If those sound familiar then you, like me, are an aging gardener.

Gone are the days when I could hit the garden at 6 a.m., garden an hour or so and then get ready for work. In the evening I’d repeat the process.

Now it’s not so easy. But thanks to speaker Duane Pancoast at the International Master Gardeners Conference I was able to listen to his advice, sign up for his blog and order two of his books on The Geriatric Gardener. His books focus on adapting to age limitations when you garden. Pancoast is a marketing communications expert who has specialized in working on gardening communications. I’ve signed up for his blog and I can’t wait to dig into his books. One thing I learned from his talk is to limit my time outside into short work sessions that allow me to do several during a day.

Frankly I should have been working on this a decade ago - before bursitis first sidelined me. But there’s no time like the present to revise my workstyle and add to my tool collection.

I’ll be reporting my results as I go along. And I welcome your advice on what modifications have worked for you.

No, I don’t want to go slogging through the woods emptying pails — been there and done that. But I do love the output of this rite of spring.

For years we went to a friends “sugaring” party and it was great fun, but now I’ve reached the age where spending a day trekking in the snow, emptying buckets of sap (40 gallons of sap to a gallon of syrup) and helping tend the fire under the pots holds less appeal than it once did.

Still I’m grateful to live in a state that produces a great deal of maple syrup since that is one of the products that may be affected by tariffs imposed by Canada. For those who don’t live in a syrup producing state this means even higher prices for this prized commodity.

But enough with the political issues. What I do miss about those sugaring parties is being outside, hearing the world coming alive again as the birds are singing their spring songs and every so often you can see a spot of green poking out from the snow.

Spring, with its promise of a world of rebirth, is one of my favorite seasons. As I listen to the birds chirping I think about the coming days when gardens begin to awake and time in the garden means being careful not to disturb overwintering pollinators.

Rushing spring is never a good idea. Instead I think I’ll curl up with a book on the couch and look through my recipes for great ways to use maple syrup like this one for Chewy Maple Cookies.

By the time I was in third grade I knew that axiom well and had even observed it! In those days I mourned the snow banks disappearing although I’ve always loved spring and what it brings.

This year we’ve had a winter that is more typical of a Michigan winter. The past few years have been what I call “Wimp Winters” but now I realize that when winter doesn’t mean non-stop play in the snow then .wimp winters are okay.

One sure sign of spring are the increase of bird songs that I hear each day when we take the dog out. This delights me as do the birds that swarm our feeder.

The next few weeks will bring more of spring’s awakening signs. What do you look forward to in spring?

Today it’s in the 40s, sunny (a rarity for February in Northern Michigan) and the drip from the icicles hanging from our roof is steady.

I gaze out my window to look out on Grand Traverse Bay. Two miles out is Bellows Island, locally called Gull Island for its inhabitants. Years ago there was a home there but now only two chimneys stand. I can see them but they are gray while the white of the snow on the island glistens. It’s such a reminder of life changes and weather changes and the climate we must all worry about.

Meanwhile I bury myself in Renkl’s book which reminds me of a childhood spent outdoors. It was a time when I once tamed an injured crow who became my companion for the summer. Thanks to Renkl her words have brought back wonderful childhood memories.

In addition to inspiring me to write, Renkl’s inspired me to get started on garden planning for this year. It will be a while before our snow diminishes so a bit of indoor gardening, a start on seed raising and rooting a few plants for indoors/outdoors will be my focus now.

If you’d like to read Renkl’s book you can purchase it at the MMGA Bookstore. Know that I don’t get any type of compensation for linking to it but if you buy here you’ll get the good feeling with knowing your supporting a good gardening cause.

Today is in the 50s so the dog and I’ll be going out soon to explore. (Typical March temperatures in our part of Michigan run between 22 and 40 degrees) Yesterday’s trek found a snowdrop in the yard — not pushing its way through the snow like most years but right in the middle of the grass. So it’s time to check out the woods and see if any of the native spring ephemerals are pushing their way out of the ground and if there is any sign of ramps (wild leeks) coming up.

I’m not an avid forager but we do dig ramps in the spring and look for morel mushrooms and fiddlehead ferns. That first taste of spring, combined with the first availability of our CSA share in April, makes spring a culinary joy!

In addition to checking out the growth patterns in the woods, I’ll also start charting out the daytime temperatures to see when it’s safe to begin garden work.

