Category Archives: Vegan Recipes

Keeping Cool When The Heat Is On

While we’re outside helping plants and critters stay alive, it’s important to keep our own cool. Cover your head with a wet bandanna before putting on your broad-brimmed sunhat and your noggin will stay pleasantly cool for about an hour. Wrap crushed ice in a bandanna and tie it around your neck for even longer relief. When I did a lot of gardening for others, I’d keep an ice cooler in my car with zip bags of gloves, socks, and shirts so I could change into cool, dry clothing every few hours. (This works great at the beach too.) After you shower, hang your damp towel on a drying rack and let it cool off the air in an overly hot room as it dries. A wet sheet draped in front of a fan can do the same thing on a larger scale. At night, fill your hot water bottle with crushed ice and snuggle with it for a chilling experience. Tuck it down by your feet to keep them cool all night.
Continue reading

Posted in composting, Garden Prep, Health & Wellbeing, Planting & Transplanting, Recipes, Soil, Sustainable Gardening, Sustainable Living, Vegan Recipes | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Simple Garden Syrups

Simple syrups are just that; extremely simple mixtures of cane sugar and water, boiled for a few minutes until the sugar is completely dissolved. Before electricity and freezers were common, most fruits were canned in simple syrups, which helped preserve their quality and flavor. Simple syrups can be flavored with all sorts of things, from vanilla beans and peppercorns to toasted fennel or coriander seeds. In summer, it’s delightful to capture the fleeting scents and tastes of herbs, flowers, and even fruit in such syrups. The primary rule here is to use only organically grown fruit, flowers, and foliage, as pesticide residues are definitely not edible.
Continue reading

Posted in Easy Care Perennials, Pets & Pests In The Garden, preserving food, Recipes, Sustainable Gardening, Sustainable Living, Vegan Recipes | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Spring Bounty & Bliss

Tart pie cherries are fun to cook with, crossing sweet/savory barriers with panache. Here, they partner with fresh snap peas in a robust entree salad with a mouth-tingling raw ginger dressing. If you don’t eat chicken, use slim strips of extra firm tofu and let them marinate for up to half an hour to absorb the zippy dressing.
Continue reading

Posted in Recipes, Sustainable Living, Vegan Recipes | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Savory Salty Seasonings

Each kind of salt has its own particular qualities, which is why lots of cooks keep around a dozen kinds on hand. For everyday cooking use, medium coarse sea salt and kosher salt are excellent, inexpensive and widely available. Flaked sea salts melt fast, providing more salty zing with less sodium. Natural “finishing” salts offer a specific, unique flavor, from black or red Hawaiian lava salt and Indian black sanchal salt to slightly sweet French grey sea salt. Continue reading

Posted in Health & Wellbeing, Nutrition, Recipes, Sustainable Living, Vegan Recipes | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment