Andrea Catherine introduced me to Lindsay Jean Hard who wrote

Cooking with Scraps: Turn Your Peels, Cores, Rinds, and Stems into Delicious Meals

something I’m super passionate about and learning about. She blogs at this place called Food52, which I love reading and I get their emails it’s always exciting! I was just reading somewhere about broccoli stems were even more nutritious then the florets maybe we’re gonna learn more about nutrition too!

Well, i don’t necessarily have a nutrition background but there is a lot to be said as far as nutrients and great things in the peels and things that we tend to discard a lot! There’s benefits to not throwing our scraps away! 

Oh year I was loving he sugar peels looked awesome because I’m always trying to get more fruit and fiber in my diet and I think there’s a lot of fiber in the peel right?

Tell us a little about yourself.

My path to where I am now has been an interesting one

Like you said I got my masters in Urban Planning here at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. I worked for our local downtown development authority for a couple of years, so that was a solid 2 years to put masters to good use. Then my husband and I moved to Japan. 

The intersection of cooking and writing. We joined a CSA when we were there where we would walk down the street to the local grocery store and pick up a box of vegetables.

CSA learning process

every week walking into the store to ask

what is in my box

That’s where I first started thinking about cooking with scraps because I knew these farmers taking this time and energy to grow.

putting it all to great use

friends of ours from college

told us they were going to start

Real Time Farms.com

resource to find farmers near them and learn about their growing practices and connect with restaurants and see where those restaurants were sourcing their ingredients from

It was a really exciting time to be working for a start up

We were acquired by Food52.com

It’s a food and lifestyle website. I worked for them for 6 years

community management

started

Food52 Facebook Cookbook club

Food52 Facebook Baking Club

I wrote a lot and one of my columns was cooking with scraps

community based so I would hunt for recipes that people shared that found other use for scraps.

Food52 community

wanted to share that with a broader audience that’s where this cookbook came from. 

Wow sounds almost like a real life Julie and Julia and right along with the ups and downs. My mom just made this delicious stock out of the scraps of our carrot peels etc. 

it was so fun!

We had found a cute tiny grocery store we found on a preview trip to find an apartment. One of my husband’s colleagues introduced us to the owner and let him know we were gonna be there and would appreciate friendly faces!

I was shopping there and I saw these vegetables but I knew I didn’t have enough language skills to get signed up for CSA. They did have other produce.

Some of the things I really learned to love but others just never resinated with me

Yamaimo  Japanese Mountain Yam

it was a mountain yam and it was really slimy when you grate it and something I could not get past the texture so I would sneak it into other people’s boxes. The owner of the store just about fell over laughing, he said if there’s something you don’t want just tell us if you don’t like it!

There were a lot of different greens that I hadn’t been exposed to

 and then learned to love

• variations of bok choi


• imuzuma


• lotus root

That’s one of my favorite things now that I hunt out at asian markets to cook with.

What do you do with lotus root?

slice it show off it’s lacy patter saute it with a little bit of soy sauce.

Now that you’re back in Michigan can you add any of those things there?

I have not added many of those things to my garden

not great with starting with seed

starter plants most of the time

shizoh the herb

I grow them from seed almost every single summer

it’s a cousin of basil

just a little bit of a spicy bite then basil does but they’re similar.

Tell me about your first gardening experience?

I actually think it was in Japan for the very first time. We would walk around the neighborhoods and people would grow things in pots. 

Most people don’t have a ton of space but they would have a porch or a lānai and we were like we can do that!

We got a couple of essential window boxes on our patio and tried to grow a few things from seed. I don’t think anything was super successful, it got under our skin enough that when we got back from Japan

I think growing things from seed is difficult. Mike has the patience and persistent to see it through, by misting them lightly and pampering them. I like things that you just broadcast like Buckwheat!

especially with Michigan climate

can’t

How did you learn how to garden organically?

I have always been interested in sustainability and the environment has always mattered to me. It wasn’t something that I 

didn’t consciously

organic garden

it was more like I don’t want to put pesticides or chemicals on what we are growing

really just trail and error

moved back in 2010

raised beds a couple of years later. It’s been about 6 years of expanding our garden

Home and garden shop right downtown in Ann Arbor we really love.

