Last Thursday I tagged along with Eric on a food expedition in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Kennsington. Just a hop over to the Fort Hamilton Pkwy and there we were at Brancaccio’s Food Shop in search of their meatball sandwich. Lunch time! As we walked in, Chef Joe was just putting today’s specials into the tall fridge… as a rack of ribs came came out of the oven.
Chef and proprietor Joseph Brancaccio gave us a taste of everything. That was quite a list.
The shop is cozy and unassuming, no indoor seating but they do have two benches outside. The regulars shuffled past us as we looked at all the fresh salads in the case. One might ask “Really? Just for a meatball sandwich?” The correct answer would be “Yes, for that meatballs sandwich.” Meet Chef Joe, he offered us samples from the daily menu while we waited — caponata, baked ziti with truffle oil, roasted Brussels sprouts, roasted beet and farro salad… all of it made that morning…
Now back to that sandwich, the portion is of a generous size, the bread is fresh with just enough marinara to moisten. But those meatballs! Moist and savory with pine nuts and raisins, seasoned with fennel and garlic. There’s an old world flavor in every bite.
Eric! Lift with your knees! Can something this big really be that good?You can taste the home-cooking in every bits. Brancaccio's meatball sammy is carefully stuffed and sauced into fresh Italian bread that just melts in your mouth.The meatballs are made with pine nuts and raisins, an old-world flavor that I love.
Eric saved half for later, mine vanished. I think I actually ate the wrapper. I was going to save the Broccoli Rabe for later, but it never made it into the fridge.
Broccoli Rabe, the trusty Italian side-kick… look how green this is.
Chef Joe gave us to a little after meal treat: “Snack a Latte” coffee cakes. Chef Joe carries some food provisions. I bought some pasta, farro, and Italian Nutella. You have to check this sweet little shop out, Brancaccio’sFood Shop 3011 Ft. Hamilton Pkwy, Brooklyn NY, 11218.
I planted everbearing raspberries from Fedco Seeds in one of my raised beds. My thinking was that in a raised bed, the natural sprawl that raspberries do would be easier to control. I have some planted in the yard nearby, and they love to creep into the lawn and everywhere else.
Here is the raised bed while the raspberries are removed
We have more bear problems now, and the bears love raspberries. The past two years the bears have mashed down my raspberry patch, so I decided this year to give them to a neighbor and reclaim the raised bed for tomatoes.
But how do you get raspberries out of a garden bed? I don’t think you can completely, so I decided to solarize the bed. I dug out all the berries I could, and then covered the raised vegetable bed with black plastic.
the raspberry plants, removedI discovered some age damage while removing the raspberries. Fixed it.
I put 6 mil plastic on the raised bed, held down with rocks.
I left the black plastic on for a month, plenty of time to kill off any remaining raspberry plants. I then kept the plastic in place, burned holes in it with a torch for tomatoes.
I torched holes in the plastic after a month for tomatoes.
Mike and Eric talked about the recent electrical storms in the midwest and that brought up the idea of ringing up our resident weather expert Tyler, ( CEO of Allison House, sponsor of Gardenfork.TV ). We found Tyler at a remote location and had a skype conference call, and talked about lightning.
Photo courtesy of NOAA (photographer unknown)
From NOAA.GOV: The picture that Tyler was referring to:
Do you know what to do if you are caught in the open during a thunderstorm or you feel tingling or your hair standing on end? Lightning causes around 100 deaths in the U.S annually (more than hurricanes and tornadoes combined). In the picture above, the young woman and her friends were severely injured by lightning just a few seconds after this picture was taken. Notice that no rain was falling, clearly illustrating that lightning can strike up to several miles away from the thunderstorm.
Images above: Sprites over thunderstorms in Kansas on August 10, 2000, observed in the mesosphere, with an altitude of 50-90 kilometers as a response to powerful lightning discharges from tropospheric thunderstorms. The true color of sprites is pink-red. Click on images to enlarge. Credit: Walter Lyons, FMA Research, Fort Collins, Colorado
Thunder Snow – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBUYmpnjob8&feature=related
I think people ignore it if they’re inside because it sounds a lot like a snowplow going by.
Faraday Cage Example – Your car acts as a faraday cage in a lightning storm:
Today we forage for wild edible food in our own yard, forgaing for Lambsquarters, also called Pitseed Goosefit or Pigweed by some. Lambsquarters is all over our cities and yards, so whether you are doing urban foraging or wild foraging, you can learn in this GardenFork.TV show about Lambsquarters.
