I haven't posted much lately. It's been a busy summer and we've been eating the crop of tomatoes that has come in.  This year, the Roma tomatoes have done the best and have been sweet and plentiful. The heat wave seems to have stunted fruit production on many of the plants, but we did manage to get some cantaloupe. It was juicy and sweet and wonderful.

Last Sunday we packed up our folding chairs, blankets, and appetites and headed over to the Farm to Fork Picnic north of Hillsborough. There were something like 50 pairings of local chefs and farmers, doing their magic with local food. The weather held up for us and we got to sample food from barbecue pork, cornbread, strawberry sangria, kimchee, lamb sausage, local beer, etc. It's a great local event that highlights the diversity of food produced in the area and highlights some of the great local chefs that we have.

So my pepper plants (and a few tomatoes) from Seed Savers arrived this week. Between rain showers today I managed to get one of the garden boxes tilled and the plants in. I planted a wide variety of peppers, including:

This weekend we're going to the 2010 Farm to Fork picnic. I'm pretty excited to get out, drink a beer or two, and eat some good food. I plan to take some pictures to post here.  In the meantime, check out this video of last year's event.

I've been slowly prepping the beds and the garden for this summer. Yesterday, I started with mulch. We spread it over the weeds between the garden boxes and throughout the plant beds. Next week we'll tear up the garden boxes and put some new soil down. Right now they're still a mess of weeds. Our pepper plants should arrive in about two weeks and then we'll go buy tomatoes, other veggies, and some marigolds to fill out the boxes.

 

I don't have training, equipment, or a great eye but I enjoy dabbling in food photography. Sometimes I get lucky and take a nice shot, sometimes I'm just indexing something I ate. I set up a vanity website that highlights what my wife cooks (check it out here if you're interested).

There is something about eating food from a truck or cart on the street that makes it better. I've always loved the idea and thought that hot dogs in New York were almost mythical. Since moving to North Carolina, the opportunity for a truck or cart has been rare until the past year. We have a great burger truck (Only Burger) and now we have a Korean taco truck, Bulkogi. 

The truck typically parks at the end of Ninth Street in Durham (in the Wachovia lot) and is fantastic. Tonight I sampled the chicken and beef tacos. They were flavorful with just a little bit of heat. I highly recommend it if you're in the area.

I'm hoping that this is a trend. I'd love to see a few more food trucks make the rounds. It's a break from the ordinary and lets you eat outside, which in North Carolina is great.

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So with Spring here, I've been seeing and reading a lot more about Local Food.  The college I attended sent me information on their local foods dinner, we're attending a local food event in a few weeks (Farm to Fork), and our local farmer's market is gearing up with its Spring/Summer hours. All of it is getting me itchy to go back out and dig in the dirt and try to grow food again this year. The biggest challenge is time. Work, family, obligations all seem to creep in and limit the amount of daylight available for even a small garden plot. This year we're going to make another good go at it. Keep it watered, weeded, and fed. Though I guess worst case in August we can always go buy local veggies from the pros on Saturday mornings.

I wrote a little about our trip to the Farmer's Market last weekend on one of my other blogs, but I neglected to discuss our haul. My wife purchased two items which have been integral in my meals this week. First she bought some greens that ended up in a great Chicken Tortilla soup. Despite my body's current battle with leafy and hard to digest vegetables, they were great in the soup.