Tell us about something that grew well this year.

The squirrels and chipmunks were our nemesis this past summer!

We lost a lot of our garden, we have 4 raised beds that are surrounded by raspberry bushes. The raspberries always do well with very little attention from us other then thinning them out, then we also have a number of rhubarb plants that do well too without interaction from us

different spot for tomatoes

that didn’t work out quite as well as I would have liked?

So what worked and what didn’t?

we have 4 garden boxes, one is much more sunny

It’s the perfect box for tomato, but we had had tomatoes there for a couple of years in a row

We haven’t done much more then amending the soil other then mixing in the compost we make, so we tried to shift entirely away from our 4 raised beds and put them on the side of the garage so they don’t get as much sun. 

I think they didn’t get enough sun.

I know exactly how that grows. IT’s tough sometimes because you have to do that rotation of crops but some things just fit some places really well. 

Is there something you would do different next year or want to try/new?

I haven’t thought too much about it yet

Cucumbers

I would like to get those back in the garden again

I love cucumbers in the past I love how prolific those tend to be

did lemon cucumbers

Let’s take a minute to thank our sponsors and affiliate links

Free Garden Course.com

 Free Organic Garden Course 

The Good Seed Company

Now Let’s Get to the Root of Things!

Which activity is your least favorite activity to do in the garden?

I don’t mind weeding at all

I like sitting there and picking out the weeds

I don’t like dealing with bug infestations mainly becauseI don’t have a ton of knowledge in that area. It’s been learning by trial and error 

It’s frustrating to see bugs and have to go back inside and start googling see if

• vinegar water


• hot pepper water

if that’s gonna work

I talked to Siri Jostad who has this awesome plant app. Yesterday I was talking to this interesting guy on farms, the bigger farm scale and he was saying if you have healthy plants you are not going to get any pests at all. He was talking about how having healthy plants will give you healthy soil and he was talking about sugar in the roots and more photosynthesis. I was curious about how it could work on a smaller scale.

I remember talking to people this summer that were saying their zucchini’s were gonna cost like 46$/lb by the time she’s added up all the time picking the bugs and beetles off.

I think its almost meditative

zone of a small

What is your favorite activity to do in the garden?

I would say picking and cooking with it for sure!

Do you want to share some recipes or tips for people with scraps or maybe something they might be surprised that they would say no way I could do that?!

I think the two most surprising recipe

banana peel cake

most people don’t think banana peels are edible but it does make a delicious cake

gardeners love coffee grounds

I like to cook with a lot of spent coffee grounds

In the cookbook I

using them in a nut butter add a nice crunchy texture to it

Food52

french silk pie

2 different ways

first to infuse whipping cream for the topping

crushed with some crushed chocolate cookies

That was another thing I saw was super surprising you were whipping up the liquid that came in the beans?

bean liquid is called aquafaba

It’s a really fun ingredient to play around with

cooking water from beans

dried

if you haven’t done it before I kind of recommend you start with the liquid that comes from a can of beans

behaves like egg whites

forms peaks

a couple of ways

In the cookbook to make a mayonaise

vegan mayonaise with it

could be adapted to play with and see it form peaks

But when you add sugar to it, it wouldn’t taste sweet

use it in baking

using it in brownies

brownie recipe isn’t vegan

fun to play

wouldn’t work for whipped cream

make meringues with it

sugar or cocoa powder

Yeah! It would not make whipped cream but you might want to add some sugar flavoring to make merengues if you take it straight up it would taste like

I have the strangest recipe, that you separate the eggs and you beet the egg whites and add them at the end and I always wonder who came up with the recipe idea?

I’ve always liked food and cooking but it wasn’t a big thing for me till we were in Japan

tiny kitchen

We didn’t have an oven we had a fish broiler draw

Adapting to cook instead of an oven or stovetop

I started documenting my cooking experiences and  experiments on a blog for the first time

cooking became a big deal

working at that start up and then also at food52 and being surrounded by people who are passionate about food and cooking

So fascinating!

What is the best gardening advice you have  ever received?

that’s a good one

we’ve mostly gone to that gardening store that I mentioned for advice on different organic products to try. IDK if I have asked for...