This spring, from April through October, I will be teaching a combined gardening and cooking class with chef Matt Dillon at his restaurant The Corson Building in Seattle’s Georgetown neighborhood. This is our second year offering the course and it is so much fun. I feel very lucky to have the opportunity to teach people about growing food in such a beautiful setting and the chance to learn from Matt. The course limited to 20 students, and the spots are filling in fast. I’ve included the official description below with all the details, including registration information:

The Corson Building’s Kitchen Garden Series

Chef Matthew Dillon and Master Gardener, Willi Galloway, have joined forces and created a gardening and cooking series inspired by the writings of food lover and gardener, Angelo Pellegrini.

“Without a kitchen garden—that plot of land on which one grows herbs, vegetables, and some fruit—it is not possible to produce decent and savory food for the dinner table.” ~ Angelo Pellegrini, The Food-Lovers Garden

The Kitchen Garden Series is a seven-month long course designed to bring food full circle – from setting a seed into the soil to sitting down to a meal made with vegetables grown and harvested outside the kitchen door.

Each class will begin with wine and a lesson in the garden. Galloway will emphasize organic growing techniques and practical strategies for maximizing production in small, urban spaces. She will also explore the amazing diversity of foods that gardeners have access to (fennel pollen, pea tendrils, garlic scapes), how to harvest crops at different stages of growth, and ways to maximize the flavor and quality of homegrown vegetables. Salad and herb gardening, growing warm season vegetables, succession planting, soil care, and planning a winter garden will all be covered.

Following the gardening lesson, the class will move into the kitchen where a cooking class will be taught. Central to each cooking class will be the idea of thrift—using all the edible parts of a plant and preserving the harvest. In addition to teaching how to cook out of the garden, Dillon will concentrate on pantry and/or larder items (canning, drying, and preserving methods) as well as making products that can enhance seasonal eating. An example being dairy products (yogurt, clarified butter, crème fraîche), if students learn how to make yogurt in April, there will be an abundance of it around when strawberries are in season, thus providing an ideal complement for the berries. Each class will end with a light meal prepared by Matthew Dillon.

The Kitchen Garden Series begins Wednesday, April 26 and meets once a month on Tuesdays (May 24, June 21, July 26, August 23, and September 20, October TBD.) All classes take place at The Corson Building from 6pm to 9pm rain or shine. Class size is limited to 20 students, and attendees should be prepared to get dirty in the garden.

Cost of the series is $700 per person and includes free admission to The Corson Building’s annual Cider Press in October. A deposit of $200 is required to reserve a space with the balance of $500 due at the first class. To register, email info@thecorsonbuilding.com or call (206) 762- 3330.

Willi Galloway is a Portland-based Master Gardener and the creator of DigginFood.com—a website that serves up organic kitchen gardening advice three times each week. She is also the vegetable gardening expert on Greendays, a weekly gardening call-in show on Seattle’s NPR affiliate KUOW 94.9 FM, and writes The Gardener, a weekly gardening column on the Apartment Therapy blog Re-Nest. Galloway has grown food in backyards, in containers on balconies and rooftops, and in community gardens. Currently, she gardens and keeps chickens in her small Southeast Portland yard. Her first book, tentatively titled Grow. Cook. Eat: A Food-Lover’s Guide to Kitchen Gardening will be published in January 2012.

Matthew Dillon is the acclaimed chef/owner of Sitka & Spruce and The Corson Building in Seattle’s industrial Georgetown neighborhood. Dillon holds a Culinary Arts degree from Seattle Central Community College and credits his experience as sous chef at The Herbfarm in Woodinville, Washington under pioneering chef Jerry Traunfeld as life changing. Traunfeld introduced Dillon to the benefits of gardens, foragers, and local purveyors, thus solidifying his belief in the importance of fresh, simple food. Dillon’s vision was apparent at Sitka & Spruce, his tiny Mediterranean inspired restaurant that opened in 2006 and earned him a place among Food & Wine Magazines Best New Chefs of 2007. Dillon’s latest venture, The Corson Building, which opened in June of 2008, is part communal dining restaurant, part larder, part event space, part urban garden and farm – and all about a farm fresh, foraged, local, simple, delicious food experience. Matthew Dillon has been nominated for 2011 James Beard’s Best New Chef in the Pacific Northwest.

