Interesting piece in this morning’s Billings Gazette about Hutterite Turkeys. The “Hoots” as they’re colloquially known, cut back on turkey production this year fearing that their premium birds wouldn’t sell in the recession, but they’re finding the opposite is true, and now there’s a run on Hutterite birds:
Cormac McCarthy, who is famously reticent was interviewed by the Wall Street Journal last week. It’s a terrific interview. Here’s one of my favorite parts:
“WSJ: What does your brother Dennis do? Is he a scientist?
CM: He is. He has a doctorate in biology and he’s also a lawyer and a thoughtful guy and a good friend.
WSJ: Brotherly conversation just turns to the apocalypse?
CM: More often than we can justify.”
Hi everyone — I’m on a bit of a blogging break still. There are changes afoot here at LivingSmall, and I’ll be back, but for now, I need a little time to rethink the blog, my schedule, etc …
You can keep up with me on Facebook (just sent me a Friend invite) or on Twitter at #cmf406.
Check out my new piece at Ethicurean.com. Pets vs. Livestock: Cracking Open the Myths about Backyard Chickens.
“Last spring I decided that this was the year I was going to finally get some chickens. On a snowy Saturday in March I brought home six tiny cheepers that I bought at my local ranch store in Livingston, Montana. Two of them died right off, which didn’t entirely surprise me: those fluffballs didn’t look like they’d really committed to life on the planet. … “ Keep reading by clicking here.
Still trying to figure out how to balance blog, freelance deadlines, family stuff, chickens, and my own writing. So, I’m the lame blogger. I promise I’ll be back soon. In the meantime, all is well, I’m just a little swamped.
Well, that was unexpected. I had a girlfriend in town last week, hence dropping off the blog, and then just as I was about to get back to it, I accidentally drowned my computer when a re-corked bottle of red wine came uncorked in my messenger bag. Dead. Dead dead dead.
And if your laptop dies on a Friday, in Montana, you can’t really get a replacement until, well, Tuesday afternoon at nearly four. However, I’m now a HUGE fan of Time Machine. I plugged in the new laptop (which is very shiny and aluminum and pretty), it asked if I wanted to migrate from Time Machine, I said yes, and 40 minutes later my desktop looks just like it did before. Restored! Really restored! I’m sort of shocked but quite pleased.
So, I’ll be back tomorrow. Now, I’m signing off, heading up to the cabin which is blissfully free of an internet connection, to enjoy a beautiful beautiful clear evening in the Paradise Valley. And then tomorrow I have to really get my act together — I’ve got some deadlines looming.
So the NY Times had a good little piece this weekend by Michelle Slatalla about digging out her grandmothers’ old recipes — they’d each lived through the depression, and were good cooks, and managed to keep everyone alive on beef barley soup for decades. She even punts a little bit at the end as she discovers that short ribs have gotten expensive, so she experiments with shin, because her grandmother was nothing if not thrifty.
I had to laugh a little — not at the article per se — but at the mere thought of learning anything about cooking from my grandmother. She hated to cook. She thought it was a total waste of time and in combination with her lack of kitchen hygiene, well she gave me food poisoning more than once during my childhood. We all learned early to treat visits to her house like trips to a third-world country: if you didn’t peel it or unwrap it yourself, then don’t eat it.
Now I love my grandmother dearly. She’s 97, and has all of her marbles (although she’s kind of bored being very old), and she taught me many important things — chief among them that a girl should always have her own money and a viable career. But cooking? Not so much …
However, I do love that people are looking back a little, getting past some of the pretensions of the past few years when it comes to food, and remembering that feeding ourselves well doesn’t require a pantry full of specialty products. Beef barley soup. Chocolate cake with a little coffee in it. Easy stuff.
