domestic life

To wrap up home-cooking-week, I thought I’d give you all a little summary of the blogs I read most often. These are the ones that inspire my own home cooking, give me interesting ideas, send me off on projects, or that I find inspirational. The Slow Cook — I love this site — although...
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I don’t have a photo, because it didn’t even occur to me until this morning that the dinner I made last night was a good illustration of what we’ve all been talking about this week — eating at home is not rocket science. As you can tell from the erratic nature of mid-week blogging,...
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NPR has been running a series this week about how people are changing their eating habits during this recession and I’m finding it really depressing. So far, it’s all about how people aren’t eating out, or ordering in, but they’re eating prepared foods out of the frozen food aisle. They had a home economist...
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The sun has come back. We feel like pagans here in MyLittleTown, ready to thow a party and rejoice. We were not forsaken! The sun came back! It’s been light before seven in the morning and until nearly six at night. It’s like being let out of jail. And so, because the evenings have...
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So, the past few years my grandmother (via my aunt with whom she lives) has been sending family things for Christmas presents. This year I got a wonderful box full of many random things including a set of table linens that once belonged to Kate Dolly. Kate Dolly’s mother and my great-great-grandmother were sisters....
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My dear friend Nina, she of the miracle-twins who restored our collective belief that things might work out in this world, has had her fifth baby this afternoon. The first boy! He’s a big beautiful healthy boy, and she’s just fine, and now I’m slightly crazed to be here in Montana while they’re all...
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One of my projects for 2009 is to take up Bob del Grosso’s challenge — the Fanatic’s Proposal. I’m going to see how little food I can buy, how much of that food I can buy locally, and how much I can live out of my own garden, pantry, and freezers. So here’s the...
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It’s a recessionary January, and I came into this new year wondering how on earth my credit card balances has mushroomed like they have? With the state of the economy being what it is, and layoffs happening right and left, I find myself in a bad position. A position that all this LivingSmall stuff...
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This is my “new” Griswold cast-iron skillet and it’s changed the way I think about cast iron altogether. I’ve had a 12-inch Lodge skillet forever, and it’s great for searing meat or for big stir-fries, but it’s really heavy, and the skillet surface is sort of pebbly. This new skillet (which I got in...
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Yesterday was the Day of the Cabbages. Since Christmas, I’ve been strangely obsessed with cabbage — am I deficient in vitamin C perhaps? I wonder …. My last batch of sauerkraut fermented up just fine, but unfortunately, the plastic bucket in which I made it retained a whiff of the Mrs Meyers cleaner I’d...
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