This year I am planning on freezing and canning a lot more of what I grow, as well as some food that I buy at the farmer’s market. My biggest problem with preserving (and gardening) is I often fail to label. So I end up with mystery bags of vegetables in the freezer and unidentified tomatoes in the garden. I’m planning on solving this perennial problem by printing these free freezer labels from Martha Stewart. All you have to do is write what is in the bag and circle the month and day the food was frozen. I think even I can handle that!

If you’ve haven’t done much freezing, I highly suggest checking out The National Center for Home Food Preservation website. They have great general guidelines for freezing (as well as canning, drying, pickling, and even curing and smoking!), plus specific instructions for pretty much every vegetable or fruit you can think of.

I thought I’d wrap up my experience with Hunger Action Week with a report card and and a link to a delicious, inexpensive recipe I should have made: potato leek soup.

First, the report card: I give myself an A for Awareness and a C- for staying within the parameters of the challenge.

My first mistake was not including Jon in the menu planning process. He has a lot of experience eating on a budget from his bachelor days, and offered to help, but I didn’t want to cede control of the kitchen. Instead, I planned out our menus for the week and focused on choosing recipes that had plenty of vegetables, used whole grains, represented a variety of culinary traditions, and were inexpensive. The only problem? I forgot to think about how much time they would take to cook and how we actually live.

For instance, our mornings are always hectic, with Jon running to the door to catch the bus at the last moment. On Sunday evening, I had the grand idea of making a huge pot of quinoa flavored with orange zest, nuts, and dried cranberries. My idea was we would just reheat it in the morning. A good plan in theory, except that you can’t just grab a bowl of quinoa and go. So I ended up eating breakfast at home and poor Jon either skipped or scrounged up something at work. I should have made muffins. That way Jon could have left the house with something homemade in hand.

I also did not add bread into my menu plan. I instantly regretted this on Monday evening when I was tired, cranky and just wanted to make a sandwich and call it good, but instead had to make a sweet potato tart, including homemade crust.  We didn’t end up eating until almost 9:00, two hours later than normal.

Our most successful meal was a huge bowl of bowtie pasta (on sale for only 2.29!) tossed with butter, garlic, lots of kale, white beans, and lemon. This dish came together quickly and it was healthy. Plus, it made so much we had it for dinner on Wednesday and Thursday. If only I had planned for more meals like that!

Even though we ended up not sticking exactly to the budget, I don’t feel like the Challenge was a total failure. The idea behind Hunger Action week is to raise awareness about hunger and the real challenge it presents to the people who experience it. Creating healthy meals on a $63.00 budget, especially without the benefit of a stocked pantry or a big garden, requires persistence, and creativity, and a lot of planning. It should also receive a great deal of respect, especially from those of use who are fortunate enough to have plenty of healthy food to eat.

Jon has offered to do the challenge again in a few weeks—and this time I’ll let him do the planning, the shopping, and even the cooking. I’ll let you know how it goes!

On Sunday evening I was standing in the produce section of the supermarket staring at a bunch of organic Swiss chard. It cost $3.49 for six leaves. Really? You could plant a ten foot row of Swiss chard for less than that, I thought. So, I pushed my shopping cart over to the conventional side of the produce section. Regular Swiss chard also cost $3.49.

Normally buying a bunch of chard does not nudge my weekly grocery budget over the limit, but this isn’t a normal week. I am participating in the Hunger Action Challenge and spending nearly four dollars on six leaves of chard seemed extravagant when I only had 63.00 to spend for five days worth of breakfasts, lunches, and dinners for Jon and I.

Food that we already have in our home is off limits for the challenge. This means we can’t touch the homegrown tomatoes and peppers in our freezer, the greens, herbs, and carrots in the garden, eggs from our chickens, and the homemade jam and chili sauce in the cupboard.

As people come together to think about hunger this week, we need to include access to garden space in the conversation. Vegetable gardening is so often seen as merely a hobby, but it is so much more than that. Vegetable gardening is a life skill—one that can provide an affordable source of ripe, fresh, seasonal, organic food for families of any income level.

