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  Salsa Party !! August 8, 2024 Everyone loves salsa! And there are so many ways to make it – various degrees of hot or mild (make it all hot, all mild, or a mix of hot and mild peppers), with or without herbs, different colors of tomatoes and peppers, or different kinds of ingredients from the usual. It's a great way to experiment with the summer garden bounty. With a salsa-making contest event on the horizon from the Knox County Seed Library and the Grow City Teaching Garden, I felt like playing with salsa ingredients. I'm not entering the contest, since I'll be too busy with other event details, but I do feel inspired. In this blog post, I'm doing a raw salsa (or Salsa Cruda, Salsa Fresco, Pico de Gallo). You can, of course, do cooked salsa, and recently my husband canned a bunch for us to have through the coming year's time. I'm starting with a basic sort of raw salsa, which can have endless variations, and at the end I'll feature a different, ...
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  Marinara Sauce The summer garden provides so many possibilities. The sky's the limit, as each individual can use any ingredient found to go in all sorts of directions. Recipes are not always necessary – it's good to learn to cook from intuition and do lots of experimentation. That's how we learn! Here's an intuitive/experimental process for doing Marinara Sauce from the garden. As always, for this blog I use what is harvested from the Grow City Teaching Garden. First, gather your ingredients together. Here I have Amish Paste tomatoes, white onion, Wise Colossus garlic (this bulb was harvested in fall of 2023) and some herbs: basil, thyme, oregano, and parsley. These all came from the Grow City garden. Sometimes I save seeds from items harvested, in hopes of adding them to the Knox County Seed Library. I did not save seeds from these tomatoes – they are an earlier harvest that had problems from weather and moisture fluctuations (cracking, blossom end rot) and ...
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Peanut, Peanut Butter!

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  Peanut, Peanut Butter!! Just about everyone loves peanut butter and has fond memories of making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Do you? And did you know that peanut butter is terribly easy to make? It is! Well, there's the tedium (if one sees it that way) of shelling them first (unless you buy shelled peanuts, of course), but shelling can be a good thing to do while watching TV or having a conversation, or it can be a good activity to share with children (who will love eating the peanuts and anticipating peanut butter), or it can just be a good meditative experience. No matter how you accomplish having shelled peanuts, it's so easy to turn them into peanut butter. Fact #1: Use USDA Certified Organic peanuts, unless you have grown your own using organic practices. Non-organic peanuts are one of the most pesticide-contaminated crops, as they are frequently rotated in a field with cotton, which is a glyphosate-heavy crop (so, you might also consider buying clothes or fab...
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