Shown in the photo above is Craig Howard hard at work tending The Great Lost Bear‘s new rooftop vegetable garden. Howard has beans, tomatoes, tomatillos, shallots, onions, cucumbers, zucchini, and a variety of peppers as well as lemongrass, and mint under cultivation—all destined for use in the GLB’s kitchen. If the rooftop concept works out, the hope is to expand it in the coming year.
Category: Cooking
The Food Switch
The latest edition of The Maine Switch includes articles about Cultivating Community “a Portland-based nonprofit that connects people to the earth, their food and one another through agriculture” and about Grown@Home which provides “weekly maintenance and new plantings throughout the growing season” for your home garden. There’s also an article by Harding Smith about barbecuing and additional piece about local barbecue sauce manufacturers. Especially interesting in this edition is a piece by Avery Yale Kamila as she tries to establish which watering hole is truly Portland’s oldest bar.
Locavore Canola Oil?
The Boston Globe has an article about the canola crop being grown in Maine and pressed into cooking oil by Maine Natural Oils.
Rodney Chamberland has been working straight out plowing and planting over 100 acres of seed potatoes. The farm’s potatoes come first.
Then, Chamberland plants rotation crops. One he’s seeding this spring will turn into 30 acres of flowering yellow canola. The crop not only improves the potatoes he’ll grow on the same land next year, says Chamberland, but its seeds will also be pressed into one of the Northeast’s only regional cooking oils: Maine Natural Oils.
The article also quotes Leslie Oster from Aurora Provisions,
“I am more than all for it,” says Leslie Oster, the general manager of Aurora Provisions and a Slow Food Portland organizer. “Now, if we could just get someone to invest in a full-scale wheat production mill.”
Meals from the Market
Tasting in Tongues has started writing a weekly post where author Paul Gagne describes how he cooked up the food sourced at the Portland Farmers’ Market. The latest menu includes a “pork chop on a bed of the parsnip/potato puree with a sprinkling of the balsamic reduction”, Greek salad and fiddleheads with red quinoa.
Saturday Farmers' Market
L&A Farm was selling rhubarb this morning at the Deering Oaks Farmers’ Market but it was going quickly. One of the other vendors still had some fiddleheads as well as some asparagus. And there was the usual spring line-up of flowers, seedlings, cheeses, etc.
Saturday Farmers’ Market
L&A Farm was selling rhubarb this morning at the Deering Oaks Farmers’ Market but it was going quickly. One of the other vendors still had some fiddleheads as well as some asparagus. And there was the usual spring line-up of flowers, seedlings, cheeses, etc.
Silver Moon now at the Market
Silver Moon Creamery has made it off the wait list and in one of the spots at the Saturday farmers’ market in Deering Oaks. In addition to the flowers (a good idea for Mother’s Day) and seedlings that predominate at this time of the year, I also saw fiddleheads, lettuce, scallions, tomatoes, small cucumbers and more.
Indian Prawn Curry
Lindsay Sterling from Inside Immigrant Kitchens has published another installment in her series on authentic ethnic cooking in this week’s Portland Phoenix.
Cooking Indian food by myself for the first time felt like skydiving; it went against all my instincts. I had one thing going for me: an Indian woman, Aruna Kilaru, had shown me exactly how to do it two weeks before. Aruna, a botany teacher and school principal from Hyderabad, India, had been visiting her daughter and son-in-law in Maine. I met them in, of all places, the office supply store Staples.
Sunday Brunch
This week’s Portland Phoenix provides guidance for cooking up your own Eggs Benedict at home for those times when “it might have been better for your constitution (and reputation) to stay home in your bathrobe.” If you still want to venture out check the Sunday Brunch List for your options.
There are several terrific places where this brunch might go down in Greater Portland, but they are all likely to share one ingredient: a line stretching out the door. Your arrival in last night’s party clothes and disheveled hair barely elicits a nod from your equally hung-over companions, already there staking out a place on the waiting list.
Kelp Noodles
The Boston Globe has a report on kelp noodles, “seaweed in long, green strips cut to the rough dimensions of linguine” produced here in Portland by Ocean Approved. The noodles are available at Browne Trading, Harbor Fish Market and Whole Foods.
Like pasta noodles, kelp is a submissive plate-mate, wrapping neatly around the tender mussels on a fork and bending nicely to their sweet, meaty flavor. Hot, simple food has a tendency to make you smile after a few hours on a cold ocean, and we slip into port a happy crew. The ocean provides – noodles and all.