Autumn has well and truly dropped here in Minnesota. This past weekend, we spent some quality time cleaning up the deck and garden. We moved a bunch of peppers into the basement grow-chamber for overwintering

On my commute this morning, for a few minutes, the sky was alive. I pulled over and just snapped this. Even though I didn't have time to frame this carefully, I think it's worth sharing. And it's important

Hey, so it's been several months since I posted here, I'm not sure what the future holds, but I thought I'd share some neat pics from a recent vacation. I took the family camping for a week at Neys and

I just put up a fresh jar of kimchi and thought I'd share this:

I cut up some collards last night and while I was waiting for my mirepoix to develop, before putting the collards in the braise for 40 minutes with wine and broth, I snapped this shot with my iPhone 6

I started my faux nuka pot just over a week ago. See details here Each day after work, I take the gallon jug of water out of the bucket, then use a fork to pry up the plate that I'm using as a cover. And

Nukazuke are a class of Japanese pickles that have been fermented in damp, cultured rice bran. They're sometimes delicious and always interesting. Where I live, rice bran is hard to obtain, and finely

So, later in the day, more turkeys came by and this dude was right outside my office window and I'm kind of proud of this shot. It isn't professional quality, but given that I was shooting through a coated

It's spring in Minnesota and that means we're starting see patches of murky green-brown earth emerge from the snow. And the turkeys are hungry from the long winter, so they love this access to grass and

There's a new cooking challenge here that I'm responding to. It's called CookWithUs and the first week is showcasing our favorite family meals. My family's favorite meal for the past few years has been

For this week's SIC contest the theme ingredient is grapes. I'm mostly not interested in deserts, but I was thinking about a sorbet if I could find "good" grapes. But it's the wrong season in

I'm finally getting a second entry in for the week! Two days ago, I made leek pakora. When it was announced that this week's theme ingredient was leeks, the first thing I though of was a creamy potato-leek

Amazing vegetable stock is almost free at my house! As we cook, we keep our vegetable scraps. We have a gallon-sized ziplock in the freezer, and scraps like: onion caps, potato peels, carrot tops, beet-bits,

Leeks! You know how every recipe for leek-dishes tells you to use the white and lightest green parts but abandon the dark green? Well screw that! The dark green part of the leaf is a little more aggressive,

It snowed last night and because it was warm, a lot of it stuck to the trees and formed a very beautiful drive to work. So I took a little time out to capture some images with my iPhone 6. Across from

OK! For this week of the Steemit Iron Chef contest, the theme ingredient is "the local product you will choose"! I live in the northmost USA, in a state called Minnesota. In this state, our

Each week, I enter the Steemit Iron-Chef contest. This week, the theme ingredient is nuts. I almost went for pecan pie (the trick is to use more pecans and less filling) but I figured there'd be a lot

So, the Steemit Iron-Chef theme ingredient this week is lettuce. That's a toughie. I mean, anyone can throw some veggies with lettuce and make a good salad, but how do I stretch my legs a little while

Here it is, another week and time to enter the Steemit Iron-Chef challenge! This week, our theme ingredient is cucumber! (As an aside, man do I love cucumbers -- Check out what I was doing last summer

I encounter recipes all the time that call for fish sauce. But as a vegetarian, I don't eat fish. So I started looking around and reading what people do for vegetarian substitutes. A lot of people just