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	<title>LivingSmall</title>
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	<link>http://livingsmallblog.com</link>
	<description></description>
	<lastBuildDate>Fri, 12 Mar 2010 19:01:22 +0000</lastBuildDate>
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		<title>Hybrids vs. Open-Pollinated Seeds, Read the Labels</title>
		<link>http://livingsmallblog.com/2010/03/12/hybrids-vs-open-pollinated-seeds-read-the-labels/</link>
		<comments>http://livingsmallblog.com/2010/03/12/hybrids-vs-open-pollinated-seeds-read-the-labels/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 12 Mar 2010 19:01:22 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>cmf</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Making]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[gardening]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[gardens]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[seeds]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://livingsmallblog.com/?p=2221</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[
It&#8217;s that time of year, when we&#8217;re all buying seeds, and I just want to put a plug in for reading the labels. Seed saving is something I only came to a few years into keeping a garden, and I pretty much just save tomato seeds at this point, but with Monsanto being investigated for monopolizing seed stocks, it seems that seed saving is one place that backyard gardeners can really have an impact. 
But the thing is, you can&#8217;t save seeds from hybrid varieties. So when you&#8217;re perusing the seed racks at  your local garden stores, if it&#8217;s something relatively easy to save yourself, like tomato or squash or herbs, you&#8217;d do well to check the package. Seed Savers Exchange is a great source of heirloom varieties that individual gardeners have saved themselves, and they&#8217;ve got some good info on how to save your own seeds as well. Personally, I find that half the fun of having a backyard garden is growing things I can&#8217;t buy in the store. For the last few years it&#8217;s been interesting Italian greens and veggies from Seeds of Italy, and this year I&#8217;m experimenting with Asian greens I got from Evergreen Seeds. [...]]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://livingsmallblog.com/2010/03/12/hybrids-vs-open-pollinated-seeds-read-the-labels/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Potato-Chipolte Love &#8230;</title>
		<link>http://livingsmallblog.com/2010/03/11/potato-chipolte-love/</link>
		<comments>http://livingsmallblog.com/2010/03/11/potato-chipolte-love/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 11 Mar 2010 18:01:18 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>cmf</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Making]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[food]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cooking]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://livingsmallblog.com/?p=2217</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[
I had to go to Bozeman yesterday to do some errands, and I had lunch at my favorite little restaurant, La Tinga. There aren&#8217;t many things I miss from California, but taquerias and Asian food are among them. I had about ten minutes before my haircut, so I ducked in for a taco or two, including one that had chicken and potatoes and a mildly-hot red chile sauce. It blew my mind. I hadn&#8217;t really expected it to, but something about the plain mealy potatoes and the chiles, with a little chicken in the mix, it was delicious. On the way home, I was still obsessed with that flavor, so I broke out the Diana Kennedy and Rick Bayless cookbooks, and went to work. I wound up pretty much following a recipe from Rick Bayless&#8217;s Mexican Kitchen: Capturing the Vibrant flavors of a World-Class Cuisine for Smoky Shredded Chicken and Potatoes with Spicy Roasted Tomatoes. Well, as much as I&#8217;m capable of following a recipe anyhow. 
Here&#8217;s what I did: chopped and sauteed an onion and a couple of cloves of garlic, then added a can of tomatoes, about four chipolte chiles with a little bit of their sauce, a [...]]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://livingsmallblog.com/2010/03/11/potato-chipolte-love/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>To Can, or Not to Can &#8230;</title>
		<link>http://livingsmallblog.com/2010/03/10/to-can-or-not-to-can/</link>
		<comments>http://livingsmallblog.com/2010/03/10/to-can-or-not-to-can/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 10 Mar 2010 23:49:14 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>cmf</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Making]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[food]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[canning]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[pickles]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://livingsmallblog.com/?p=2213</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[
Jeez oh Pete, so spring is here, and it seems to have brought along the first &#8220;canning is dumb&#8221; article. This year it&#8217;s at Slate, where last summer, it was at  Salon. I&#8217;ve addressed this subject once already,  last summer, when Salon published a ridiculous piece &#8220;debunking&#8221; the &#8220;myth&#8221; that canning will save you money, but I guess if they&#8217;re going to write the same article over and over, I&#8217;ll have to keep throwing in my two cents. 
Canning is useful if you have an excess of something. It&#8217;s a method of preservation. If you want to make a hobby out of it, and get all &#8220;lifestyle-y&#8221; about it and spend too much money and annoy your friends with your esoteric jams, then that&#8217;s your business. The rest of us will just keep on keeping on.  
