I recently wrote a magazine story about Georgia Haverty, who worked on her family’s apple farm in the early ‘80s and then returned to her land in the beautiful Virginia mountains in 2011 to start a pick-your-own operation. When I showed up to interview her, she was making crockpot apple butter…
Peach Crisp
This is the recipe that almost didn’t come to be. I feel like I’ve been working on it all summer and only now have I circled around to something I’m happy with. It began with an old family recipe, one I’d made many times, a cobbler that I remember adoring…
Pick-Your-Own Berries in Southwest Virginia
The strawberries ripen sometime in May, then come the raspberries, then the blueberries and blackberries. In the best years, blueberry picking can go on all the way through September. All around the Roanoke Valley are farms and orchards with fresh, often pesticide-free produce waiting for us to come fetch…
Arugula Strawberry Spring Rolls
I began making spring rolls years ago when my garden was giving me more lettuce than my family could possibly devour. Spring rolls turned out to be a lovely way to shake up the everyday salad. My go-to recipe has always been these Vegetarian Spring Rolls. With their pan-fried tofu…
Mixed Greens and Berry Salad
I created this recipe to hand out to participants of a class I taught on surprising ways to eat your berries. It was a hit. The biggest takeaway might have been how pleasing it is to mix all kinds of bold flavors in with your spinach or lettuce. Yes to…
Linguine with Garden Herbs and Clams
We are seafood fans in our house, but we are also well-aware of how fragile the edible ocean is these days. For more than a decade, I’ve been referring to my Monterrey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch Guide to help me find environmentally friendly seafood. In the past several years, as eating local…
Greens, Glorious Greens
As we march through Spring, past the asparagus and the strawberries, waiting patiently for zucchini canoes and tomato globes, we find ourselves in the months of greens. At our house, it begins with kale and spinach — those cold-hardiest of veggies. We often have an early crop of lettuce, too, thanks to…
Spinach Swiss Souffle
We’ve grown a lot of spinach this Spring — which makes me really happy because I adore this veggie’s thick leaves and big crunch. I love how well it pairs with cheese and eggs and cream — and nutmeg. It’s wonderful in salads and sautés and smoothies. I honestly can’t…
Balsamic Vinaigrette
In planning for a class all about berries that I’ll be teaching soon at The Roanoke Coop, I’ve been stirring up and swapping out different dressings with varying lineups of salad ingredients. For a mix of spinach and sprouts and strawberries and pecans, I had first matched my popular Poppy Seed…
Eating Local Is My ‘Diet.’ What’s Yours?
To any of you who’ve been reading what I write for awhile, the story of how I cleaned up my eating act is a familiar one. In a nutshell, several forces converged to push me toward a healthier, more plant-based life than I’d grown up with: my husband and I…