For years I cleaned up my garden in the fall and then as soon as was possible I was out doing an early spring bed preparation The theory I was taught was that an hour in the garden in the fall saved three hours in the spring and gave you a head start on the next year’s work. But as I’ve learned, leaving dead stems, leaves and twigs in the garden gives butterflies and bees places to live until they are ready to emerge in the spring — usually when daytime temperatures are steadily above 50 degrees.

So until then I’ll limit my spring clean up to taking out some saplings that are in an area I want to plant this spring and making a new burn pile with those. Meanwhile that will give our black lab plenty of time to check out the smells of the rabbits that live under our deck. And when my back says “enough already” I’ll start making a spring order for my new native garden.

Happy Spring!

But because we love fresh vegetables and because we love the idea of Community Supported Agriculture, for the past two years we’ve purchased a CSA share from Homestead Hill CSA. I knew this would be a great CSA to invest in because Pam, one of the owners, was the Master Gardener Coordinator when I took the class in 2007. She taught our vegetable gardening section of the course and her passion for raising food crops was obvious.

Pam’s husband Steve comes from a long line of fruit farmers so CSA share members have the opportunity to buy their spectacular strawberries and cherries as well as vegetables.

But the bounty of our share challenges us to find new ways to use each week’s supply. Fortunately we have a stock of cookbooks as well as internet access for recipe searches. As tomatoes have begun ripening here in Northern Michigan I’ve had a craving for gazpacho and went in search of a great recipe. I found one from Chef John that uses fresh tomatoes. Without the addition of any cream the pureed tomatoes gave the diced vegetables a creamy base that was just delicious. We loved it. That started a conversation about the gazpacho we made early in our marriage years, very different from the one we made this year but also very good.

To the cookbooks we went, hoping we hadn’t sold or given that book away over the years. But we were in luck. It was on our bookshelves - The Best of the Best by Arthur Hettich, then editor of Family Circle, which was the largest selling women’s magazine. The Best of the Best is a compilation of recipes from some of the notable American restaurants of the 1970s, leaders in the culinary arts like James Beard, Mimi Sheraton and Craig Claiborne and celebrities like Burt Reynolds.

We quickly went to the index and found the recipe for Chilled Gazpacho Soup from the Tack Room in Tucson, Arizona, which unfortunately closed in 2003. What an interesting recipe that was! Years before the emphasis was on farm to table eating and before lots of fresh ingredients were as easy to access as they are today, this soup could even be made in winter. (Brrr if you did it in Michigan.) However the gazpacho recipe we used this year is focused on fresh and that’s what’s appealing to me right now.

From there we went on exploring recipes and remembering names. When I happened on Peg Bracken, I remembered her I Hate to Cook book. With a little online sleuthing I found that book had been reprinted in a 50th anniversary edition. Since I’m not the cook in the family, I checked out a couple of her recipes and was rewarded with Peg Bracken’s Sour Cream Cole Slaw. Bracken describes her preferred recipes as “hard to spoil, easy to make and remarkably good tasting.” The Sour Cream Cole Slaw recipe seemed to fit the bill so I gave it a try and it is delicious.

I’m going to explore further some recipes in the book for using this week’s summer share and I’ll keep you posted.

Fortunately I’m back in the garden now and have cleaned out a lot of weeds that accumulated during my enforced “time off.” But I’m being very careful of my back and part of that is aided by using my garden kneeler/seat. I’ve been using the kneeler for years to avoid pains in my knees, but I realized during this layup that I hadn’t been using it at all the day I hurt my back. My husband has been using it for a couple years (we have two as a result) and he swore by it while listening to my pain complaints.

Another benefit of the kneeler/seat is that when you use it for kneeling it makes getting up a lot easier. Used to be I could go out in the vineyard to prune grapes, squat to get the lowest part of the vine and stand up with ease. Today’s reality is that 30 years takes a toll on your flexibility and you need to adjust. This bench helps me do that. Best of all, it comes with a tool holder so I’m not making holes in the bottoms of my pockets as I stick pruners or clippers in them.

If you are making some modifications in your gardening to accommodate the realities of aging, then this is something you should look at. There are lots of kneeler/seats on the market but I’ve found that the less expensive ones work just fine.

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Last week I was talking to a friend I met professionally many years ago, catching up on her latest projects and activities and updating her on what we’re doing these days. In the conversation I shared with her that I had concluded that growing up as an only child on a farm where our nearest neighbor was one quarter mile away was perfect preparation for staying quarantined (yes, I’m high risk, so I’m being very careful). It taught me a lot about finding things to do to amuse myself. That’s come in handy since we self-quarantined in early March.