Because there are a lot of us out here who still can things because they&#8217;re there. I have a yard with rhubarb plants, plum and cherry and apple trees, raspberry bushes and a big veggie garden. I like my own food better than I like most other people&#8217;s food, and I seem to be incapable of throwing food out. So I [...]]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://livingsmallblog.com/2010/03/10/to-can-or-not-to-can/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>2</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>&#8220;How I Fell In Love with a Fish&#8221;</title>
		<link>http://livingsmallblog.com/2010/03/10/how-i-fell-in-love-with-a-fish/</link>
		<comments>http://livingsmallblog.com/2010/03/10/how-i-fell-in-love-with-a-fish/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 10 Mar 2010 16:41:29 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>cmf</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Thinking]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[sustainability]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[aquaculture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[fish]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[wetlands]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://livingsmallblog.com/?p=2208</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[
Although I have mixed feelings about TED, which too often seems very self-congratulatory, this TED talk by Dan Barber, of Blue Hill Farms, is both hilarious and really informative. Veta la Palma is a completely innovative fish farm in the south of Spain, where they&#8217;re growing fish for restaurants in a natural, clean, reclaimed wetland. Figuring out how to farm fish is crucial for those of us who want to continue eating fish, since we&#8217;ve drastically overfished the oceans, but Veta la Palma has also reclaimed a wetland to do what wetlands are supposed to do, cleanse water.

]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://livingsmallblog.com/2010/03/10/how-i-fell-in-love-with-a-fish/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Lit News and Reading Roundup</title>
		<link>http://livingsmallblog.com/2010/03/09/lit-news-and-reading-roundup/</link>
		<comments>http://livingsmallblog.com/2010/03/09/lit-news-and-reading-roundup/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 09 Mar 2010 20:16:14 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>cmf</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Thinking]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[books]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[poetry]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://livingsmallblog.com/?p=2201</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[
I&#8217;m sure no one will be surprised to learn that my major decorating theme around here is piles of books. I have bookshelves, and even a wee library in my basement office, but the books, they still seem to pile up. 
So here are a few things I&#8217;ve been reading lately: 
This terrific article about how the David Foster Wallace archives found a home at the Ransom Center in Texas.
We had our first glimpse into Wallace’s creative process in 2005 with our acquisition of the papers of Don DeLillo. Unexpectedly, the archive included a small cache of letters between Wallace and DeLillo, a correspondence initiated by Wallace when he was struggling through his colossal novel, Infinite Jest. Wallace’s letters show a writer who was deliberate, funny, and often uncertain, but most clearly, they show a writer who took painstaking care with his art.


The Boston Globe has Adrienne Rich on Elizabeth Bishop&#8217;s The Complete Poems, 1927-1979. Of Bishop, Rich says:
In particular I am concerned with her experience of outsiderhood, closely—though not exclusively—linked with the essential outsiderhood of a lesbian identity; and with how the outsider’s eye enables Bishop to perceive other kinds of outsiders and to identify, or try to identify, [...]]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://livingsmallblog.com/2010/03/09/lit-news-and-reading-roundup/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Nori Lunch</title>
		<link>http://livingsmallblog.com/2010/03/09/nori-lunch/</link>
		<comments>http://livingsmallblog.com/2010/03/09/nori-lunch/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 09 Mar 2010 18:15:49 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>cmf</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Making]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[food]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[brown-bagging]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cooking]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[lunch]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://livingsmallblog.com/?p=2192</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[
I&#8217;ve been obsessed with nori rolls lately. I got the idea from Cathy Erway&#8217;s delightful book, The Art of Eating In: How I Learned to Stop Spending and Love the Stove, which I reviewed for Bookslut about a month ago.  After this long winter, I&#8217;ve been craving crunch, and veggies, or maybe there&#8217;s something in the seaweed that my body craves, but it&#8217;s been nori rolls for lunch for a couple of weeks now. 
 The thing is, nori rolls are actually quite easy. I like the rice warm, so I either make up a fresh batch in the rice cooker, or simply scoop out about a rice-bowl&#8217;s worth of leftover rice, add some rice vinegar, and heat it in the microwave. Then spread it out on the nori sheet, and add whatever is around. For a while, I was eating leftover steak, cucumber, and scallion nori rolls. Lateley, I&#8217;ve been making a little salmon salad with my near-miss Costco salmon then adding a few slices of my homemade pickled oyster mushrooms (sadly, I&#8217;ve run out of these. Thank goodness spring is on its way), some cucumber for crunch, slices of pickled ginger, and a generous sprinkle of chopped [...]]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://livingsmallblog.com/2010/03/09/nori-lunch/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>2</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Garden Fencing</title>
		<link>http://livingsmallblog.com/2010/03/08/garden-fencing/</link>
		<comments>http://livingsmallblog.com/2010/03/08/garden-fencing/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 08 Mar 2010 20:03:31 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>cmf</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Making]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[chickens]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[gardening]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://livingsmallblog.com/?p=2183</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[
Ever since last fall&#8217;s episode of food poisoning, I&#8217;ve been meaning to finish enclosing the garden. However, I had to wait for the ground to thaw, and well, the freelance life means that finances have been just tight enough that I didn&#8217;t want to go out and buy copper pipe. But this weekend, I finally got it done. I tried to come up with some solution other than more expensive copper, but since I&#8217;d done the rest of the trellis/fences that way when I built the garden (this is summer number eight &#8212; how did that happen?), well, I just couldn&#8217;t bear the thought of two beds edged in pvc when the rest uses copper. So I sucked it up and spent the money. 