History shows that gardening can be an important and feasible part of a secure, healthy, and sustainable food supply. During WWII the United States government recognized that homegrown food was an important way to ensure an adequate food supply, so they encouraged the planting of victory gardens at the local, state, and federal level.

In 1943 an estimated 20 million victory gardens were planted, producing 8 million tons of food, and an estimated 40% of all the fresh vegetables in the United States. The reason regular citizens were able to make such a dramatic contribution to the food supply was because the government recognized that urban agriculture was an essential component of the food system. And, more importantly, the government then created policies that provided extensive gardening education, that encouraged people to turn underutilized yards into food production gardens, and turned public lands into gardens for people who could not grow their own food at home.

The victory garden movement demonstrated that investing in gardening education and access can and should play a significant and profound role in improving food security.

Of course, gardens will not solve the hunger problem alone. We need to ensure that there are grocery stores in every neighborhood and that bus routes connect people to those stores. We need to bring farmer’s markets into underserved communities. We need to teach people how to cook in school. But we also need to ensure that every citizen has the opportunity to learn how to grow their own food and a space to do it.

$63.00

That’s the maximum food stamp benefit a 2-person family is allocated each week in Seattle. While food assistance is designed to supplement a family’s food budget, many people don’t have enough money to buy extra food and cover rent, childcare, transportation, and other basic living costs as well.

Next week United Way of King County is sponsoring a Hunger Action Week to bring attention to the issue of hunger here at home. Jon and I typically spend more than twice the food assistance budget on groceries alone, but next week we will limit our purchases to $63.00 and forgo eating at restaurants. Our goal is to not only stay within the budget, but also prepare meals that are healthy and delicious.

As we prepare for this challenge I can’t help but think back to my time in Cuba last summer. What impressed me most about Cubans was not their ability to live without—which they certainly do—but how they manage to make do with what they have. I’m going to keep that spirit in mind as I draw up our menu and shopping list.

If you’d like to take part in Hunger Action Week, please visit United Way’s website and take the challenge!

Several other Seattle food bloggers are also taking part in the challenge, including A Conscious Feast, Savory Sweet Life, Gluten-Free Girl and the Chef, Family.Friendly.Food.

Yesterday I got to meet the food writers Jane and Michael Stern!

Okay, so meet is probably a strong word. They were being interviewed on NPR the hour before my weekly garden radio show with Greg Rabourn and Marty Wingate. So when their interview ended I was in the hallway and I smiled at them. Alas, words failed me. All I could think to say was, “Oh my gosh, I loved your column in Gourmet and was crushed when the magazine closed.” Which is pretty lame. So I just stood there grinning and mute.

Oh well! Even though we didn’t actually get to chat, I did come home and listen to the podcast of their interview. And it confirmed what I already knew: the Sterns have the coolest job ever. They eat their way across the United States, searching out the best little diners and local restaurants and then writing about them. Although Gourmet is no more, you can still read about their latest finds on the website Roadfood, pick up one of their books (I’m partial to 500 Things to Eat Before It Is Too Late) and listen to them on Lynne Rosetto Kasper’s radio program The Splendid Table.

To listen to the Sterns interview on Seattle’s NPR station KUOW 94.9, just click here. If you’d like to listen into the gardening call-in show that I am lucky enough to be apart of, click here. You can stream past gardening shows or download the podcast. Yesterday we talked about succession planting!

I am a sucker for good package design in general. But when a cute package contains heirloom seeds, I cannot resist. These “art packs” are sold by the Hudson Valley Seed Library, a non-profit based in Accord, New York that offers (mostly) locally grown and regionally adapted seed varieties. Each seed packet in the series is designed by a New York-region artist to celebrate the beauty of heirloom seeds. The Forest Stewardship Council-certified paper packets are printed with vegetable based inks—and while they are recyclable, or even compostable, I think they belong in a picture frame more than the paper bin

The Hudson Valley Seed Library was started by Doug Muller and Ken Greene, two young farmers with a dream of creating an “accessible and affordable source of regionally-adapted seeds that is maintained by a community of caring gardeners.” They sell seeds grown on the seed library’s farm and by other local farmers and gardeners, but they also encourage people to save their own seed and share it. If you pay $20 to become a member of the seed library, you get discounts on seed packs and events and 10 packets of plainly packaged seed of your choice. Best of all, members who save seeds can return them to the seed library in exchange for a discount on the following season’s membership fee. If you’re a novice seed saver, no worries. The seed library offers classes, workshops, and information on seed saving.

