Garden Soup

It’s takes about six months to make this soup. Start in the spring. Eat in the fall.

Step 1: In the spring, plant tomatoes, basil, parsley, leeks, carrots, zucchini, and maybe some onions.

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Orto Lessons Learned

How does your garden grow? It started out as a strange season and it stayed that way. A cold wet spring, followed by a few short weeks of blasting heat, then cool and wet again.
To be honest, I thought it was something we did.

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Foodbuzz 24×24: 25K Umbrian Challenge

Come over for dinner on Saturday night! And so the invite went out for a very local Umbrian feast, hosted by Foodbuzz. Corks popped, pasta was made, meat was grilled and a lot of wine was consumed. You should have been there!

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Insalata Caprese

Like proscuitto and melon, the marriage of a ripe tomato, bufala mozzarella and fresh basil, the insalata caprese, is a match made in heaven. And right now, today, in Umbria, with tomatoes and basil from our orto, it is the time and the place to be eating a caprese salad.

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Kitchen Garden Day

Next Sunday, August 22, is the first annual celebration of World Kitchen Garden Day. What should you do to celebrate World KItchen Garden Day? Sign up here. Host a party in your garden. Visit us in our garden. Eat a tomato. We’ll show those snack food people they don’t know who they are up against as we rise up, spade in hand and declare, “I am a Gardener!”

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Super Quick Tomato & Basil Sauce

Warning: For those in the North East US, suffering from a lack of tomatoes due to the tomato fungus, do not read this blog post, it will cause you undue pain and suffering. For the rest of us who have an abundance of tomatoes, read on! Our tomatoes are coming in quicker than we can…

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A Garden Tale

 For those faithful readers, you know that we share our orto with our friends from Portland, its in the heart of town so everyone feels free to comment on our efforts and its not really our orto, its Signor Bruski's orto and he just lets us use it. For anyone else just tuning in, well,…

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Orto Report

 It took us almost a week to get over to inspect ‘our’ orto. I think we were simply afraid to look. In case you don’t know or remember the whole saga of how we wound up as serfs working a garden in the center of our medieval village: click here. This year, our first order…

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