Victorious Gardening!

It’s official!  We not only have a new president, but we also have a kitchen garden in the White House!  Many are ecstatic about this, and the hard work by everyone who has been active in promoting this high-profile garden has paid off.   The Obama girls will be eating spinach, fresh from their backyard next to their playset!

Some exceptionaly hard workers on the White House garden front: WHO Farm school bus organic farm drivers, Eat the View home farmer, and the woman full of grace.  Though, if you ask me, the guys driving around the country and digging up their front lawn had a much cooler way of going about activism!

My own garden update:

I am definitely having a garden this year.  I am one of the many people in the US who either don’t have a yard, have a very small yard, or have a yard but don’t have safe soil (or don’t have the money to test it).  My city has several community gardens, but it’s come accross an interesting issue with the fact that gardening seems to be in vogue this year: the wait-lists are twice as long as ever!  This means the chances of me actually getting a garden plot are limited.

What’s there to do, you ask?

Well, container garden!  I have a small, small plot of land between my front steps and our side street that I plan to get my landlord to let me use. Container gardening can be very inexpensive: it can cost just the price of seed, compost, and a small shovel.  You can collect all kinds of free containers (I’ll be getting some plastic tulip boxes from a florist/friend, asking nurseries for leftover pots, and have been asking for donations of buckets from my coworkers).   My containers may not be beautiful, but no one will notice or care once they see the tasty plants and food I will grow!

If I sound very confident, please know this is all a facade: my gardening resume is short and only includes a couple of house plants from college (one which died from some weird mites, the other which I actually flew home to my parent’s house to protect from said mites) and some carrots I grew when I was eight.

Let’s hope with age that I’ve picked up a green thumb…

It’s official: Winter is here!

The above picture was actually taken Friday, before today’s storm.  It’s been an incredibly snowy weekend, and it’s a verifiable winter wonderland out there!  Fitting for the first weekend of Winter.  I just hope this isn’t how the whole winter will go, otherwise I’ll have to spend it all at home, drinking tea, and curled up under woollen blankets.  Wait, that wouldn’t be so bad would it?

So the bad news is that you haven’t seen a lot of original pictures from me, because my poor little Cannon Powershot digital camera has gone on the fritz.  I don’t know why.  I haven’t dropped it or abused it.  Perhaps the few months of neglect while I wasn’t posting was enough to make it go on strike?  I have to take it in to the photo shop to see if there is anything that can be done for it.  In the meantime, the pictures you see here are from my boyfriend’s camera, when I can convince him to let me use it!

Christmas is a-coming, and if I don’t see you all before then, please have a Merry (and safe) Christmas!

Fifth Annual Menu for Hope

Tis the season!  One of the wonderful parts of being in the food blogging community is the charity that people express.  Not only are food bloggers willing to help each other out, but the kindness goes way beyond the virtual world and right into the lives of those who are the most needy.

Each year for the last five years, Pim of Chez Pim has organized the Menu for Hope charity event that benefits the UN World Food Program’s work in Lesotho.  Here’s how it works:

Bloggers donate incredible raffle prizes and post descriptions of them on their blogs, which are organized by regional hosts.   The public can then look at all the beautiful prizes and buy raffle tickets through Firstgiving.  Each ticket costs $10, and they can be applied to prizes by designating their code in the comments section when donating.

This is an amazing event, and although I’ve never won anything, I find it an exciting charity to be involved with.  Last year over 90,000USD were donated to the Lesotho project, including a school lunch program as well as the local procurement program.  To learn more about the WFP’s involvement in Lesotho, please click here.  And make sure you see the Lesotho children’s breathtaking pictures here.

After the jump I’ve put in what I consider to be the highlights of the prizes, but you should definitely check out the master list yourself.

And don’t forget to enter in to the raffles at Firstgiving.com!

Happy Saint Nicholas Day!

It’s crazy how late Thanksgiving was this year.  Just a week ago I was frantically cooking our dinner (we had ours on Friday), and today I’m celebrating one of my family’s fun Christmas traditions!

Before I go into Christmas already though, I have to give Thanksgiving (tied as my favorite holiday of the year), a proper mention.  The menu turned out very tasty.  I highly recommend the roasted sweet potatoes, which came out super sweet – without added sugar – through its special baking method (it started in a cold oven!).  I also recommend the other Cook’s Illustrated recipe we used, which was for green bean casserole from scratch.  Yum, without the processed food guilt!  The apple onion cheddar gratin from Moosewood’s New Classics, as always, was delicious.  If you can get your hands on those recipes, they are definitely worth it.  Gourmet’s chorizo cornbread stuffing left some to be desired.  I’m not really a big fan of cranberry sauce or brussels sprouts to begin with, but others really liked them.

So, St. Nick’s.