Recipes

Is your garden producing more vegetables than you know what to do with? Not sure what to do with that new vegetable you received in your CSA share? Looking for some seasonal inspiration? We have 50 years of recipes and resources to help. Read our seasonal eating guides and browse our recipes below. 

Fall Recipes

Make the most of harvest season and plan for the winter ahead with our fall recipes. 

Spring is here! Celebrate the end of winter by introducing lively spring greens and foraged edibles into your diet. Read our suggestions below: 

Harvest Preserves

Toki Oshima drawing By Roberta Bailey Another fall has come, time to give up the quest to keep the garden watered and weeded. Many of the plants have faded to golden hues already. The brown of skin fades. We welcome a sweater and jeans. It is a time of surrender, yet it can be the

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Harvest Kitchen Fall is Garlic Time

‘Phillips’ garlic grown by Roberta Bailey. Rob Lemire photo. By Roberta Bailey For me, the Common Ground Fair is a continuing conversation that winds through each day and back over 30 years or more. As a celebration of rural living, it draws together many creative minds, and I try to keep my days open enough

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Epicurean Delights

Toki Oshima drawing. By Roberta Bailey Have you been through the Exhibition Hall yet? Common Ground Fair’s Exhibition Hall is a hall of marvels. You walk from the hustle and bustle of the fairgrounds into the cool quiet sanctum of mellowed wooden timbers and high ceilings. The outside world falls away. You focus on rows

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Harvest Kitchen: Reliable Fall Recipes

Drawing by Toki Oshima. By Roberta Bailey On his show “A Prairie Home Companion,” Garrison Keillor once did a monologue about four people who went for a car ride in order to see the odometer turn to 200,000 miles. He took listeners through the town and out to the country, where our attention was turned

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Pepper Sauces

by Roberta Bailey It’s going to be a long, hot winter – or it can be if you spice up your winter fare with flavorful and fiery hot sauces from around the world.I’ve been interested in growing hot peppers and making condiments with them for a long time, but I was drawn to growing hot

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Harvest Kitchen Broccoli Bounty

English photo. by Roberta Bailey Around the end of June or the very beginning of July, the garden changes dramatically from a plot full of fragile seedlings and newly seeded rows into a full-blown summer garden. This year the shift occurred on July first in my garden. I was absent-mindedly walking through it on my

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Plant-Based Recipes

Whether you eat a strictly plant-based diet or you want to eat more vegetables, we have 30 years worth of plant-based recipes for you to browse!

Foods from Fruit and Nut Trees

By Roberta Bailey Maine is a rich state. We are rich in beauty, rich in art, rich in innovative people. We are colorful and full of local color. We color outside the lines. We think outside the box. We get cabin fever and turn the box into a high tunnel and learn how to laugh

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Go with Green

Swiss chard is among the greens that are great for braising. These bunches were being sold at the Belfast Farmers’ Market by New Beat Farm. English photo. By Cheryl Wixson Spring is the start of my favorite season of eating. I love the shift from eating root vegetables to just-picked, seasonal and local food. After

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Rhubarb

Rha rha for rhubarb! English photo. By Roberta Bailey I don’t grow rhubarb. My neighbor has a double row with more than 20 plants in it. I just cross the street and pick what I need. Walking back to my house, a bundle of red stalks in my arms, I get to take in the

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Harvest Kitchen Kale

‘Red Russian’ kale. English photo. By Roberta Bailey Kale is all the rage! It is rocking the health studies with its cancer fighting properties and the nutritional scene with its high levels of beta-carotene and other carotenoids, vitamin K, vitamin C, lutein and calcium. The red kales have invited the popular buzzword “anthocyanin” to their

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Fava Favorites

By Roberta Bailey Over the last few years, I have been discovering shell beans. Their diverse flavors and uses are well worth the time that I once considered to be the reason that I didn’t grow them. This year I have discovered fava or broad beans. I tried growing them once, about 15 years ago,

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Shell Beans

Drawing by Toki Oshima By Roberta Bailey For the first time in almost, 20 years of preserving food, I had a surplus of canned green beans and tomato sauce. I had planned on putting up a little less food as my son, Isak, was leaving for college. I hadn’t planned on my daughter having swim

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Health-Forward Recipes

Whether you’re looking to try something new or change your diet to promote a healthier lifestyle, we have a recipe for that. 

Harvest Kitchen: The Tricky Topic of Dieting

By Roberta Bailey I recently heard the results of a study comparing the success rates of three popular diets. They were about equally successful, and researchers advised going with the one that seemed easiest to stick with. The report was followed by a doctor’s personal commentary saying that losing weight comes down to the simple

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Recipe Videos

Food Preservation

Preservation, including fermenting and canning food, is the best way to make the most out of your harvest. With these recipes, you’ll be able to enjoy your harvests from the growing season during the winter months. 

