Locavore In Training

Heather's Note: My friend Penn lives in Canton (a section of Baltimore for the non-Maryland people) with his wife and has been learning to how to combine a desire to grow his own food and city living. When he isn't an urban "farmer", he works in IT and writes for blogbaltimore.com. I've asked him to share his experience here, to show another spin on local food. If I'm lucky, one day I'll convince him to share his award-winning white chicken chili recipe (mentioned below) with us.

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It's called a tale of two pots because that is what I started with when I first started my city garden and it also makes for a very catchy title!

It all started with my White Chicken Chili, and our discovery of how much better and cleaner cilantro is when it's home grown. We used to buy our cilantro in bunches at Safeway. It wasn't bad, it was just usually very dirty and not very potent so we always felt we had to overcompensate to provide taste. When we moved to our house on Essex Street, I was able to buy a couple of these little guys and put them on my retaining wall that separates us from our neighbors.

I filled both of these pots with some potting soil and planted basil, cilantro, green onions, and more basil. You can never have enough basil! The plants were very easy to take care of and after they initially sprouted, provided a better view in the backyard than the ugly gray cement.

It really wasn't hard work. Very easy to manage and tend to each and every item. The other advantage was that it was easy to cook around these herbs. If I have an over abundance of basil, I will take some and boil it in olive oil. This gives olive oil a hint of basil and it taste much better with bread and Parmesan. Excess cilantro and basil goes into salads and soups. Green onions always work out well with almost everything we cook. It was amazing how much fun and how easy it was to grow these things.

This obsession of growing my own foods didn't stop there. I wanted to do more. I wanted tomatoes, I wanted rosemary, I wanted to grow everything that was in my spice cabinet. I wanted to grow, and then dry, what I couldn't eat. I bought rosemary and lavender. I got mint from a friend. My herbs were multiplying on my wall. No longer did I carefully care for two pots but, in the same season, I now had 5. I allowed my cilantro to seed so that it could die down and then come back. It was awesome!

My next step was tomatoes...