Working on Green

Sometimes I feel a little awkward responding to other blogger's posts about cooking with fresh foods and "going green," particularly in the kitchen. After all, I do spend a great deal of time posting about processed food cookbooks.

Culinary Types asks "What have you done to green up your kitchen?" Well, quite a bit, actually.

One of the things is that I've finally planted a vegetable garden again after many years of not doing so. Although it was rather a late start, right now there are several varieties of tomatoes, eggplant, Serrano, Jalapeno and Pablano peppers, carrots, radishes, onions, tomatillos and bell peppers. Another bed holds asparagus, which won't be harvested for a couple of years yet.


The zucchini, yellow squash and cucumbers are coming along nicely. And there's a whole bed of green beans.


We also planted lemon, lime, orange, fig and pear trees this spring. There are several plum trees that have been quite neglected over the years that we'll work to straighten out. There was an existing grapevine that was taking over everything so I've cut that back. I think the man before us made wine--I found lots of bottles in the attic that indicates this was so.


I've started composting my kitchen scraps and yard waste again.


I'm deathly scared of these, and it's actually why I haven't put in a garden for the past several years. But, I'm trying to conquer that particular fear, mostly through the process of learning to identify them after they're thoroughly dead.

Perhaps in a few months I'll have a submission to The Perfect Pantry, on her series of Other People's Pantries that will look like this:


So while I continue to write about the cookbooks that promote the use the much-maligned, overpackaged, over-processed foods as recipe ingredients, I'll be keeping an eye out to see how the food companies respond to the changes taking place in our kitchens in that aspect.