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	<title>LivingSmall</title>
	<link>http://livingsmallblog.com</link>
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		<title>Lit News and Reading Roundup</title>
		<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>
		<link>http://livingsmallblog.com/2010/03/09/lit-news-and-reading-roundup/</link>
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		<title>Nori Lunch</title>
		<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>
		<link>http://livingsmallblog.com/2010/03/09/nori-lunch/</link>
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		<title>Garden Fencing</title>
		<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>
		<link>http://livingsmallblog.com/2010/03/08/garden-fencing/</link>
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		<title>Hoop House</title>
		<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>
		<link>http://livingsmallblog.com/2010/03/08/hoop-house/</link>
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		<title>Chickens and Dogs</title>
		<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. 
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		<link>http://livingsmallblog.com/2010/03/08/chickens-and-dogs/</link>
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		<title>Go-To Recipes?</title>
		<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>
		<link>http://livingsmallblog.com/2010/03/05/go-to-recipes/</link>
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		<title>Michael Ruhlman: Why Cook?</title>
		<description><![CDATA[

Michael Ruhlman started a meme a couple of weeks ago where he asked people to blog about why they cook. Above is his TEDxCLE talk about why cooking is essential to making us human, to making us families, and to making us reasonably healthy human beings. It&#8217;s well worth the fifteen minutes (and he&#8217;s sort of adorably nervous, as one would be). 
He says in the video, and on the follow up post on his blog, that we need to make cooking an imperative. With which I agree. But I guess one of the things I&#8217;ve been trying to figure out by writing about it (the only way I ever figure anything out) is why we need to make cooking anything. How did we get to this place where cooking, and I&#8217;m not talking elaborate, or slow food, or gourmet, or any of those things, I&#8217;m just talking about the simple act of cooking our meals on a regular basis has become so strange? Where cooking for yourself and your family has become the exception, not the rule?
I cook because it would be weird not to. I cook because it&#8217;s cheaper to cook for myself than to eat out. I [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://livingsmallblog.com/2010/03/04/michael-ruhlman-why-cook/</link>
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		<title>Old is the New Green</title>
		<description><![CDATA[
The cover of Preservation Magazine proclaims this month that &#8220;Old is the New Green.&#8221; It&#8217;s an interesting concept on a lot of fronts, especially in the way it undercuts the idea floating around out there that we can shop our way to sustainability. Sustainability, and being green, aren&#8217;t about buying clothing made from bamboo (which is really just rayon, the manufacturing of which brings a host of problems) or changing the lightbulbs, or well, buying different stuff instead of the stuff we&#8217;ve been buying all along. We&#8217;ve got to start thinking about ways to NOT buy stuff. To buy less stuff. To reuse the stuff we&#8217;ve already got.  
Which is why I just loved this article about the green overhaul that the owners of the Empire State building have just done. For instance, instead of replacing all the windows, which would have led to a zillion pounds of window being sent to the landfill, they pulled out each window, broke the thermopane seal, added a layer of mylar, and resealed and regassed them. Then they put them back in. End result, lower energy costs for air conditioning since the mylar reflects the sun, and higher heat retention in the [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://livingsmallblog.com/2010/03/04/old-is-the-new-green/</link>
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		<title>Eat Real Food</title>
		<description><![CDATA[
I&#8217;ve read several articles in the last few days that have me all het up about the food thing. There seems to be a new and annoying meme out there, that eating real food will make one a &#8220;slave&#8221; to one&#8217;s kitchen. That somehow, &#8220;cooking from scratch&#8221; is so difficult and so time-consuming that no one can really do it. It&#8217;s just too hard. 
Well maybe it&#8217;s too hard if you&#8217;re being an obsessive yuppie about it. People, grow some common sense. Exhibit A is this article in the Sacramento News Review, &#8220;Fast vs. Food: How the sustainable-food movement drove one busy family to the brink and back again.&#8221; Like a number of articles on this topic I&#8217;ve seen lately, the author seems to take an all-or-nothing approach. Either they&#8217;re making all their own bread, pizza dough, eating only from CSA boxes and going to the Farmers Market or they&#8217;re eating microwave meals from Trader Joes. Or then there was this one, featured on CNN.com, &#8220;An Inconvenient Challenge, Eat &#8216;Real Food&#8217; For a Month&#8221; in which Jennifer McGruther, food blogger at The Nourished Kitchen is so restrictive about her definition of &#8220;real food&#8221; that she has people throwing out everything [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://livingsmallblog.com/2010/03/03/eat-real-food/</link>
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		<title>Roger Ebert, My New Hero</title>
		<description><![CDATA[
If you haven&#8217;t read Chris Jones&#8217; profile of Roger Ebert in the lastest issue of Esquire Magazine, go there now. It&#8217;s incredibly affecting. 
I remember my surprise a couple of years ago when I discovered how amazing Ebert&#8217;s written criticism is &#8212; like so many, I&#8217;d thought of him as the thumbs up/thumbs down guy, or as the guy my creative writing instructor at the University of Illinois, the unforgettable Rocco Fumento, used to brag had once been in his class. The U of I and I were not a good fit, and that class summed up many of the reasons why, and so, for years, I unfairly assumed that Ebert too must be somehow second-rate. The idiocy of youth.  
So when I was trying to learn to write book reviews, I got Ebert&#8217;s books out of the library. If you haven&#8217;t, already, you should go get yourself a copy of  The Great Movies or The Great Movies II. They&#8217;re brilliant, enormous fun to read, and a real education in modern movies. He&#8217;s a brilliant writer, who has the unlikely ability to critique a genre while always allowing his deep love for it to shine through.
Ebert&#8217;s been all [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://livingsmallblog.com/2010/03/03/roger-ebert-my-new-hero/</link>
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