So I realize I’m the last person in America to experience this, but I just got a new-to-me used iPod and well, I’m besotted. Many years ago, my Beloved Stepmother gave me an original 10GB iPod as a delightfully extravagent birthday present, and I’d been pretty happy with it, although I was always running out of room. Then when she was here a few weeks ago, she traded me the iPod Touch she’d replaced with an iPhone for an older MacBook — she’d never really used a Mac so I gave her an old one of mine to see whether she liked it before switching from a PC. Anyhow, the iPod Touch was cool, but it didn’t have any memory at all — I couldn’t get it to load podcasts or my new music and I grew increasingly frustrated, especially now that I’m working at home on the kinds of tasks that I really need music to concentrate on.
So I finally took the plunge and upgraded to a 120GB used iPod I found on Amazon. It was about half the price of a new one and the seller was great and sent it to me right away, in the box and everything.
This is where I sound like a geezer because 120 GB!? That’s more memory than I think every computer combined that I owned for the first 20 years of my working life. That’s a LOT of memory.
And so I’ve been loading CDs onto it since it arrived. CDs that I haven’t listened to in a long time. CDs that I missed. I’m a huge fan of Shuffle, and the idea that I can have all my music in one place, and set it going, and it’ll just shuffle around for hours. Love it. Plus, Apple finally fixed the problem with classical music — for a long time the albums didn’t sort right — the movements were all out of order. It was a gigantic pain in the neck.
So here I am, with my shiny new toy, that was kind of extravagant, but sometimes, even when money is tight, it’s worth it for something that will make your everyday life so much more pleasant.
I’ve got a deadline this week, so blogging will probably be light, and since the temperature hasn’t gone above thirty since Friday, I thought perhaps a recpie for potato soup might be in order. There’s just about nothing cheaper, it’s dead simple, and infinitely variable. The basic recipe is, of course, Julia Child’s:
Really. That’s it. Peel and cut up the potatoes. Chop the onions or leeks. Melt the butter or oil in a pot and saute the leeks or onions until they’re soft. Add the spuds, salt, and water to cover. Cook until the potatoes are falling apart, and either mash with a potato masher, or pureee with a food mill or immersion blender. Sometimes I add a carrot or two to the soup, I like the sweetness and color. Also, a clove of garlic or some thyme can be nice as well.
Variations, here are a few variations I like. I add these after pureeing the soup, so that there’s some interesting texture:
This is such a delicious, cheap and easy soup that there’s no end to the experimentation you can do with it. We had some last week with a fresh loaf of No-Knead bread and there were leftovers, so I think tonight we’ll finish it off, with some sort of variation. Warm soup on a cold nigh. Yum.
It’s supposed to go down into the single digits tonight, so this afternoon, despite the fact that it was only 25 degrees out, and snowy, I got the storm windows out of the shed, and put them up.
Every year I forget what a colossal pain in the ass they are. I replaced all the old windows in my house except for those in the living room. They’re really old double-hung windows, so old that the glass is wavy, and I just fell in love with them. So I kept the clunky old wooden storm windows that go with them, and there I was, on a ladder, cursing and banging at them with a hammer to make them fit. Ugh.
But now they’re up, and the storm-door insert is in my screen door, and the house is feeling all cozy and battened down for winter.
It’s supposed to go back up into the 60s next week, so I buried the garden in straw and covered it in plastic. I’m hoping to keep at least the hardy greens alive. I decided this summer that what I really love are the spring and fall crops, I’m not so much for the mid-summer heat crops, and I’d hate to lose all my greens.
We also got the chickens stet up with a (ridiculously expensive!) heated base for their water unit, and a 100 watt light bulb to heat the coop. They sort of hate the light bulb — it goes against their urge to roost someplace dark in the evening, so I ordered a red heat bulb for reptiles. However, tonight they’re going to have to sleep with the lights on — it was 16 degrees outside this morning when I got up, and 28 degrees inside the coop (I’m a little obsessive about remote-control thermometers). So if it goes down to 0 tonight, it’ll only be about 10 degrees in the coop, and that’s too cold. We’ll have to see how they do … I hope I don’t wake up to chicken-sicles tomorrow (or frozen eggs!) …