This organization provides such an interesting and valuable model for encouraging seed saving among home gardeners and preserving seed diversity. Wouldn’t it be cool if this concept expanded into a system of seed libraries across the country, with each one growing and offering heirloom and open-pollinated seed suited to local climate conditions?

Even though I live in an opposite corner of the country from the Hudson Valley Seed Library, I’m definitely placing an order for Spotted Trout Lettuce (aka Forellenschluss). This German heirloom has outstanding flavor and is a mainstay in my garden because it handles heat, cold, and rain with aplomb. I could buy ‘Forellenschluss’ at my local nursery, but I want to spend a few of my dollars at this seed library in the hopes that it thrives and grows—maybe even into my own part of the world.

I am so excited to announce that my friend and beekeeping mentor, Corky Luster, has officially launched Ballard Bee Company—an urban pollination service. Here’s how it works: Corky comes to your yard in spring, sets up a hive, and stops by weekly to check in on the bees’ progress. In return for hosting a hive, you get a personal pollination station in your garden and some of the hive’s honey at the end of the season.

If you want to get involved, he’ll mentor you on the finer points of beekeeping. Don’t have a backyard? Not a problem. You can sponsor a hive—Corky will share some honey with you and donate honey sales from your hive to programs that teach kids the art and science of beekeeping.

All of the Ballard Bee hives are kept in the city—don’t worry, it’s perfectly legal—where the bees forage for pollen from a diverse range of sources, including blackberries, fruit trees, and backyard vegetable gardens. The resulting honey is lightly floral, golden, and absolutely delicious. Corky and his sweetie Karen hand pour the honey into glass apothecary jars and sell it to a number of Seattle-area retailers and restaurants, including Boat Street Café, Dish D’Lish, DeLaurenti and Pasta and Co. In 2010 they plan on expanding their product line to include creamed, spreadable honey (my favorite!), comb honey, and maybe even a candle line.

Pretty good buzz, don’t you think?

Thanks to TKTJ Design for providing the photos for this post.

I’ve decided to follow the advice of these cute little munchkins and pledge to Eat Local this Thanksgiving! The Eat Local campaign is sponsored by the Cascade Harvest Coalition and Puget Sound Fresh and it is designed to raise awareness of the foods available from local farms. We will certainly be buying bread, cheese, and meat at our farmers market, but I want to make sure that we have homegrown food on our table, too. Here are a few ideas for eating uber local this Thanksgiving:

* Reserve some homegrown potatoes, winter squash, and apples for your Thanksgiving meal. Store them in a cool (about 50 degrees F), dark, dry place until you’re ready to use them.

* Use fresh herbs from the garden, including sage for stuffing, rosemary for the turkey, and thyme for roasted vegetables. Or, cut herbs now and dry them.

* Keep root vegetables, including carrots, beets, turnips, and rutabegas, in the garden and harvest them for the meal. In cold climates you can protect the crops from freezing by mulching around them with four- to six-inches of straw.

* Don’t pull out hardy greens like kale, Swiss chard, and collards yet. Wait to harvest them for Thanksgiving

* Harvest the peppers now, roast, and then freeze them. Add the thawed peppers into a roasted root vegetable medley, or blend them with feta cheese and serve with crackers as an appetizer.

Do you have other ideas for eating from the garden—or from local markets—this holiday season? If so, please share. And don’t forget to take the pledge!

Tomato season is coming to its end. In my garden a few orange-ish red tomatoes hang from their scraggly vines, but at the farmer’s market it is another story. On Sunday nearly every stall had crates of tomatoes priced to sell at $2.00 a pound.

I know that it’s a different situation out on the East Coast, where blight swept up the seaboard, leaving hardly any tomato plants in its wake. But here in Seattle, a record hot summer and a dry, warm fall resulted in bumper crops of tomatoes just waiting to be canned.

So, I called up the Shannon and Jason of The Lazy Locavores for some tomato canning hints. These guys know tomatoes. They have 60 plants growing in pots on the patio of their townhouse and have roughly 150 more plants in 5 different sites around Seattle. They can at least 80 quarts of tomatoes every year (plus “lots and lots of salsa”), share food with their gardening clients, and donate produce to the food bank.

