Category Archives: domestic life

Clothesline Love …

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IMG 0253 300x225 Clothesline Love ...
Although it’s snowy today, it’s been in the sixties all week, which means I can start drying clothes on the line again. I’ve written before about my clothesline love, and I’m always surprised by the number of people who object to clotheslines on principle. I really don’t get it. When I moved in, my house, like most houses in town, had a huge clothesline made from plumbing pipe that was set into about four feet of concrete below ground. We have famously strong winds here in Livingston, and the legacy clotheslines were built to withstand it. I had that clothesline cut down because it was right in the middle of the backyard, and people kept bonking their heads on it.

When I decided I wanted a new clothesline, I splurged on this one by Versaline: the Disappearing Slimline Clothesline. It was expensive, but I’ve been using it steadily for four years now, and it’s held up beautifully. It’s a great clothesline for small spaces, because you can fold it back against the wall when you’re not using it. I leave mine up pretty much all the time, since it’s in a spot where not much else happens in my yard. The other key to using the clothesline a lot is that it’s in a convenient spot — my washer is in the basement, and the line is just outside the basement door.

I use my clothesline all the time, and my sweetheart teases me a little bit about my internal rules for hanging clothes. I like to hang like items together, all the shirts in a row, with their arms hanging down (otherwise you get weird bumps on the shoulders of your shirts, makes you look like you’re shrugging), all the pants in a row, and the cloth napkins, well, that’s a whole line to itself. I like the order to it. And if you’re worried about the neighbors seeing your “smalls” as my English friend Sabrina calls them, just be sure to hang them on the inside where they can’t be seen. There’s no reason a clothesline has to be unsightly.

For me, clotheline love isn’t just about the energy saved. There’s nothing better than sheets that smell like sunshine and breeze. As far as towels go, I leave a couple of them crunchy for the sweetheart who likes them that way, the rest I toss in the dryer for ten minutes to fluff, then hang on the line. It’s one of the easiest ways to save energy, using a clothesline, and although I try not to preach here at LivingSmall, I have to say, that it’s blog policy to encourage clothesline use.

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Go-To Recipes?

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Go To Recipes?
So all this talk about cooking, just ordinary cooking, has gotten me thinking about go-to recipes, the ones you rely on and can do without really thinking. For Michael Ruhlman it’s a roast chicken. Which I’ve got to second. I use Marcella Hazan’s “recipe” which is nothing more than a roast chicken with a lemon stuck full of fork holes inside it. The lemon does wonders.

I’m having the girls over for Oscar night on Sunday, so I’ve been thinking about what to cook.There’s going to be a bunch of us (the Sweetheart is fleeing to his cabin, not a fan of pop culture is he) and we’re all going to be talking on top of one another and swilling wine, so I’m thinking something simple. I’ve got a couple of big roasts in the freezer — I know there’s at least one pork shoulder down there, and a chuck roast, but I might wind up turning to an old favorite, penne with vodka sauce. It’s a great party dish because it holds pretty well, you can make it in enormous quantities, and I’ve never fed it to anyone who didn’t really like it. With bread, and a salad (I’m thinking the marinated beet and grapefruit salad from Urban Italianby Andrew Carmellini.

The penne vodka recipe I use (well, I think I’ve memorized it by now) is from one of the first books I ever worked on, back when I was a starving editorial assistant in New York: The Glamour Food Book, now sadly out of print. It was a collection of recipes that Glamour Magazine pulled together and reprinted, most of which were fast, easy, and reasonably cheap since their target market was young working women who were just starting out. I still have it, and I still cook from it.

So there’s a thought. A mainstream fashion magazine in the 1980s that had recipes, for real food, for food you’d cook for a little dinner party, or to feed yourself on an evening after a long day at work. And it wasn’t considered “cooking from scratch” or anything exotic. It was just cooking. It was just what you did, especially if you were young, and didn’t have much money, and wanted to entertain. Hmm. No wonder I’m such a dinosaur.

So readers, what are your go-to recipes? The ones you use when you don’t want to think about a recipe. When you just want to cook something you know you like, and that you know your friends and family like?

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Eat Real Food

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grocery bag 134x150 Eat Real Food

I’ve read several articles in the last few days that have me all het up about the food thing. There seems to be a new and annoying meme out there, that eating real food will make one a “slave” to one’s kitchen. That somehow, “cooking from scratch” is so difficult and so time-consuming that no one can really do it. It’s just too hard.

Well maybe it’s too hard if you’re being an obsessive yuppie about it. People, grow some common sense. Exhibit A is this article in the Sacramento News Review, “Fast vs. Food: How the sustainable-food movement drove one busy family to the brink and back again.” Like a number of articles on this topic I’ve seen lately, the author seems to take an all-or-nothing approach. Either they’re making all their own bread, pizza dough, eating only from CSA boxes and going to the Farmers Market or they’re eating microwave meals from Trader Joes. Or then there was this one, featured on CNN.com, “An Inconvenient Challenge, Eat ‘Real Food’ For a Month” in which Jennifer McGruther, food blogger at The Nourished Kitchen is so restrictive about her definition of “real food” that she has people throwing out everything in their pantries, including dried pasta, and flour — she’s telling people to grind their own flour for goodness sake.

