
1 tablespoon finely grated Parmesan cheese, plus more for garnish
2 tablespoons fresh basil, minced
2 pints of cherry tomatoes, halved pole to pole
2 large garlic cloves, slivered
1 tablespoon flat leaf parsley, minced
2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
Zest from ½ of an orange
Zest from ½ of a lemon
Sea salt

Instructions:
1. Bring a large pot of salted water to a rolling boil and add the pasta. Give it a good stir. Meanwhile, melt the butter in a skillet. When the foam subsides, add in the bread crumbs and one tablespoon of the basil. Stir constantly until the breadcrumbs are evenly coated with butter and golden brown. Scrape the toasted breadcrumbs into a bowl and set aside. When cool, stir in the Parmesan cheese and add salt to taste.

2. Wipe out the skillet and then heat the olive oil over medium heat until it shimmers. Add in the slivered garlic and cook until it is soft and just beginning to brown on the edges. Add in the cherry tomatoes and cook, stirring occasionally until they soften and begin to wrinkle. Remove from the heat as soon as the tomatoes begin to collapse. Gently stir in the remaining basil, parsley, orange and lemon zest.

3. When the pasta is cooked (it should be tender with just a little bit of bite), drain it into a colander and then immediately transfer it to a large bowl. Pour the tomato sauce over the pasta and toss well. Dish up the pasta into warmed bowls and sprinkle the buttery breadcrumbs over the top. Pass Parmesan cheese at the table.

I’m growing a fall crop of peas for the first time this year. Most people only grow peas in spring, but at my community garden, I’ve observed that peas do very well, if not better, when planted in late summer for a fall crop. So I thought I’d try it (and encourage you to do the same)!

Before I plant peas, I always soak them for about 8 hours in a jar of water. I find this helps the peas germinate faster because the big, fat seeds have already absorbed enough water to sprout when you plant them. Pre-soaking the seeds also allows you to remove seeds that aren’t viable, as they tend to float and viable seeds tend to sink.

Before planting I also cover my seeds in rhizobia bacteria inoculant. Rhizobia bacteria have a symbiotic relationship with peas (and other members of the legume family). The bacteria act like little nitrogen factories for the peas. They form nodes on the plants’ roots and convert nitrogen from the air into a form that the plants can use. In return, the peas provide the bacteria carbohydrates and minerals. You can buy pea inoculant from most seed companies (including Johnny’s Select Seeds and Territorial Seed Company). To apply the inoculant, simply pour some into a baggie, put in the presoaked seeds, and shake until the peas are coated. Then you’re ready to plant!

Sow peas about an inch deep in a sunny, well-drained spot in the garden. I seed my peas less than an inch apart, because I like to thin them out when they are a couple of inches tall and use the shoots in salads. Vine and bush varieties of peas grow best with support. I usually grow peas up a bamboo tripod, but Jon and I built an A-Frame trellis out of cedar 1×1 boards and hardware cloth this spring and it works great (and looks nice, too!).

In honor of my grandmother’s 86th birthday this past weekend, I harvested an armful of basil and made pesto. My Nona was born in a tiny coal mining town in western Wyoming to immigrants from northern Italy. Italian was her first language and she learned to cook on a wood burning stove. Growing up she fed me a steady diet of simple, delicious food—polenta, gnocchi, fresh pastas, and pesto, lots of pesto!

She always grew a huge crop of ‘Genovese’ basil against the brick wall in her backyard. All summer long she’d make pesto, freeze small mounds of it, wrap each mound in plastic, and stick them in the deep freeze. Then, during the fall and winter, she would distribute little Tupperware containers packed with pesto to her lucky family.

I’m keeping up the tradition by growing lots of basil and freezing pesto so that I can share it with friends and use it in pasta dishes, dressings, and soups this winter. While my Nona isn’t able to cook anymore, I know that she’s happy I’m carrying on the tradition.

Nona’s Pesto
Pesto can be made with all sorts of herbs and nuts, but this recipe is traditional to the core, just basil, pine nuts, Parmesan cheese, and olive oil. It is incredibly easy to make and absolutely delicious. If you scale the recipe up or down, err on the light side with the garlic at first because you don’t want it to overpower the basil’s sweet, spicy flavor. This pesto adds a welcome dash of summery flavor to winter dishes, so stock up on it now! You won’t be sorry come January.

