The Cellar and the Pantry Blog

Is this a trend?  Village Whiskey, Jose Garces' newest restaurant, is the second place I've been to in the last month or so that featured house-made pickles.  Village Whiskey offers a choice of five different pickle plates as an appetizer: tomatoes, beets, carrots, artichokes, or onions.  I got the pickled cherry tomatoes, which were delicious, as was everything else I tried.  It was served the way many restaurants serve cheese samples, with two sides (whipped mascarpone and a tapenade).

If you're curious, the other place was the Varga Bar, which offers a very tasty "pot o' pickles" appetizer.  Could small-scale, traditional food preservation be the next culinary trend?

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One of the benefits of growing your own onions and peppers is that they go with absolutely everything.  For this edition of Grow Your Own, the cooperative blogging project, I combined them with spaghetti squash, also from the garden, for a quick and tasty dinner that's almost entirely homegrown.  Go preheat your over to 350 and give it a shot!

From the garden I used:

• One small white onion
• One large pepper, as hot as you like; mine was a Joe's Long Cayenne (from Seed Savers Exchange)
• One spaghetti squash, var. Vegetable Spaghetti or similar

From the pantry, I added salt, pepper, butter, olive oil and grated cheese.

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By now, everyone is talking about the White House vegetable garden. The White House has published the official garden plan, which is heavily slanted towards salad greens and peas. There are also small plantings of broccoli (no doubt for state visits by George H. W. Bush), onions, shallots, carrots, radishes, fennel, and rhubarb. This doesn't seem to be the entire layout, though, as the New York Times reports that the garden will include tomatilloes and a berry patch, neither of which appear on the plan. And it's a little surprising that the tomato, a staple of almost every American home garden, doesn't appear on this plan.

Most of the media coverage has been aimed at the casual reader. The Cellar and the Pantry wants to know more, and I'll bet other gardeners do, too.

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The March edition of The Session, the beer blog community's monthly cooperative conversation, is pale lager. As in standard American light-colored, light-flavored lagers.

Many of the beer-appreciation (a.k.a. beer drinking) blogs aren't too pleased, because it's not what they usually drink. And many of the home-brewing blogs aren't pleased, because it's not what they normally brew. But The Cellar and the Pantry has a wider mission than just brewing, and if you're interested in making your beer by using your gardening skills as well as your brewing skills, it might just be one of the easiest styles to grow.

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