Damon Lee Fowler

While I've been out in the jungle we call the back garden, hacking away at the briars that have surrounded our sadly neglected greenhouse like Sleeping Beauty's castle, Lent has crept up on me.

For those who don't observe the Christian calendar, Lent is a penitential season of spiritual fasting modeled on the forty day fast that Jesus took to prepare for his ministry. Well, since he retreated to the wilderness for that one, in a way it seems appropriate that my Lenten observance began out in our own little wilderness.

Many who observe Lent focus on what they're not doing (most often what they're not eating and drinking). But a proper spiritual fast is less about the abstinence that marks it outwardly than the introspection and contemplation that ought to be going on inwardly. To that end, there's been a trend over the last few years to shift the focus from "giving things up" to "taking things on" as a spiritual discipline.

Perhaps rescuing our sadly neglected garden could be thought of as spiritual, but then again, so can everything we do. With that idea in mind, these days  Read More 

Over the course of my newspaper column's twenty year run, I but rarely developed original recipes for it. It wasn't laziness; it just wasn't cost effective. To fully develop a recipe from scratch requires a great deal of time and a lot more money than the column earned.

Still, every now and again, a column would inspire an idea for a dish that just wouldn't leave my imagination alone. And when, on those rare occasions, I gave in to the call and the recipe turned out well enough to make it into the column, it was always met with a hollow promise that I'd repeat it until it was perfected.

All too often, though, it got filed away and never made again.

Last year when panic hoarding created so many shortages of basic staples, just such an idea reared its little head and demanded to be noticed. Read More 

Before the season for asparagus passes completely, here’s another great stir-fry that brings it together with two other favorite spring flavors, young leeks and little red new potatoes.

This is the kind of thing my mother would make when I was growing up, since Stir-frying is one of her favorite cooking techniques. Not only is the technique quick, it does wonderful things for the fresh produce that is no further than her back yard. Read More