I was lucky enough to attend a tomato canning class taught by Shannon and Jason at the home of Canning Across America’s founder Kim O’Donnel in August.  The class was so much fun—everyone pitched in to skin, core, and crush (i.e. smoosh tomatoes with your hands!) tomatoes. We canned whole tomatoes, crushed tomatoes and made salsa. It was such a good time.  And so easy! Seriously, anyone can do this.

Since I don’t have a memory for details, Shannon kindly sent me their list of top 5 tomato canning tips and agreed to share their directions for canning crushed tomatoes. For detailed instructions on canning whole and halved tomatoes and tomato sauce, or to schedule a canning class of your own, please check out The Lazy Locavore website and tell them I sent you!

Top 5 Tomato Canning Hints

1. Can crushed or chopped tomatoes instead of whole ones. Whole tomatoes look pretty in the jar but you can pack almost twice as much if you “mush” them up a bit. Remember, if you are going to cook them in sauces or stews, they are going to end up that way anyway.

2. Put up quarts of tomatoes. It’s very rare to see a recipe that calls for a pint of tomatoes.

3. Forget about canning spaghetti sauce. Instead of making 5 quarts of spaghetti sauce, why not have 5 quarts of tomato sauce that you can use for spaghetti or chili or any other dish.  Add the herbs, spices, and salt later.

4. Put up a few more jars than you think you need. You don’t want to run out early if something happens to the seal on one or two jars.

5. Use a crock pot or slow cooker to start batches of sauce.  Just toss the tomatoes into a slow cooker, turn it on, and go away. Come back hours later and you are almost ready to process the sauce.  If you like your sauce smooth, run the pulpy goodness through a food mill to remove the skins and seeds, or take the lazy way out and use a hand blender to pulverize the entire batch.

Crushed or Chopped Tomatoes

Equipment Needed:

Bottled Lemon Juice

Salt – Optional

Jars, rings, and lids

Water Bath Canner and assorted saucepans/bowls

Tomatoes* –  Approximate Yields:
21 pounds crushed for canner load of 6 quarts.
13 pounds crushed for canner load of 8 pints.

* You can use whatever type of tomato you like here.  Look for large round tomatoes with deep color and firm flesh.  We prefer to use Roma style (paste) tomatoes for making chopped tomatoes because the thick flesh remains tight after processing.

1. Prepare Jars and Lids

Place the jar lids in a small sauce pan filled with water.  Bring to a light boil then turn down to low heat for about 10 minutes before using. The idea is to keep them hot, not cook them. Leave in hot water and remove as needed. For preparing jars, wash them in hot soapy water and rinse well, or if you are lazy like the Locavores run through a hot cycle in your dishwasher. Place jars in a rack in your water bath canner, and boil gently for 10 minutes. Leave in hot water and emove a few jars at a time as you need them.

2. Skin Tomatoes

To remove skins, wash tomatoes and dip in boiling water for 30 to 60 seconds or until the skins begin to split. Then dip in cold water, slips off the skins, core ,and remove any blemished or discolored parts.

3. Heat and Pack Tomatoes

Chop tomatoes into bite sized pieces or crush them with your hands or a potato masher.  Place is a saucepan. Heat to a boil and cook gently for 5 minutes. For quart jars: add 2 tablespoons lemon juice to each canning jar (along with 1/2 teaspoon salt if desired). Pack hot jars with hot prepared tomatoes leaving  ½-inch head space. Remove air bubbles. Wipe rim and screw threads. Place lid and screw ring until finger tight.

4. Process in water bath

45 minutes for quarts. 40 minutes for pints. (Times given are for sea level to 1000 ft elevation.  If you live at elevations over 1000ft please check your state Department of Health or Extension Office for correct processing time)

5. Turn off heat and wait 5 minutes

6. Remove jars

7. Wait 2 hours – check for seal

If seal did not take you can try to process again with a new jar and lid, but results will be poor.  The better choice is to refrigerate and use within 2 weeks or process for tomato sauce.  (yummmmm sauce!)

8. Label contents and date then store in cool, dark location.