Few things raise Minnesotans’ collective glee quite like when our frosty state earns mention in the New York Times – particularly when America’s paper of record gets Minnesota very, very wrong. Remember “Mort’s”? And so we greeted with a good deal of mock outrage and secret merriment the Times’ strange assertion, in an article about the Thanksgiving […]

Julia and I headed south to get a gauge on Minnesota’s spring mushrooms some time in May. Here’s what we found. And here we are, November 1.

There wasn’t much to see at the farmers market just now, but it’s a good thing I took my camera along. Waiting at our front door upon our return was this lovely Scarlet Tanager.

Just a few weeks ago it seemed like the farmers markets would never open, and now here we are already two weekends into the season at the Midtown Farmers Market. And what a season we are having! May farmers market shopping in Minnesota in any normal year is an affair for the die-hards, an exercise […]

It may be only April, but it’s already time to pull on your mushroom hunting fashion boots. You’ll fend off ticks and look good while slinking through the woods. Tom found this pair of morels nestled in the grass. Excited at an early find, he didn’t even wait for me to take their picture before […]

Hoping to catch the earliest of the season’s morels, Tom and I headed south last weekend in search of the Minnesota State Mushroom. As with any mushroom trip, the central goal – the one that we try to convince ourselves of over and over, as we continue to tote an empty basket – was to have […]

It’s almost election day, a time for Americans to exercise the most basic mechanism of self-government by choosing our rulers. Nobody can have failed to notice that the stakes are high this year. Issues that once elicited some kind of consensus have become the source of bitter disagreements. As a food blogger, I have a […]

Last week was the first time I’ve ever noticed fresh ginger at the farmers market, and, indeed the first I’d ever seen ginger so fresh as to still have stalks attached – who knew ginger had stalks? The scent of this ultra-fresh ginger is a joy to take in – grassier and spicier than the […]

Call me a pessimist, but in spite of all the amazing advances being made in the realm of cold weather fruits I don’t think anybody’s ever going to grow citrus in Minnesota. So what’s the hard-core locavore fundamentalist zealot to do when he finds himself in the North country and craving a glass or two […]