What you’ll need:
4  packed cups of fresh Italian basil leaves (I use the variety ‘Genovese’)
3 cloves of garlic
½ cup pine nuts
½ cup Parmesan cheese
½ cup extra virgin olive oil
Salt to taste

Instructions:
1. In a food processor, blend the basil, garlic, pine nuts and Parmesan cheese into a smooth paste. Scrape down the sides of the bowl. Then, with the blade running, slowly drizzle in the olive oil. Process until the olive oil is thoroughly incorporated and the pesto is smooth. Give the pesto a taste and add salt if necessary.

2. The pesto will keep for up to a week if refrigerated in a covered container. Bring it to room temperature and give it a good stir before using it in a recipe. To freeze, fill the individual cells of an ice cube tray with pesto and place in the freezer until solid. Then, wrap each cube of pesto in plastic and place back in the freezer. To freeze larger portions, line a small cookie sheet or pizza pan with waxed paper. Drop ¼ cup mounds onto the wax paper and freeze until solid. Wrap each mound tightly in plastic and store in the freezer. Drop the frozen cubes of pesto into soups or sauces. When using frozen pesto in a pasta dish, allow the pesto to unthaw and then stir in a few teaspoons of pasta water before tossing it with the cooked pasta—this helps distribute the pesto throughout the pasta evenly.

One of the most unexpected and wonderful benefits of starting a blog about gardening is meeting amazing people who help make the world a better place by growing food. A few weeks ago a gardener in my neighborhood, Marguerite, contacted me. She and her 10 year old twin boys decided they wanted to start a vegetable garden. But instead of sticking it in their backyard, they chose to transform the strip of grass and weeds between their sidewalk and the street into a vegetable garden. And they asked their neighbors to join them.

Marguerite and her boys put out a sign that said “We’re tired of rising food and fuel prices, so we’re going to turn this weed patch into a P-Patch (an organic community garden).” Three families in their neighborhood responded, and in a matter of days, they turned a chunk of wasted urban space into a productive food garden.

I’m going to post pictures of this new community garden next week, but first I wanted to share a video called This Is Your Lawn that Marguerite sent me this morning. Kitchen Gardeners International has started a grassroots campaign called Eat the View with a mission to plant edible gardens in high profile places. One of the goals of Eat the View is to convince the next president to dig up a portion of the White House lawn and plant a kitchen garden. The garden would help feed the first family and support local food banks in Washington DC.

How cool would that be? The This Is Your Lawn video is awesome, and after I watched it, I immediately went to Eat the View’s website and signed the White House Food Garden Petition. I hope that you’ll take a few minute to check out this video and then pass it along. If the next president does plant a kitchen garden, you’ll know that you were part of the movement that made it happen.

Even though summer got a late start here in Seattle, I’ve had good luck with my warm season crops, especially my zucchini. We’ve harvested thirteen ladyfinger-sized squash so far and have loads more on the way.Most summer squash you see at the store are about 12 inches long, but I like to harvest mine when they are 4 to 6 inches long. At this stage the squash are so sweet and tender, you can practically eat them raw.

The mild flavor of summer squash pairs up so well with herbs, especially parsley, basil, and sage. For a simple weeknight supper, I often sauté zucchini in a bit of butter, toss it with a few tablespoons of freshly made pesto, and serve it over soft polenta. It’s fast, pretty and so delicious.

But when I have a bit more time, I like making risotto studded with half moons of zucchini, slivered garlic, ribbons of basil and some lemon zest. It tastes bright and fresh–just like summer!

Summer Squash Risotto
Risotto tastes best hot off the stove, but it cools down quickly. I get around this issue by serving it in bowls that have been warmed in the oven for a few minutes. This helps keep the risotto warm throughout the meal. In summer, I like to stuff the leftover risotto into bell peppers and bake them for dinner the next day. In the fall and winter, I stuff chard leaves with risotto, which Mark Bittman happens to discuss in today’s Dining & Wine section in the New York Times.

What you’ll need:
4 6-inch long summer squash (a mix of yellow and green squash looks very pretty)
1 medium yellow onion, minced
4 tablespoons of butter
2 cups Arborio rice
¼ cup dry white wine
4 cups of water
4 cups of vegetable broth
2 large garlic cloves, slivered
¼ cup of basil leaves lightly packed
½ tsp lemon zest
½ cup finely grated Parmesan, plus more for serving
Salt and pepper

Instructions:

1. In a heavy bottomed pan (I use an enameled Dutch oven), melt 2 tablespoons of the butter over medium heat. When the butter foams, add in the onions, give them a good stir, and cook until they are very soft and translucent. In a medium saucepan, combine the water and the vegetable broth and bring to a gentle boil, then lower the heat so the broth mixture stays at a low simmer.