Do you forage for wild plants? What edible plants have you eaten or found? Let us know below:
Lightning Storms over Chicago, The Dangers of felling trees, Chainsaw sharpening revisited, How to make a flower Box on GardenFork.TV, Food Safety during a power outage, Dry Ice, and Geocaching are just a few of the things we talk about this week on GardenFork Radio. We will have a bonus show tomorrow with Tyler, our weather expert from Allison House, Severe Weather Data.
Here’s plans and video to make a window box for your flowers. Easy to build in a weekend. Many window boxes fall apart because they are made of wood, I solved that. And here is Eric’s solution: the GardenFork Window Box Plans. Watch the show and then check out our video on window box planting. Below is a window box plan and photos to accompany the window flower box video.
How to make a window flower box
The wood box is made out of pine. It’s sized to be just slightly larger than the plastic pot that holds the plants. You can use common pine, be sure to prime it first with a stain blocking primer, else the knots in the wood will bleed through the paint. You can buy a can of stain blocking primer in a spray can, hit all the knots with a second coat, it dries pretty fast.
Give the window box planter several coats of paint, it will last longer that way.
I had to offset the hanger brackets because the side of the house has board and batten style wood siding. If you are attaching this do a house with vinyl siding or clapboard, you might want to slip behind the brackets some shims so the bracket screws don’t crush the siding.
When cutting the front and back wood pieces, be sure to cut them 1-1/2″ longer than the width of the inner planter. If you have coated screws, or deck screws, use those, as they are less likely to rust and bleed out of the paint.
This is how I make a window flower box, please tell us about your window box experience below.
Emergency Room Stories, The Proper use of LinkedIn.com , buying power tools, Grace Piper of FearlessCooking.TV and pickles , Growing and cooking garlic scapes, Organic lawn care from The Family Handyman , how to eat thai red curry, Real World Green and hypermiling, Hiking the AT in Falls Village, and viewer mail! You can check out Family Handyman here
Mike and Eric talk about a road rage incident and how to deal with road rage, recent weather info from the Allison House : Severe Weather Data weather station at GardenFork HQ , Eric’s excellent experience at Bakespace.com ‘s TechMunch NYC , Eric requeens a beehive, and the proper use and care of soldering irons
Plus Viewer Mail!
Photo by Marykbaird http://morguefile.com/creative/marykbaird
Learn how to requeen a beehive in this beginning beekeeping video. Requeening the hive is not rocket science, but you do need to know how a few things when you do this. This Beekeeping video will show you how to replace the queen in your beehive, or at least how we do it. As with many things in life, this is how we do it, others may do it differently.
You replace the queen in a beehive when you want to improve the hive’s characteristics or when the original queen of the beehive has died for some reason. You also requeen a beehive to keep it from swarming.
We are going to try requeening our hives in late August to prevent swarming the following spring. I’m told that queens replaced in the fall will not swarm in springtime, so we’ll see. Of course we’ll make a video about that.
Watch all our shows on GardenFork.TV : The Solar Powered Clothes Dryer , aka the clothesline is green and saves money. Installing a clothesline is super easy, if Eric can do it, you can do it. So go out and put up your clothesline and be green and save money.
This ketchup recipe is from a viewer and food blogger, Kathy. Kathy has a blog, What’s For Dinner, sent this and I wanted to share it with you all.
I love ketchup, and I’ve never made my own ketchup, but why not try this ketchup recipe?
Homemade ketchup recipe
There are a million versions of this on the internet, but my kids and husband prefer this version. I have 3 sons who put ketchup on EVERYTHING.
• 6 ounce can tomato paste
• 1/3 cup tap water
• 2 tablespoons vinegar
• 1/4 teaspoon dry mustard
• 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1 pinch cloves
• 1 pinch allspice
• 1 pinch chili powder
• 1/3 cup brown sugar
This is simplicity itself. In a medium bowl combine all of the ingredients with a wire whisk. Blend well. Scrape the mixture into a pint-sized, resealable container. Chill overnight, to blend the flavors. Use wherever ketchup is desired.
To reduce the sodium content simply omit the salt.
As written this recipe makes 12-ounces or 24 servings, 1-tablespoon each.
The recipe freezes extremely well. When I have a time I make up a very large batch, place it in a Ziploc bag and freeze. When our ketchup supply runs low I simply thaw the frozen supply over night. Then I snip the corner of the Ziploc bag and squeeze it into an existing ketchup bottle.