Here are a few of my special projects that are keeping me busy outside this summer:

1. My new border garden that is focused on native plants.

2. Raising food from seed. I’ve always been big on transplants but this year decided to take the plunge… more in a future post as these plants develop.

3. Catching up on the lesson in plant breeding I had from Joseph Tychonievich at Michigan Master Gardener College several years ago and cross breeding some petunias to create some fun colors that are uniquely mine.

Today I’m headed to the garden to weed (perpetual) and move some plants (seems like perpetual) while my husband is in the vineyard. Today he’s digging holes to put in new vines - grapes developed in Minnesota to withstand temperature falls up to -40 degrees. While I hope we don’t experience another polar vortex in the near future, I sure want to be ready if it happens.

Having a number of things to do outside assures us that we won’t be bored during our hibernation. I’m particularly excited to get back to plant breeding, even in a most elementary way. Looking back on my school science projects I think I’ve been headed in this direction for a long, long time.

If you’d like to try something different in gardening, I’d highly recommend some experiments in plant breeding. For my go to book, I rely on Joseph Tychonievich who makes it simple and easy for avid home gardeners like me who don’t have horticulture degrees.

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But for immediate gratification after today’s session, I went online, using a website he mentioned, to plan the replanting of one of our “front of the house” beds.

Tallamy talked about how there are “keystone” plants that feed multiple insects, butterflies and birds. So, when you’re picking native plants to add to your garden and you have limited space you can pick the plants that feed the greatest number of species.

One of the keystone plants Tallamy talked about are oak trees. Obviously I’m not going to plant an oak tree right in front of a bay window and frankly, our alkaline soil is not idea for oaks But we have a meadow area just down the hill that does support oaks and I plan to selectively add plants to that area that will make it an even greater place for birds, butterflies and insects to feed.

Plants that I will place in my garden space include goldenrod, sunflowers, asters, beebalm, wild strawberry, yarrow and black-eyed Susan’s. along with some milkweed. Most of these will be transplanted from other areas in the garden where they need to be dug and divided and then I’ll add to them little bluestem, blanket flower and beard tongue. This should provide both a riot of color and a great place for pollinators to hang out and I’d love to attract monarch butterflies in the numbers that this picture shows (it’s a stock photo — dreams are important, right?)

Next, I’ll be ordering Tallamy’s newest book, Nature’s Best Hope. Stay tuned for a review of that.

I posed that question to a high school friend who is a first responder and he told me that one of the first questions they ask a patient is if they are allergic to any type of medications.

Of course, if the patient is unconscious, the responders need to look elsewhere for that information. If they’re responding in your home they will probably look first on the refrigerator. But what if you’re outside or working in a community garden?

If you have allergies, whether to food, insects or medicines, you should be carrying that information with you and preferably on your person. Medical bracelets have long been used to provide first responders with the medical information they need when treating you.

But today our smart phones can also carry a lot of information — even more than you could ever put on a bracelet or necklace tag. For example, my medical ID on my iPhone has my name, age, sex, blood type, that I am an organ donor, any medical conditions I have, medical notes, allergies and reactions, a list of the medications I take and my blood type as well as my height and weight. Plus it has room for emergency contact information for my husband and other family members as well as my physician.

So today I took a little time to make sure that my medical information on my smartphone was complete and up-to-date and my husband did the same. The smart phones are always with us as they are for so many people these days so we’re letting them work for us in emergencies.

Should you update your medical information? Definitely. Or in the words of the old Nike commercial - Just Do It!

As a kid growing up in the country I didn’t have much of an introduction to cooking with herbs unless my mother was feeling experimental (not often.) And even when she was, there were no fresh herbs to be found unless there was a bit of parsley in the fridge.

Basil? We never even had spaghetti unless it came out of a can so the idea of pasta with pesto was unheard of.

It was the 1980’s before I really discovered basil and all that you could do with it. The credit for that goes to my adventurous eater husband who is always discovering different dishes to enjoy, to the broadening of our culinary horizons that came with an increasing interest in food and cooking, spurred on by the emergence of TV chefs and meeting new friends from different backgrounds than I experienced in my small town including the grandson of Italian immigrants.

We were living in Southwest Michigan in the 1980’s and about an hour away Fox Hill Farm where owner Marilyn Hampstead had begun an annual “Oh Boy, Basil” festival. Hampstead and her farm became known for this annual festival, which even got a mention in The Christian Science Monitor. While we never made the festival it did inspire me to begin growing as many varieties of basil as I could.

