LivingSmall

My Milk Lady has returned! The cows calved and had a nice rest, and once again I’m getting my recycled gallon jar of milk every week. She had to raise her prices because the price of hay and fuel have gone up so much, and although I assured her it was fine, I understood, I […]

Finally! A day of real progress in the garden. I was very surly yesterday morning — it was cold. Too cold and icy to get any garden work done. I was taking it personally — storming around doing my errands, grumping about the damp wind. Then, finally, about one, it warmed up and I managed […]

My friend Max was telling me about his in-laws’ declicious ham salad the other day at the party. He said it’s really addictive and one of the things he looks forward to after a family ham. Since I have a lot of ham left, the thought had been niggling in the back of my […]

I hosted Easter yesterday — sent out invitations and invited everyone I know to stop by — it was great fun, there were probably 30 or 40 people over the afternoon, luckily not all at once since my house isn’t that big. I did a big ham, cured and smoked by our local butcher, Matt. […]

Take one pint mason jar of leftover lentil/lamb/mushroom soup (made from leftover lamb braised with mushrooms), one pyrex half-pint dish of leftover braised cabbage/onion/carrot/tomato, and one of Matt’s Meat’s good homemade German sausages. Dump them all in a pot, stir, add enough water to bring to a soupy consistency and simmer until the frozen sausage […]

Funny the way synchronicity works — I’ve been thinking a lot about how skills like learning to knit, or sew, or garden, or cook — skills some of our mothers (or in my case, my grandmother) discounted as being the kinds of skills that keep a girl tied to a domestic existence that stifles other […]

It happens every year about this time. We start getting a little more daylight and suddenly things I put up months ago, and had no interest in, start appealing to me again.
I have tons of mint in my garden, and all through the growing season (which is long for mint, it’s both hardy and invasive) […]

My love of Joan Dye Grussow’s work, particularly This Organic Life, is well documented on this blog. Her experiences over the years growing and storing most of her own food was absolutely inspirational to me when I built my garden, and it’s still a book I go back to again and again.
This video has been […]

My milk delivery came yesterday. The thing with buying milk from a real cow is that it’s not always the same. This week I pulled nearly a quart of cream off the top of my gallon, and the cream is thicker than it’s been before. Almost like English cream — slightly lumpy. This might be […]

So, I’ve been buying raw milk from a local rancher since last fall — she shows up every Tuesday with a glass gallon pickle jar full of milk, with a nice layer of cream on the top. The cream has been getting thicker the past couple of weeks — I used to skim about a […]