This essential oil recipe for honeybees is similar to the several commercial essential oil concentrates you can buy from beekeeping suppliers. These essential oil mixtures are said to have several benefits. They improve the disease resistance of the honeybees, they calm the bees when you are working them, and they can help introduce a new queen to a beehive.
NOTE: I now buy the essential oil mix from a beekeeping supplier here. Its saves time for me, is easier than putting together all these ingredients, is safe, and works very well.
I keep getting questions about what is an essential oil. An essential oil is the extracted oil of a particular plant. That’s it. For some reason, people ask if they can use mineral oil, and no, you can’t.
The two main ingredients here, lemongrass oil and spearmint oil are said to reduce the presence of diseases and pathogens in the hive.
You MUST use food grade essential oils for your bees, do NOT buy oil used for aromatherapy, it can contain ingredients toxic to bees.
To buy food grade spearmint essential oil on Amazon click on this link → Spearmint Food Grade Essential Oil. Double check the Amazon listing to make sure the oil is food grade, Amazon’s search function isn’t perfect.
To buy food grade lemongrass essential oil on Amazon click on this link → Lemongrass Food Grade Essential Oil. Double check the Amazon listing to make sure the oil is food grade, Amazon’s search function isn’t perfect.
I got this and many other beekeeping recipes for honeybees from Cass, whose blog is WVBeekeeper.
I have tried to contact Cass to ask permission to reprint this recipe but could not, so I’m hoping he’s ok with the idea of us all helping honey bees.
Essential Oil Recipe For Honeybees
A well known commercially available general purpose essential oil product for bees that is similar to the following recipe claims many benefits even though many of those claims have yet to be proven. The following recipe should work about as well as that product and is way cheaper. It can be added in small quantities to feed to encourage feeding. It has been known to occasionally cause robbing behavior due to its great appeal to bees.
> 5 cups water
> 2 1/2 pounds of sugar
> 1/8 teaspoon lecithin granules (used as an emulsifier)
> 15 drops spearmint oil
> 15 drops lemongrass oil
Bring the water to a boil and stir in the sugar until it is dissolved. Once the sugar is dissolved remove the mixture from the heat and quickly add the lecithin and the essential oils. Stir the mixture thoroughly. This solution should have a strong scent and not be left open around bees. Cool before using.
NOTE: i have had difficulty getting the lecithin granules to dissolve in the mixture. I have made this without the lecithin and it seemed to be ok.
Cass says: “Use the Essential Oil Mixture in early spring and during periods when no nectar is available and to build up packages, nucs ind swarms. Two teaspoonfuls in a quart of 1:1 sugar syrup delivers a total of one cc of both essential oils. The essential oils are evenly distributed throughout the syrup. The Essential Oil Mixture helps produce rapid build up of bees when used as a feeding stimulant. In addition, using 4 teaspoons in a quart of one to one sugar water of the Essential Oil Mixture as a spray instead of smoke helps calm the bees, and spraying caged new queens and bees helps with queen acceptance during cage introduction and reduces balling during direct release when sprayed on new queen and bees. It also helps to reduce stings: mix a little on your hands and watch the difference in bee behavior-very few or no stings at all. Acts as a bee calmer when sprayed on the bees and helps prevent fighting when combining nucs, swarms, and colonies. Spray on a colony while doing a cut-out for some extra calm bees! When sprayed on new foundation helps encourage the bees to draw out new comb or plastic comb.”
Road Trip! Well, at least a trip to NYC, and we tried out our new microphone that plugs into the iPhone. The Camera Operator joins us to talk more about the Beer Cooler Sous Vide video how to, a Bat Removal learning experience, Planting tomatoes, a Beekeeping update and more. Listen to GardenFork Radio on GardenFork.TV or on iTunes.
When I hear about a cook book or gardening book, I feed the title into my local library search page and reserve the book. Last week, I had three books that all came in on the same day. They were, Carrots Love Tomatoes: Secrets of Companion Planting for Successful Gardening by Louise Riotte, In The Green Kitchen by Alice Waters, and Edible A Celebration of Local Foods by Tracey Rider and Carole Topalian Interestingly there was a showing of the movie Fresh on the same day the books came in and I meet my gardening girl friends at the library.
Carrots Love Tomatoes: Secrets of Companion Planting for Successful Gardening is a great little book that every back yard gardener needs to check out. Because of space constraints, I need to know what plants go better than others. A lot of the information was stuff that I already knew, but there was some new information. Like Spinach and Strawberries grow well together. Which I find interesting since I’ve seen on a lot of menus spring salads with spinach and strawberries. Could there be a possibility that flavor profiles can follow what is in season at the time.