I’m not the only one who remembers the “Oh Boy, Basil” festivals as sparking an interest in this wonderful herb. As I was looking for more information about the festivals and Fox Hill Farm I found this homage to basil and the basil festivals in this blog by a Southeast Michigan chef. Like me, Chef Pete considers basil on of his favorite herbs.

My taste for fresh basil has never dulled, so I was extremely excited to flip over my Herb Gardens calendar this month and find a recipe for Basil Vinaigrette as well as a wealth of ideas and information about my favorite herb. Some of the use suggestions contained in the calendar including making a basil simple syrup for cocktails, placing the cut herb in a glass of water to keep it fresh and making basil tea, which I’ve never tried. According to the calendar information basil tea calms the nerves, settles the stomach and helps the sinuses.

I dug out Marilyn Hampstead’s The Basil Book, a slender paperback chocked full of information about the herb and it’s uses. I plan to keep it out this year and try some of the many recipes for using basil that extend well beyond pesto but first I’m going to follow the successful pesto farmer’s advice and get some basil seeds started so that I’ll have plenty of herb to work with this summer.

Some of the recipes I want to try include pesto packed tomatoes, basil pepper jelly, the icy cinnamon basil fruit compote, hot holy basil tea (calming is good, right?) and cheesy basil puffs (cheese, basil, true Green oregano and puff pastry - what could be bad?).

I’ll keep you posted on the results.

Photo by Rob Pumphrey on Unsplash

There’s too much to do and only so many hours in the day so the formal herb gardens I might aspire to are just going to remain an aspiration. Plus, I just can’t do eight hour days in the garden anymore - my back won’t tolerate it. Also, I live on what’s left of the family farm, which is more suited either to agricultural row growing or informal gardens than it is to creating a formal bed.

To grow anything edible I end up doing battle with deer, with bunnies, with fox and raccoons, all of whom love the tasty grapes we grow as well as herbs I might add to our landscape.

So I look longingly through the pictures in Ethne Clark’s classic Herb Garden Design and enjoy every one. Then I return to the sections entitled “A Movable Feast: Herbs in Containers” and “A Planting of Pot Herbs” and “A Planting of Thyme.”

Clark’s fabulous designs - the less formal ones - do inspire the layout of my perennial gardens. She’s a master at creating amazing color patterns and she mixes her art with a lot of good, practical information.

Do you want a scent garden? I used this book to plant one when we lived in an urban environment where the noise and smells of the city needed to be offset with something more natural and more esoteric. Did it screen out all smells urban? No, but it provided me with some peace and tranquility while living on a lot and a half.

If you’re interested in herbs this is definitely a book that offers something for everyone, no matter what your taste. Clarke walks readers through planning and planting including choosing plants that suit your site, choosing a design and your garden’s structure. She also talks you through herbs and their growing habits and how they can integrate into your garden as a whole. Probably my favorite section is on colour (Clarke is American by birth but lived and gardened in England for many years so you’ll find many British spellings in this book). As you’ll see in this section and several others, herb gardens are not devoid of color.

Her designs range from formal to “beside the kitchen door” in style, truly making this a book that offers readers guidance on any type of a garden they might grown. And if you’re not good at visualizing, the spectacular photography in this book will help you envision what an specific style of herb garden may look like on your site.

While the book was originally published in 1995, which is about the time my fascination with herbs began, it is in my view a classic well worth reading again and again.

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One of my favorite books to use when planning an herb garden or looking for a new herb to try is The American Garden Guides: Herb Gardening.

Many herbs are not native plants. Does that mean you shouldn’t plant them for their culinary, medicinal or fragrance qualities? No. What it does mean is that you should be aware of both a plant’s positive and negative qualities. Also, know that some herbal plants are natives like Echinacea Purpurea or purple coneflower.

That’s where this book’s plant selector section is particularly valuable. Since I live and grow plants in Northern Michigan I need to know what will and what will not survive in our cold climate. With that knowledge I can choose what to put in pots and what can be planted in the garden. My focus is on growing culinary herbs and many of them originated both outside North American and in much warmer climates. I need to know if a plant can’t survive outside so I can grow it in a pot that can be moved inside to provide us with fresh herbs all winter long.

