life skills

We’ve been cleaning out the freezers to make room for some incoming elk and lamb, and we found several packages of  “soup bones.” They were far too meaty for the dogs, so I made a batch of stock. First I roasted them all off in a hot oven with three or four onions cut in...
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Seems we’re all still reacting to the Flanagan piece slamming school gardens. Here’s a piece from Civil Eats that quotes Booker T. Washington on the value of physical work. The contempt shown by so much of the middle and upper-middle classes for people who work with their hands is, I’m convinced, partly responsible for...
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Hmm. I don’t think being green is the problem here — seems like these couples have bigger issues. Another dumb lifestyle article from the NY Times. When Trying to Preserve the Planet Strains the Relationship – NYTimes.com As awareness of environmental concerns has grown, therapists say they are seeing a rise in bickering between couples and...
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While in some ways I hate to give Caitlin Flanagan any more web traffic for her flameball of an article about school gardens, the response has been very heartening. Here’s a link roundup: Red Herrings Are Not Dinner Food, or why Caitlin Flanagan is WRONG about school gardens | Oakland Local Mag writer: Alice Waters and...
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There’s a knife-sharpener guy who has been sitting out by the side of the road near the grocery store for a couple of months now. Every time I drive past Mountain Man Knife Sharpening, I think I should take my knives to him, and yesterday, when I saw he was in his truck, I...
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Tennis was my bête noire as a child. I took lessons, dressed in my proper white tennis skirt and tretorns, from the time I was about four until I was fourteen. And in all those years I could never hit the damn ball. It was a trial. My mother desperately wanted me to be...
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Walking around town this morning with Raymond, I noticed we’re in full sunflower season — every alley and garden and roadside is suddenly illuminated with sunny yellow flowers. The cosmos also did really well this summer — lots and lots of big banks of pink and white cosmos around town. I love this...
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When my stepmother Susan was here last week, we went mushroom hunting. It’s been an uncharacteristically wet summer, and we really cleaned up. We found this gorgeous big bolete, which was nearly entirely clean of maggots (not always the case with these big ones), as well as a bunch of smaller boletes. It was...
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We went on a little camping expedition this weekend, and it wasn’t until the afternoon of the second day that I managed to find any of these beauties. Boletus Edulis. Also known as penny buns, porcini, cep, and steinpilz (depending on which European grandparents you had …). I’d been finding plenty of other boletes —...
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Cooking in clay is one of those things that you read about in cookbooks and wonder what the fuss is all about — or at least I did, until my mother gave me this funny little pot one year for Christmas. I have no idea where she found it, it was an odd...
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