The Roaming Parkers blog is coming up on its 1-year anniversary, and in the past year, we have published a LOT of great content related to travel, adventure, conservation, and food!
Does that sound like a crazy random sampling of blog topics? Not to us, see all these topics overlap tremendously. Adventure involves travel and vice versa. And the more you travel and play outside the more you see of instances that Mother Nature or even just the world in general needs a helping hand (conservation) from you.
Food goes with all three of the other topics. Of course, you’ll need healthy, nutritious food to fuel your adventures. Traveling also means you will be exposed to interesting ethnic cuisines and a large part of conservation is protecting our ability to grow healthy animals and plants for food.
If you are a new-comer to our little online adventure, or if you just missed something the first time around, here is a recap of what we think is our best foodie writing from our first year!
Gardening
Someone once joked that growing a garden is the best way to spend 5 months of toil in order to save $2.14. There is some truth to that but the value of a garden goes way beyond saving some grocery money.
The produce can be as heirloom or not, as organic or not, as GMO or not as you like. You have much more control about the quality of produce that makes it to your table. Also, gardening – just the process of caring for living things – is therapeutic.
The Roaming Parkers usually have a garden growing, and we frequently blog and discuss aspects of growing, including…
- 9 must-have books for Mississippi Gardeners
- How to get started composting
- How to plant a survival garden
- How to deal with tomato cutworms without pesticides
Southern/Local cuisine
Growing a garden is a big part of life in Mississippi. Most everyone has at least a little garden with a couple of tomatoes or some herbs. The vegetables that are produced in our gardens then find their way into traditional southern recipes!
- The fine art of the tomato sandwich
- Cowboy candy – sweet pickled jalapenos
- 2 totally crazy uses for okra including Okra coffee!?
- 5 great things to do with New Orleans’ favorite vegetable – the mirliton
Of course, most of us are not vegetarians, so there are also a good number of blog posts about fish or steak or sausage…
- How to pan-fry fish
- Quick & easy red beans and rice
- The search for the best steak on the planet
- Steak with mushroom creole sauce
And coming from such an amazing local food tradition, I even had a few food culture shock anecdotes from when I was away at college…
- Food culture shock when you move to university
- Mr. Cook milkshakes were NOT as thick as a Blizzard
- A rib-shaped void
Exotic/experimental cooking
One of the most awesome things about traveling is getting to try new foods and see how different people work with the same old staple plants and food animals that we use here – but they end up with totally different meals!
We also like experimental cooking! Every so often we will bring home an intriguing sounding recipe and work it out for ourselves. Sometimes the results are amazing and sometimes they are only so-so, but it is always fun and educational.
- Peanut butter, jalapenos, and barbecue sauce
- Homemade spring rolls
- Kilimanjaro-inspired creamy leek soup
- Flax-chia crackers
Camp cooking
Of course, when you off camping or on some other adventure, you still have to eat – so part of the Roaming Parkers blog involves trying out various camp cooking ideas.
Lately, much of what we’ve been trying has involved a Dutch oven, such as…
Connect with us!
The thing that makes this food blogging thing so rewarding is the interactions we have with people from all over the world that we would otherwise never get to meet. Blogging is only fun and informative if YOU interact and engage.
Here are several ways that you can engage with the Roaming Parkers blog and make it better for everyone!
- Leave a comment on any current article. We shut down commenting on older posts to stop spammers from trying to sell sunglasses and Viagra on our website but commenting is enabled for all articles younger than 2 weeks old.
- Come find our Roaming Parkers Facebook Page, Like and Follow it, and Review our page with a 5-star rating and a blurb about what it is that you especially like about Roaming Parkers. We think that the more glowing reviews we get, the more people Facebook will spread our content to – and that’ll make the community better for everyone!
- While you are on Facebook, there is an active community of thousands of readers commenting on articles and sharing content related to travel, adventure, conservation, and food on the Roaming Parkers Facebook Group. You are welcome to hop over there and Join the group so that you can get all that content and interact with all those folks!
- Whenever you see an article from Roaming Parkers blog that you really like, send a friend a link to that article along with a little note about why you like it and why you think they would enjoy the blog too!
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