Alice Water did a very nice, well explained cook book. It’s a collection of lots of different chefs, farmers, writers’ recipes and how to cook them. I had heard about the Thomas Keller Roast Chicken which is included in In The Green Kitchen and is just a good basic recipe. However I like to keep the wishbones and pull them out after roasting the bird. Call it morbid, but I have a collect of wishbones hanging in my kitchen.
Edible is a guide book to good local food providers with beautiful pictures. The recipes listed in the book were good. There is a nice mention of the Chicago Green Market. Even though this is a newer book, there are so many more providers which I think could be mentioned.
My local library sent me a nice email reminder to get In The Green Kitchen and Edible back since they are newer books. Check out books at your local library. If you want to buy the book, after checking them out, hit your local book store.
Garden Report 6/04/2010
Eric and Mike had talked about seeding some stuff early and I fully agreed with them. Chicago had an early spring and then a nasty frost. I got excited and planted Carrots, Radishes, Beets on March 30th. Well. At least seeds are cheap. There was little activity until the middle of May and the only thing I’ve harvested are some radishes. The beets are fairly leafy, but the carrots are itty bitty. I think the ground was too cold for the seeds to germinate and should have tried to be patient and waited to plant.
Gardening is about experimenting. In the five years that we’ve lived in our house, I’ve found that containers and raised beds work best for me. Along with lots of fencing to keep the dogs out. The hardest thing to learn is that less is more, sometimes. With containers and fast growing plants like beans, you can crowd the pot a bit. In a 24 inch pot, I have four petite peas, three scarlet runners, and three fava beans. They need to be in full sun, so I have to water often. Which is why we have 3 rain barrels. The cucumbers, which I also grow in a 24 inch pot, did not like being crowded by romaine lettuce. I had to resow some cuke seeds, harvested and ate the lettuce, but the new plants look good.
In the open spaces of our yard, we have lots of flowers. Mike learned that boy dogs like to have a target to pee on at the park, well Max does like to pee on things. We don’t plant edibles where the dog may pee. I really crowded a bulb bed this year with tulips, allium, and lilies. So far, the spacing and timing of the bulbs has been good. The tulips came first and as they died back, the allium bloomed. I’m concerned that the allium may be crowding out the lilies. We just have to wait and see. The bulb bed is framed by a small leafy shrub that looks japanese maple ish and a super tall thick grass. The grass is allowed to go to seed and dry out in the winter. I’ve also planted two kinds of lemon verbena with in the shrub and grass. More for possible mosquito rep-lent properties than edible, but I will harvest some leaves outside of Max’s aim zone.
The side garden, well was going to be more formal. That’s not happening. This is a 20 foot by 18 inch space between the walk way and the neighbor’s fence and is full sun. Last fall, I split up the major clumps of peonies, phlox, and yarrow and evenly spaced them. Between those flowers, I planted lots of sunflowers, quiona, for the birds, and bachelor buttons. Originally, I wanted a space that was filled with big blooms and I may still get that next year when the peonies are more settled in their spaces. Now we have a bird feeder paradise. I put a feeder near the garden and the birds just love it. Max and Kora have very little interest in the birds and the birds have learned that.
We need some serious help in the front. It’s very neglected. We have some overgrown shrubs and a beautiful ginkgo tree, but the grass on the parkway is just dead. The space under the shrubs is dark and even though we’ve had some good rains, it’s so covered that it says dry. One major bright spot it that a lavender bush returns to the corner of our lot ever year. It’s small and scraggly, but it’s mine. I’ve also had sages, thyme, fennel, tarragon, and of course mint, return. Radicchio returned, but was eaten by rabbits.
What I’ve been most impressed with is the lettuce table. The lettuces that I planted haven’t suffered in the heat like the lettuces in pots have. The radishes have been very nice. I need to replant the rosemary because it needs a drier environment. We’re even having good luck with basil started from seed.
The only thing I’m partly disappointed in is the pepper patch. Marigolds and amaranth are growing well around the patch, but the four types of pepper seeds I’ve planted haven’t come it and it’s been warm and wet. I’m thinking that I’m going to have to buy some plants and toss them in the bed. I do have two very nice tomato plants growing.
In general, so far I’m super happy. Jim and I got the green house up last week and he’s pushing me to do all edibles in there so I don’t have to fight the elements. I’m partly for that. The containers work really well at keeping the dogs, bunnies, raccoons, what ever, out of some of the edibles. Last summer we had a real scare with Kora and a virus transmitted from “wild” animal urine. Kora was vaccinated for the virus, but still caught a random strain.