2. Meanwhile, wash the zucchinis and trim off their stem and flower ends. Cut the zucchinis in half lengthwise and then slice each half into thin half moons (about ½ inch thick). You should end up with about 2 cups of sliced zucchini. To slice the basil into ribbons, stack 3 or 4 similar sized leaves on top of each other. Roll the leaves up into a tube shape and then slice the tube into thin pieces.

3. Add the rice to the softened onions and stir to coat the grains with butter. Cook, stirring constantly, until a white oval is visible at the center of each grain. Pour in the white wine and stir until it is completely absorbed.

4. Then, begin adding one cup of the broth to the rice at a time. After each addition of broth give the rice a good stir to keep it from sticking and wait until all the liquid is absorbed by the grains before pouring in the next cup.

5. Add the zucchini and garlic to the rice after the 6th cup of broth has been added to the risotto and absorbed.

6. Then, continue adding the broth to the risotto ½ cup at a time until the rice is cooked and the zucchini is just barely tender. In her excellent cookbook The Splendid Table, Lynne Rosetto Kasper offers this advice for determining when risotto is perfectly cooked:  “A good risotto is tender, but still a little firm to the bite—never mushy. Some prefer risotto creamier than other, but it is never soupy or dry.”

7. Once your risotto reaches your preferred texture and consistency, remove it from the heat. Stir in the lemon zest, Parmesan cheese, 2 remaining tablespoons of butter, and the basil. Adjust the seasonings to taste with salt and pepper. Let the risotto set aside for a few minutes. If you want the zucchini to soften up just a bit more, cover the pan. Serve the risotto in warmed bowls and pass extra cheese at the table.

I recently read an editorial in the New York Times that said the social ties in American neighborhoods are half as strong as they were in the 1950s. We don’t seem to have this problem on my block, and I think it’s because so many of our neighbors grow food. When you have an abundance of cherries, or apples, or snap peas, a logical solution is to knock on your neighbor’s door with a bag of fresh produce in hand.

The other night, our neighbors across the street, Katie and Tom, invited a few people over to make applesauce. They have a big, old apple tree in their yard that has been dropping ripe apples all over their lawn and patio for the past couple of weeks. Rather than let the apples go to waste, they decided to make applesauce.

Katie borrowed this super cool machine called the Squeezo from her mom and set it up on a butcher block in the backyard. The Squeezo looks kind of like a meat grinder for fruit. Basically, you scoop cooked apples into a funnel, turn a heavy crank, and presto, applesauce comes out one end, and the apples’ skins, seed, and pomace squeezes out the other.

Cranking out huge vats of applesauce made us all hungry (it smells so good!), so we decided to make Aebelskivers, which are these little spherical, pillowy pancakes that you serve with applesauce. Jon cooked up batch after batch of them and we ate them hot off the stove dipped in applesauce and sprinkled with powdered sugar. At the end of the evening everyone left Tom and Katie’s with a full belly, a big freezer bag filled with applesauce, and plans to hang out again soon.

Last weekend Jon and I joined some friends for an eating, drinking, bike riding exploration of Portland, Oregon. We stayed at the Kennedy School, a historic elementary school turned quirky hotel, in Northeast Portland that has a community garden in its parking lot.

We stopped by the Oregon Brewers Fest, ate donuts at the infamous Voodoo Doughnut, and stumbled upon Powell’s Books for Home and Garden. This outpost of the independent bookstore Powell’s (whose cavernous new and used bookshop is located in downtown Portland) rubs shoulders with an eclectic mix of shops, cafes, and bars on SE Hawthorne Boulevard.  The shop only carries books on gardening, cooking, and home projects and it has a smattering of wacky gifts. Need a chicken figurine made from pinecones? They’ve got it, along with pretty much every cookbook or gardening guide you’ve ever dreamed of.

Gifts for chicken lovers

If you happen to find yourself in Portland, definitely take an hour or so to explore this shop. They have whole sections dedicated to Sustainable Eating, Organic Gardening and Vegetable Gardening, and a collection of mismatched chairs are scattered around the store, practically inviting you to plop down and read.

I wish this was my personal library

I decided to treat myself by buying Heidi Swanson’s delightful cookbook Super Natural Cooking. Swanson writes one of my favorite recipe journals, 101 Cookbooks, and her book is a beautiful, inspiring, and imminently readable guide to cooking with whole foods. My ‘Purple Majesty’ potatoes are ready to harvest, so I’m going to try out her Quinoa and Corn Flour Crepes recipe this weekend, because the crepes are stuffed with purple potatoes and Gruyere cheese. Mmm! Can’t wait!

Garden gnomes!

A collection of cute cloches