Grape Leaves

Growing grapes provides not just fruits for wines and jellies, but leaves for stuffing as well. Illustration from Handbook of Plant and Floral Ornament from Early Herbals, by Richard G. Hatton, Dover Publications, N.Y., 1960. By Jean Ann Pollard The Norse tale of Leif Eriksson’s epic voyage across the Atlantic to “Vinland” circa 995 –

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Fermenting

Vegetables can be fermented in glass jars of various sizes, with rubber gaskets and wire bails, using non-iodized salt (such as sea salt or pickling salt) and non-chlorinated water. A scale is essential to get the right ratio of vegetables to salt. By Roberta Bailey One way that I coped with the interminable rains of

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Fermented Foods

Illustration by Toki Oshima. By Roberta Bailey When I first came to Maine, I lived in northwest Washington County, close to the Aroostook County border. As in all rural Maine towns, you drive at least a half hour to an hour to get anywhere other than your local gas station/convenience store, which also serves as

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Canning

by Jean Ann Pollard “Clostridium botulinum produces the serious neurological and potentially fatal disease commonly known as botulism.” (Fox, Nicols. Spoiled: The Dangerous Truth About a Food Chain Gone Haywire, HarperCollins, N.Y., 1997, p. 59.) Home canning has always been “a notorious breeding ground for a bacterium called Clostridium botulinum,” reports Nicholas Bakalar in Where

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Canning

A Brief History of Canning Canning is only about 200 years old. It began when Parisian Nicolas Appert set out, in 1795, to win a reward from Napoleon Bonaparte for preserving food by vacuum-packing. By 1804, he’d learned to boil meat and vegetables in jars, seal them with corks and tar, and soon opened the

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Meat-Based Recipes

Find inspiration for how to enjoy local, organic meat with these recipes.

Harvest Kitchen Column with Roberta Bailey

For over 30 years, Roberta Bailey has been a regular contributor to MOFGA’s quarterly publication, “The Maine Organic Farmer & Gardener.” She’s written a vast collection of personal stories mixed with tasty recipes.

Harvest Kitchen Kids in the Kitchen

Toki Oshima drawing By Roberta Bailey How strange not to be gathering for a celebration of Common Ground. For so many of us, the Fair has been a place to catch up with friends from afar, to listen to talks and learn how to do it all better, to eat great food, to sell or

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Harvest Kitchen Summer Heat

Toki Oshima illustration By Roberta Bailey When I was a child, my family went out to eat at a restaurant once a year, on Mother’s Day. We went to Howard Johnson’s. I always got fried clams. I know it was due to socioeconomics, but I also think people went out to eat less in the

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Harvest Kitchen Turmeric for Flavor and Health

Turmeric grown by students at the Troy Howard Middle School in Belfast and entered in the 2018 Common Ground Country Fair Exhibition Hall. By Roberta Bailey High tunnels have changed the cycles of Maine’s local food systems, extending our live food harvests to year-round bounty. Along with cucumbers, greens, sweet potatoes and tomatoes come the

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35 Years of Harvest Kitchen

Drawing by Toki Oshima By Roberta Bailey Happy Anniversary to me! This spring marks the 35th anniversary of my time writing this column. My entire adult life has evolved around the full flavors of homegrown food straight from the garden, pantry and root cellar. I have never thought of myself as a fancy cook. Instead, I feature

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Harvest Kitchen Cooking from the Garden

Stock up on ingredients for fall and winter recipes at the Common Ground Country Fair farmers’ markets. John Williams photo By Roberta Bailey Here we are at another September, another Common Ground Country Fair. We have persevered through drought and heat, wild thunderstorms and unexpectedly chilly nights. We have reveled in a cool breeze, cooled

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Harvest Kitchen Simple Gifts of Kindness

Toki Oshima drawing By Roberta Bailey These days “kindness” is the word that I hold in the foreground of my mind. It is on a slip of paper at the corner of my bathroom mirror, the base of my computer, and I envision it on the inside of my forehead. It helps me move through

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All Recipes

sweetcorn illustration

Harvest Kitchen: Farm-Grown Corn and Cornmeal

By Roberta Bailey The word “corn” denotes the staple grain of a region. In countries where wheaten bread is primarily eaten, wheat is their corn. In countries where rye is eaten most often, their corn is rye. In the Americas, our corn, our staple grain is maize. Maize is inextricably intertwined into our daily world.

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Freezing Food: Recommendations and Recipes

By Roberta Bailey Every food has an optimal way for preserving it. Much of that depends on how you like to eat each food. Berries can be canned as jam or in syrup, made into juice, dried as leather or slices, or frozen in bulk. Greens are better frozen than dried or canned, but maybe

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Harvest Kitchen 1

Heritage Fruit Recipes

Celebrating Fall Flavor and History By Roberta Bailey Early last winter, a friend of mine told me about an ancient tree on the farm where she used to live. It was a Northern Spy apple tree. She said it was the old strain of Northern Spy, better than what seems to be around now. Her

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Butter: A Wholesome Food

By Roberta Bailey Some of my most vivid childhood memories pertain to butter: making butter in kindergarten, Pilot crackers (4-inch-round crackers with flavor similar to oyster crackers) spread with butter at my grandmother’s house, buttering my hands to form popcorn balls, and making scrambled eggs with butter in seventh grade home economics class (I had

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Dandelion gnocchi crisping in black cast iron skillet

Dandelion Gnocchi Recipe

By Holli Cederholm Gnocchi is one of my favorite celebratory meals. I usually only make this potato-based pasta a few times a year, but it’s always for a special occasion: the arrival of an ingredient that I haven’t cooked with since the last time it was in season. In the fall, I mix up a

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Illustration of dandelion flower and greens

Wild Spring: Recipes for Foraged Greens and Roots

By Roberta Bailey When I was first farming in Maine, I befriended as many elders in my small rural town as I could. My partner and I would visit them in their extraordinarily warm houses, we always remembered to dress in layers, and we would ask a steady flow of questions about how to do

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