Composting -- fascinating fun with vegetable scraps

Food and fun are not the only things that come out of my kitchen. In fact, there is also a lot of trash. When you cook a lot at home, you have much more than just take out boxes to dispose of. But veggie peelings, onion skins, that bit of leftover rice that I can never seem to finish all make their way not into my trash can, but into my compost pile.

Now before you start holding your nose and running, realize two things: 1, that it is a petite pile neatly hemmed in with chicken wire at a far corner of the yard, and 2, it's a mix of leaves and veggie stuff, so it's not like it smells like a trash can. But yeah, sometimes it does, and you don't really put your face that close to it, especially in August.

When I started seriously buying more veggies from the produce section instead of the can or the freezer, surprise (!), they come whole. So you have to peel them, remove seeds, ends and cores. My parents had a compost pile growing up, and so I was used to the idea.

But now that I have my own, it's like my own local version of Planet Earth. Don't need time lapse photography of the rain forest floor here, just my leftover jack-o-lantern, slowly caving and changing colors. Or old cabbage leaves that begin to rot in my crisper drawer and then seem to stay perfectly half-rotted for the longest time in the pile under a thin layer of Bradford Pear leaves. It's a fascinating ecosystem that I feed, and then in spring, it feeds me back, all dark and rich and dirt-smelling with only an occasional avocado skin or newspaper shard to recognize.

And the most amazing thing? The size deferential between the amount of stuff I throw in there (asparagus ends alone account for pounds of discards) and how much rich dirt I get out. The breakdown is amazing.

If you're interested in starting your own, anytime is the perfect time:

http://web.extension.illinois.edu/homecompost/building.html
http://eartheasy.com/grow_compost.html
http://gatheringinlight.com/2007/10/15/how-to-start-a-compost-bin-in-the-city-with-little-money/

Acorn squash made me do it

Well, it's happened. I KNOW there are 1000s of food blogs out there, and I KNOW that a lot of people do them exceptionally well.

But I want in ...

I am jumping into the crowded end of the pool that is food blogging, and I don't care. I love food, writing, eating, writing about food, writing about eating ... and well, there you have it. And my sister Courtney provided the title, "from my little kitchen." It is little, in all its 1960s glory (including the stove) but we produce some great eats, and we don't even miss our microwave.

So ...

Last night, I finally moved past Squash 101. That's beyond crookneck (common southern yellow) and butternut squash, and I moved into the land of those gourds that you thought were just for decoration.

Barbara Kingsolver and her chapter on pumpkins made me do it. Holly Herrick and her effusiveness about the squash available at the market made me do it. And frankly, Harris Teeter made me do it.

There was a cute little acorn squash that was in season. It was a white acorn, one of the only I could find at my James Island store that wasn't grown in Mexico but in the U.S. (but still a very long train ride away). And it was pale and generally manageable, like that quiet kid in the back of the classroom.

I split it open, saved the seeds for roasting, and set upon cooking the thing. I was roasting chicken, potatoes (an obsession) so why not roast it? I added a pat of butter, a tablespoon of brown sugar into each halved cavity, and then I got frisky. Well, it was Sunday night and yes, there might have been some wine in the picture.

I sprinkled 4-5 dashes of Peychaud's bitters on each half. Jon Calo of the Cocktail Club said I could cook with it, so let's see, shall we?

What resulted was delicious, not too sweet with a complex taste that I am warming up now as I write. It was a little fibrous, or stringy, as we say in North Carolina, but it was good. I promise there'll be more pics in the future, but for now, imagine a rounder version of a butternut squash, roasted. I trust you get the picture.