life skills

I have another gallon of real milk coming today, and because a gallon of milk a week is really more than I can use, I ordered this nifty cheesemaking kit from the New England Cheesemaking Supply Company. Last week I made yogurt from the fabulous unpasteurized milk and I was shocked at how fabulous...
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I’ve been in a frenzy of food preservation here at LivingSmall. Saturday I pulled and washed and cut and blanched and drained two six-gallon trash cans full of endive. I then wrapped the blanched endive in towels to squeeze out the water and sealed it in bags using my vaccuum sealer and froze them...
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Somehow we’ve managed to live a little too large here at LivingSmall, the debt-to-savings ratio has gotten itself upside down, and so we’re trying to cut back wherever we can. I’m the kind of person who buys pantry staples when I’m feeling existentially anxious, and so, in the spirit of economizing, I’ve found myself...
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Somehow the subject of canning is everywhere on the interenets, and it’s spawned a bastardized version of “Surfin Safari” inside my head. You’ve got a lot of time to think of things like this while waiting for water to boil. On the home front — I put up a couple of jars of marinated...
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I was showing my house to some visitors from LA last week, and Brooke noticed the jams and preserves lined up at the top of my pantry. “Do you know someone who makes those for you?” she asked. “I did that,” I said. “Really?” she seemed surprised, as if she’d never known anyone who...
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