People, this is not helping.

While I realize that part of the appeal for the media is that there’s a meme to be driven — “eating real food is just too hard!” it’s also being driven by the sort of obsessive, perfectionistic, “lifestyle-driven” behavior that gives the whole food movement a bad name. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing. It can be whatever you can do. I was so aggravated that I emailed my friend Nina, who has five kids, and who cooks them dinner every night because well, we’re midwesterners, we cook dinner. That doesn’t mean I haven’t been at Nina’s any number of times when we’ve ordered pizza (although her kids don’t like the local pizza, which is sort of amusing). Nina’s response was:

I’m just sick of a certain sector of privileged Americans over-thinking and over-classifying everything. Just cook for your kids and cook with your kids whenever possible. Go to the farmer’s market and buy organic when you can. Do what you can because you want to not because you are nailing yourself to the Cross of “slow, organic, homemade, gourmet” or whatever kind of food. My kids usually get organic but I buy bagged stuffing sometimes, instead of pulling my own bread. I make gravy but then serve frozen green beans. Who cares!!!!

Here’s the deal folks. It’s not that complicated. As Michael Pollan keeps repeating ad nauseum “Eat real food. Mostly plants. Not too much.” Go to the grocery store and buy real food. You know, vegetables, pasta, meat, milk, whatever … Avoid things in shiny packages. Buy organic if you can. Buy good meat if you can – -meat that hasn’t been in a feedlot or an industrial packing plant. Why would you buy a frozen pasta meal when it takes just as long to cook some noodles and saute some veggies with chicken or fish or a little meat? I don’t get it. Our parents cooked us dinner every night, and did dishes, and it wasn’t some dreaded life sentence. It’s just dinner. Cook with your kids. Have them help with the dishes — remember chores? Chores aren’t a bad thing.

And sure, if you want to pull some stunt, go ahead. But don’t confuse stunt cooking with ordinary, everyday, cooking cooking. It’s just cooking people, it’s not rocket science.

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New Directions at LivingSmall

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what to do with LivingSmall. While the practical posts on cooking, gardening and chickens will, by no means be going away, the focus will be shifting a little bit.

There’s been a lot of discussion chez LivingSmall about the recession/depression, and how it’s not going away. Every morning, the newspapers are full of stories about “recovery” and no one seems to be discussing the fact that we can’t go back, we can’t have a recovery that is predicated on the same boom-and-bust cycles fueled by easy credit and that aren’t backed by anything real, in particular, by jobs that pay a living wage. It’s not just manufacturing jobs that are disappearing anymore. At Cisco, all of us in tech writing were watching our jobs go to India, or Ireland, or Israel, or anyplace else where people had decent English skills and lower wages (and usually government health care).

I’m also interested in the national conversation about what exactly constitutes work. I’ve wanted to freelance for ages, so I’m pretty excited about not having a “job” anymore. However, I find the national discussion about what constitutes work, and what constitutes a job very disturbing. You would think if we’re trying to reboot our economy, we’d want to create an environment that’s hospitible to small businesses and entrepreneurs, but in fact, we’ve done just the opposite. With the Democrats caving on health care reform, and leaving all of us who are self-employed or working for small businesses hung out to dry, we’re all at greater risk of medical bankruptcy. We can’t buy into unemployment insurance even if we wanted to, and without “employers” we pay 15% Social Security tax instead of the 7.5% one pays when working for an “employer.” All of which was enough to keep me out of the freelancer pool until I was forcibly thrown into it.

And so now what? The big corporations are steadily throwing more and more American workers overboard, credit is tightening, and no one is addressing the reality of what a real recovery might look like. There’s a big opportunity here. We could actually start to rebuild along more sustainable lines. And what intrigues me, and what we’re going to be exploring here some at LivingSmall is — what might that sustainable recovery look like? Is there a real chance for us to think about our lives and livelihoods in a more creative way? Can we create a discussion about changing our lifestyles that posits a world in which less stuff leads to more freedom for us all? Readers? What’s your experience been? How has the recession inspired you to make changes you’d maybe resisted, but that you’re finding fulfilling?

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Half a cow and ten chickens

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Here’s an interesting article about buying meat in bulk, including practical tips for those of you who might be interested but don’t know where to start.

The Seminal » Food Sunday: I’ll take half a cow and ten chickens please.

We’re lucky here in Montana — not only is it pretty easy to find a rancher who will sell you part of an animal, we’re one of the few states that still has small local slaughterhouses. Big Ag has managed to kill them in most other states — I have a friend in Colorado who would raise cattle for her family, except that she has to send them to Kansas to be slaughtered, and they have to go to a big feedlot. Here we’ve got some great local slaughter and butcher operations, in part because of out-of-state big game hunters who need their meat cut and packed. We bought a pig in August, and have half a lamb coming sometime this week. We’ve also got elk from one of Chucks’ friends, and another friend of his gave us several big roasts cut from their own cattle. You need a freezer, but if there’s one foodie thing I can absolutely recommend, it’s buying meat from a source you know. You keep an animal out of the industrial food system, you get nice clean delicious meat and generally save some money over what buying organic meat costs you in the grocery store.

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