other

As I noted last week, I’m taking up Bob del Grosso’s challenge — the Fanatic’s Proposal this year. 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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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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Finally! It was gorgeous today — 20 degrees, blue skies, and most important, almost no wind. I mean, a normal breeze, but not like the last several weeks where every time you go outside you feel like you’re getting punched in the head. So this afternoon Raymond-the-dog and I went up to Suce Creek...
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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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So, my post-Christmas mania has been getting rid of services I don’t need. I’ve been chafing at my cable bill for almost a year now — it went through the roof, nearly 90 bucks a month (I had HBO and all that). For a while I thought about getting rid of the premium channels,...
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After nearly a year of surgery and recovery and then blowing the achilles tendon repair, my vet and I decided to go for an exoskeleton solution. This is Owen in his very fancy orthotic device that the nice folks at K-9 Orthotics in Canada built for him. We made a fiberglass cast of his...
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There’s a pretty good article in the New York Times this morning about the way people are economizing on their food budgets. The shocking part, to me anyhow, is that the article cites several families who were eating out four to five nights a week. What? Perhaps I’m old, or cheap, or a misanthrope...
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My beloved Milk Lady recently sold her calves, so my weekly gallon of milk has been coming topped with a full quart of cream. Which is a lot of cream. This weekend, I had about a pint of cream left from last week when looking at my new delivery, and so, I decided to...
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It was seven degrees this morning and originally I was going to leave Raymond at home and go to the gym instead of going for a walk. It’s a block and a half to the gym, and warm in there, while walking the mile and back to the dog park was going to be...
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Using my cold frame as a refrigerator. But it works! Last night, I put the pot with the chicken in it outside in the cold frame for the night. The pot is too big for the fridge, it was in the high 30s last night and even now it’s only in the mid-40s. Really,...
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