Rhode Island 100 mile

A few weeks ago, Josh and I went to Burlington VT to visit Toby, Kristen, Kira, and Trey.  We spent two wonderful nights eating, drinking, and visiting – and just having a good time.  Toby, knowing my love for chocolate and great bread, told me about a great bakery and a chocolate store right next door.  Both were REALLY good!  At the Red Hen Baking Company – you can sit at a very large window and watch them make the bread – very cool!  We picked up a pull apart seeded baguette – it was fabulous with the food that Kristen made us that weekend.  At Nutty Steph’s we tried a couple different chocolates – of course one of them was the caramel with salt.  It was different from the one we used to get at Cacao in Kittery Maine but really good all the same!

Before leaving for Burlington, Josh read about a place called The Alchemist – it serves its own beer and we had the sausage plate for a bit of an appetizer.  I can vouch for the sausage and pickles and Josh said the beer was quite good.  Dan Blakeslee, one of our favorite local artists, did some of the artwork for the Alchemist – check out the coaster.

When we arrived at Toby and Kristen’s, we had a great spread of cheeses, more sausages, and these fabulous lamb sandwiches on homemade foccacia bread.  I couldn’t stop eating!!  And that was just the first day.  Stay tuned for some more good eats from Burlington – including some fabulous pork!

…well, the raised bed are built, the landscape is blooming and things are happening here @RI 100 mile…here are some shots from this weekend:

Last year during all the rain, the vine that was growing on our cyclone fence that separates our yard from the neighbors died and started to rot from inside the mass. We decided to strip it off the fence, revealing an ugly, poorly constructed barrier between us and the neighbors. Luckily for us, our neighbors never liked the fence and vine  anyways and offered to split the cost on a new cedar fence. Our trusty handyman Wayne installed the new fence last Fall and to our surprise, it provided a new open space in our backyard that we didn’t think existed. After a winter of looking out there, we decided to build some new raised beds in the space that the vine once occupied. We priced out some material options and ended up building the beds out of some rough cut cedar that someone was selling here in Rhode Island. A couple days of work later, we now have some new beds to increase our veggie growing capabilities…we’ll be posting on what is going in them at a later date…

                                        -Josh

The old fence and vine:

The new fence and raised beds:

This weekend was the annual Southside Community Land Trust plant sale up in Providence. The Land Trust is a 3/4 acre farm smack dab in the middle of Providence that is an oasis of open space amid the concrete confines of the City. The proceeds from the sale go back into the Farm which then promotes educational programs about urban farming. The sale is quite an event- there were thousands of plants to be had with live music and merriment for all. We ended up walking away with two boxloads of plants for our own garden…below are some photos from our visit:

…sorry for the lack of activity on the blog- not that we haven’t been doing anything of note…we’ve got a bunch of posts to do, but just haven’t gotten to them yet. This past weekend was a flurry of activity- the Goddard Park Market opened for the season and the Pawtucket Market is getting ready to move to its summertime location. There were a ton of people out on Saturday, scooping up plants for their moms (we picked up a nice little bay leave tree for ourselves)…

…On Saturday, we had some family over for a nice little dinner that turned out more local than we thought it would. We had chicken from our winter CSA, carrots from Schartner’s, asparagus from the Goddard Market and the ever popular tart that I found in Suzanne Goin’s cookbook “Sunday Suppers at Lucques”. I’ve now made the tart two ways- one with bacon and shallot and the other with swiss chard and pine-nut currant relish…both are extremely good and cause near-riot hysteria whenever they are presented…so this time we made two of the swiss chard ones. We were able to get the chard at the market on Saturday and there was some Narragansett Creamery ricotta in there, but most of the other ingredients were not local- not too bad of an effort, though…sometimes we just can’t have everything as local as we would like!

                                           -Josh