Category: Good Food on a Budget

All about growing and making good food, including gardening, foraging, gleaning, processing and cooking.

Chaya – Mayan Tree-Spinach, Cabbage Star

The Chaya plant offers extraordinary attributes as a food crop: potential year-round yields; highly nutritious; tasty; productive; minimal pest or disease susceptibility; tolerant of diverse growing conditions; easily propagated; perennial; handsome foliage; fragrant flowers that attract butterflies, moths and bees; useful forage for domestic animals. On the minus side… it is freeze-tender; its leaves should be cooked rather than ingested raw; it has but few cultivars, and their relative merit and behavior are practically undocumented. Overall, more people should know about, and grow, Chaya — hence this article.

Kate’s in the Kitchen: It’s All About Bread

I’ve been way into baking bread lately. Once a week on my day off, it goes something like this: wake up, throw a loaf of bread together, and let it rise while I shower and get ready for the day. Deflate the dough for a second rise and have a fresh loaf by the afternoon. We go through about a loaf a week, and I’ve been conducting careful weekly experiments in the hopes of perfecting the recipe for a whole wheat bread.

Time to Think Gardens – Get Those Cool Season Starts!

It’s the middle of March and time to get your seeds in – and for those of us lucky enough to live in milder climates, time to get those cool season plant starts! Buying starts and seeds from local growers and at local sales ensures that you get plants that are climate-appropriate. Get planting!

Kate’s in the Kitchen: Lessons Learned

Looking back, this last month has been a little roller-coaster ride. Ian and I have taken on a number of new challenges, some individual and some joint. I took on a new job while he took on more practice hours in preparation for his recital. I launched a new website and we started saving our food scraps for compost. As I mentally ticked off the events of the last few weeks, it was clear that we weren’t wasting time. In between each hiccup we celebrated little successes, and even our low points left us with lessons learned.

A Look at Meat: Less, Local, Natural, and Whole

Meat and poultry that is conventionally produced to reach the market quickly and in large quantities comes to us at a cheap cost, but it’s a high price to pay for the environment and our health (not to mention animal cruelty issues). Fortunately, there are steps you can take to make it easier; not only for the earth, but for our wallets, our conscience, and our bodies.

Conscious Consumption on a Budget

It’s not always easy to keep track of the content of your food. You might not always have time to go to the natural foods store, and if want to go out to eat, odds are you can’t afford to eat at the restaurant that lists the life history of every vegetable on your plate. At those times, we usually don’t worry about whether our food is organic or not, but whether it is fresh, delicious, and preferably local (at least supporting a local business).

Guerilla Grafters: Adding Fruit to Ornamental Trees

The Guerrilla Grafters are a group of San Franciscans who believe urban trees are a precious thing to waste on simple flowers. Their goal is to graft – albeit illegally – fruit bearing branches onto non-fruit bearing fruit trees, in hopes that over time the cities ornamental trees can provide food for residents free of charge.