The trellis/fencing is 1/2 inch copper plumbing pipe, and because I don&#8217;t know how to weld, I used duct tape for the joints. It was really easy to  put together, and with the pipes jammed a foot or two into the ground inside the raised beds, and lashed to one another with zip ties, they withstand the wind nicely. So this weekend I enclosed the last two beds on the end of the garden, and [...]]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://livingsmallblog.com/2010/03/08/garden-fencing/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Hoop House</title>
		<link>http://livingsmallblog.com/2010/03/08/hoop-house/</link>
		<comments>http://livingsmallblog.com/2010/03/08/hoop-house/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 08 Mar 2010 18:55:15 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>cmf</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Making]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[gardening]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://livingsmallblog.com/?p=2177</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[
It was a big weekend of gardening here at LivingSmall. The temperatures were in the mid- to high-fifties, and so I decided to see if I can jumpstart the season a little bit. I&#8217;m deathly tired of eating other people&#8217;s vegetables. I want greens of my own again. 

So I built a little hoop house over one of my beds. I bought four ten-foot lengths of 1/2 inch pvc pipe, and since wind is a perennial problem here, I ran one lengthwise, with the other three crosswise. I planted some arugula, spinach, Japanese mustard, mache, and escarole &#8212; just half-rows for now. I&#8217;m waiting on a bunch of Asian vegetable seeds that I ordered last week, and I thought I&#8217;d try succession planting as well. 
I watered everything, covered it up, and now I&#8217;m resisting going out to peek. Nothing would have happened since yesterday. I know that. I&#8217;m a grownup. I&#8217;ve been gardening for a while. But I still want to go peek. Sigh. Here&#8217;s hoping we have greens in a couple of weeks. 
]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://livingsmallblog.com/2010/03/08/hoop-house/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Chickens and Dogs</title>
		<link>http://livingsmallblog.com/2010/03/08/chickens-and-dogs/</link>
		<comments>http://livingsmallblog.com/2010/03/08/chickens-and-dogs/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 08 Mar 2010 16:55:07 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>cmf</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Living]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[dogs]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://livingsmallblog.com/?p=2173</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[
It&#8217;s not quite the lions and the lambs, but pretty close &#8212; we&#8217;ve had a big breakthrough in the domestic realm this week. The dogs seem to have developed the ability to mingle with the chickens without killing them. It&#8217;s a fragile truce, and one that requires close supervision, since the poor bird dogs are fighting generations of breeding that tells them to get the bird, but so far, we&#8217;ve had several episodes of domestic harmony. Which makes gardening much easier, as the compost heap is inside the chicken run. 
At any rate, I&#8217;m very proud of my boys. Such self-restraint. It was so exhausting that Raymond (the larger dog) had to come inside and take a nap afterwards. 
]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://livingsmallblog.com/2010/03/08/chickens-and-dogs/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>1</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Go-To Recipes?</title>
		<link>http://livingsmallblog.com/2010/03/05/go-to-recipes/</link>
		<comments>http://livingsmallblog.com/2010/03/05/go-to-recipes/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 05 Mar 2010 20:07:05 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>cmf</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Living]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[domestic life]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[small town life]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cooking]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://livingsmallblog.com/?p=2169</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[
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&#8217;s a roast chicken. Which I&#8217;ve got to second. I use Marcella Hazan&#8217;s &#8220;recipe&#8221; which is nothing more than a roast chicken with a lemon stuck full of fork holes inside it. The lemon does wonders. 
I&#8217;m having the girls over for Oscar night on Sunday, so I&#8217;ve been thinking about what to cook.There&#8217;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&#8217;re all going to be talking on top of one another and swilling wine, so I&#8217;m thinking something simple. I&#8217;ve got a couple of big roasts in the freezer &#8212; I know there&#8217;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&#8217;s a great party dish because it holds pretty well, you can make it in enormous quantities, and I&#8217;ve never fed it to anyone who didn&#8217;t really like it. With bread, and a salad (I&#8217;m [...]]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://livingsmallblog.com/2010/03/05/go-to-recipes/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>3</slash:comments>
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