Welcome to Serving Up Vermont, a food blog that explores healthy and affordable cooking with seasonal and local products.
Do you like the taste of old-fashioned, crunchy sour and half-sour pickles? At the Chubby Muffin Community Kitchen this week, we made a batch of these wonderful pickles using fresh, local cucumbers from Pomykala Farm. Here are a few steps from the process (from a batch I made ahead at home to bring in to sample):

Washing cucumbers and soaking them in cold water for an hour to get ready for pickling.
Our family looks forward to Thursdays at the Intervale all year.

We bring a picnic blanket, some fresh cut-up veggies and dessert, and then enjoy a picnic with American Flatbread slices and whatever else looks good (the pulled pork sandwiches from Bluebird have been delicious).

Almond sponge cake with fresh, local berries
Here’s an almond sponge cake that’s delicious with heaps of berries, honey, and freshly whipped cream on top. Use any berries you have…raspberries, blueberries, currants, you name it. (This is also delicious in the winter, with pears steamed in cider and ice cream).
On Tuesday, I taught my 2nd class at the Chubby Muffin Community Kitchen. Eleven participants made honey-sweetened raspberry jam with Adam's Berry Farm raspberries and we canned it together so everyone could bring jars home.

Meg visited Adam's Berry Farm recently, and has this to report:
I didn’t grow up in a farming family. My parents grew a few gnarled tomatoes each year and that was the extent of my agricultural experience as a kid. And yet, each July, we’d go out to the U-Pick blueberry farm for a few flats of berries.

Blueberries ripening in the sun
I’m excited to announce that community cooking classes are coming to the Old North End. On Tuesday night, I taught a pilot class on yogurt-making. It was a lot of fun to connect with neighborhood folks around cooking in the Old North End.
Homemade yogurt class at the Community Kitchen at Chubby Muffin
Here's a localvore update on wheat bran from Meg...

...Local wheat bran has arrived!

Rolled biscuits on the left; drop biscuits on the right.
Local strawberries are here! And what better way to enjoy strawberries than with easy, delicious cottage cheese pancakes?

Easy cottage cheese pancakes with fresh, local strawberries and yogurt
As promised, here are the recipes from Dalia’s Mexican cooking class. We had a great time, and hope to do another Mexican cooking class in the fall (perhaps mole, as numerous people have suggested).

Dalia's Mexican cooking class