Because herbs are often not native plants and because this book was first published in 1994 you do need to check out the invasive qualities of the plants you’re planning to use. You will find listings for some invasive species like Dame’s Rocket. So while its plant selector section is a great place to find information on a vast number of herbal plants, be sure you research anything you want to plant in a garden bed. Tip: if a plant is described as “spreading” or from Europe or Asia but is “now naturalized” beware - you may spend valuable gardening time digging it out from areas where it spreads in a few years.

Also in this book are sections on garden design, techniques for planting and growing and the special living conditions (including the climates we live in) provide us as a challenge for herb growing.

So sit down, have a read a with an eye to the kinds of herbs that interest you. Have you been reading about medicinal herbs and are you interested in an herb garden that focuses on medicinal herbs? Or are you a Shakespeare buff who thinks it would be great fun to plant a garden focused on the herbs that Shakespeare mentions in his plays? Or are you like me who wants to focus on herbs that add flavor to simple meals?

Whatever you’re seeking, this is a good read with a lot of great information, much of which is timeless.

Note: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. The Amazon Services LLC Associates Program is an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com.

The first night we had a simple salad of greens with a seeds and nuts topper and a vinaigrette dressing. For the next few days we had spinach salads with hot bacon dressing, harking back to the first spinach salad crazes of the 1970s.

Tonight we’ll be using some of the remaining salad greens to make Utica Greens, a great recipe found in the NYTimes Cooking section.

So, now I’m thinking ahead to what I can do this winter to increase the amount of greens that we can have locally grown once our CSA shuts down for the winter. It was back to the books and I found a treasure - The Salad Lover’s Garden by Sam Bittman. This book has been around for a while as we’ve done our on and off vegetable gardening (you can tell by the coffee stains on the edge of the pages as well as the 1992 publication date.)

What I especially love about this book is its wide ranging discussion of the ingredients that may be used in a salad. (Note: Bittman warns that space limitations keep him from discussing all the types of greens you can grow, but he definitely has enough options to get you started plus a list of recommended varieties.)

So what can you expect to learn about in this book. Here are the subjects Bittman covers:

• Lettuces

• Chicories/Radicchio

• Belgian Endive

• Endive and Escarole

• Spinach

• Arugula

• Celtuce

• Chard

• Cresses

• Dandelions

• Mache

• Shungiku

• Mustard Greens

He also includes plants for crunch in salads which can be carrots, celery, radishes, sweet fennel, cucumbers, broccoli, cauliflower and peppers. Other salad additions include classics like onions and tomatoes. And no salad book would be complete without a run through some of the classic salad herbs, which can also be used in omelets, soups, stews and sauces. There’s also a section on cabbage and members of the cabbage family, like Brussel sprouts.

There’s also lots of good information on preparing a garden plot, selecting seeds and deciding what to grow but what I am focused on is container gardening and Bittman covers this too. Our blustery winter temperatures here in Northern Michigan preclude any type of outdoor gardening from October to May, so my hopes for salad greens this winter will have to focus on what I can do inside.

If you only chose one book to read on vegetable gardening — not likely in our house — you’ll learn growing techniques, how to plant, succession planting, container gardening, compositing and fertilizing.

One caveat: since the book was published in 1992 there have been changes in our approaches to pest control so I would look for advice online to update what is in the book (be sure your online advice comes from a research institution like a land-grant university and their extension department or websites like The Garden Professors, which are written by horticulture educators with solid science and research backgrounds.) But the information on laying out a garden and on selecting tools and the basics of growing is great as well as the instruction on the care of salad crops is useful information.

If you’re interested in having more great salads this summer this is a great book to read and learn from. You can find it on Amazon by clicking the Buy on Amazon button on the product photo below.

Note: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. The Amazon Services LLC Associates Program is an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com.

We’re fortunate to have a bundle of weekly goodness from our CSA from late April (it started last week and I’m savoring the memory of the taste of today’s spinach salad as I write this) through early December, but there are still some things we grow, like herbs. And because we do battle with a herd of deer and a family of rabbits as well as wire worms in the soil in our garden area, we focus on container growing for anything edible.

But, because these are at best trying times, I thought it was time for me to get out some of the vegetable gardening books I’ve accumulated over the years and refresh my knowledge of both the books and the advice they give.

One of my favorites is Barbara Pleasant’s Home Grown Pantry. One of the reasons I really like this book is how she’s arranged her topics into sections entitled:

1. Why Grow Your Own Food? In this section Pleasant talks about the drive to provide food, common traits of pantry gardeners, how to use her book, climate information, choosing what to grow, row covers, food preservation management and cooking from the pantry you’ve stored.

