Cooking Up a Story

Posts By: TwoJunes

Hominy Waffles

The toasty corn flavor in these waffles lends them to dinner, as well as breakfast. Try serving them with grilled sausages. This recipe was originally published by Nicole Rees in the Oregonian. Hominy Waffles 2 cups all-purpose flour 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder ½ teaspoon salt ¼ teaspoon baking soda 2 cups buttermilk, at room [...]

Corn-Fed Girl

I know that all the recent news about corn has been grim. We Americans consume an enormous amount of corn in the sneaky and unhealthy form of high-fructose corn syrup. Monocultures. Bt corn and genetic engineering. Ethanol and farm subsidies. These are complex and real issues that require study and reflection. But…I’ll just confess right [...]

Cheese Grits and Collard Greens

For a vegetarian version, eliminate the bacon, and use mushroom stock, vegetable broth or water rather than chicken stock and olive oil instead of butter. The cheese is up to you…it’s delicious with it, but the plain, non-savory version is great too and it makes a wonderful breakfast porridge served with maple syrup or molasses. [...]

Taking No Child Left Behind Into the Garden

by TwoJunes Volunteering at the Oregon Food Bank I (Lisa again this week!) am very excited to be participating two wonderful programs offered by The Oregon Food Bank this summer. I’ll be volunteering as a mentor for the Cultivating Community program, and then, a bit later, helping out however I can in teaching or developing [...]

Kids and Gardening: Getting Dirty Pays

I (Lisa) grew up in northwest Arkansas, just a generation or two removed from the family farm. Although it was not the primary source of income, my grandparents and parents devoted considerable land to producing food for the family table. One of my grandfathers had a “truck patch” in addition to the family garden…literally, extra [...]

Health Food or Frankenfood: You Decide

Beyond the marketing hype, there is value in some of those functional ingredients. I (Nicole, aka June #1) work in the food industry. For years, I have been explaining my “unusual” homelife to coworkers—the lifestyle of homemade food centered on local, natural ingredients that readers here take to be completely normal. So (readers here) you [...]

Homemade Stock: Kitchen Alchemy

Here in the kitchen of the TwoJunes, we practice a kind of rough magic on the days we make stock. Our precious “stockpile” of poultry carcasses, limp carrots, slightly wilted celery stalks, withered mushrooms and forlorn parsley stems bubble contentedly in the big pot along with garlic, onion and fresh herbs from the garden. Check [...]

Small Batch Chicken Stock

TwoJunes, Lisa Bell and Nicole Rees, share their latest recipe: We freeze all our poultry carcasses and bones, be it chicken, duck or turkey. Then, when the carrots and celery are looking a little droopy, we pull everything out and make a huge batch of stock. Very little gets wasted that way. We usually make [...]