2. Basic Food Preservation Methods. It’s no good to store food if 1) you don’t eat it or 2) you don’t eat it quickly enough. She also talks about basics of food preservation: creating your own cold storage, dry storage, freezing, drying, canning and fermenting (including home wine making.) Pleasant tells you how.

3. Vegetables for the Homegrown Pantry. This is a great section, especially for those who want to explore all options in growing and preserving from the best types of a vegetable to plant, to what you need to do to grow it well, to harvesting, storing and preserving.

4. Fruits for the Homegrown Pantry. This section focuses on fruits but gives the same type of information as you find in the vegetables section. As the daughter of a fruit grower I love the sections on apples, grapes and cherries (we grow wine grapes but I may put in a couple juice grapes. As a flavored vinegar lover I appreciate her recipes for fruit infused vinegars to dress a variety of salads.

5. Herbs for the Homegrown Pantry. Probably my favorite section since I love growing herbs even though I’m not a focused vegetable grower. Herbs are just fun! Fresh herbs add so much to every meal and it’s great to freeze them or dry them for winter use as well. Oh, and to keep at least one small plant of each type in the bay window of our kitchen.

For someone like me who hasn’t done a vegetable garden other than a few herb and tomato pots in years, paging through this book was not just a good refresher, it was inspiration. Flipping to the end of the book I realize that Ms. Pleasant has also done a gardening guide on composting and one on starter vegetable gardens — helpful information for anyone planning their initial garden and wanting to make the most of their vegetable and garden waste. If you’re interested in a home grown pantry for 2020 and beyond, this is a great place to start.

If you’re interested in a Barbara Pleasant’s Home Grown Pantry you can purchase it on Amazon by clicking on the Buy on Amazon button at the bottom of the product picture.

Note: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. The Amazon Services LLC Associates Program is an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com.

So, as long as I’m thinking creatively, I pulled out Victoria Wise’s American Charcuterie. We’ve had this cookbook since soon after it was published in the mid-1980s. What fun to look through this great guide to doing classic charcuterie as well as some of the marvelous recipes for specialties like marinated mushrooms and pickled beets!

Since my husband is more the cook that I am, I took a look through the most stained pages and found more than a few favorites. One recipe we love is Charcuterie Potatoes. The dish couldn’t be simpler: potatoes, cream, butter, salt and pepper. Wise recommends serving it with honey-glazed sausage. It’s so popular with my husband and his sister that it’s become our go-to dish for holidays, both Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Another favorite is also a favorite of our friends Brian and Alice and it’s classically French: Choucroute Garnie. To make it well you need a recipe like this that details how to make the sauerkraut (warning, this takes planning because good sauerkraut must be made well ahead). Wise also details cooking the sauerkraut and what to pair it with - preferably fresh ham hocks brined for a few days, confit of duck or goose and sausage. Fortunately Wise also gives ideas on how to make a respectable version from purchased ingredients.

With recipes for some very interesting and varied dishes, I suspect we’ll be doing some serious shopping and experimenting once it’s time to go to the grocery store again!

If you’d like to do some experimenting yourself and you consider yourself a reasonably good cook with a palate that goes beyond meat and potatoes I highly recommend this cookbook to you. There’s a reason it’s still available after 30+ years.

Note to buyers: If you choose to order either of these items, know at as an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

To make this oil, I used a recipe that I found in the Herb Gardens calendar I got for Christmas and I loved the herbal oil that resulted. It has just a kick of heat (warning, I love heat so if you don’t often eat hot foods you might want to try a little bit just to start) and it made our very simple pasta with shrimp, oil and cheese oh so good. If you’re interested in creating some pili pili oil either for gifts or for your own use, here’s a link to a New York Times recipe for the oil. The ingredients are the same as the ones I used but the amounts are slightly different. However this looks good as well and I may pair it with the Herb Gardens recipe next batch as I mix up some for gifts.

I was especially glad to have the pili pili oil on hand as we ran out of olive oil and we’re self-isolating for a couple weeks because of the coronavirus and Covid 19. So I went online to see what supplies I could order in the interim and found some that I’m ordering today. Below you’ll find links to the olive oil and - for those of you who live in areas where spicy dried peppers are hard to get chili de arbol. If you choose to order either of these items, know at as an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Stay warm (or cool if you’re in a hot climate), stay safe and stay healthy.