Vegetable Experiment of the Day — Braised Endive One reason I’m experimenting with vegetables is that I’m planning my garden for next summer, and I don’t want to wind up with a freezer full of fine organic veggies that I don’t like to eat. Also, I’ve been living the past couple of years with my brother, a guy who won’t eat “wet leaves,” so now that we’re no longer roommates, I’ve been going to town with wet leaves. About a week ago, I bought some endive. At least I think it’s endive. It’s a variety that isn’t as curly as…
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Cauliflower and Carrot Gratin Who would have thunk it? This was outrageously delicious — and to think, I’d been about to write it off as a disaster. Here’s the deal, I’m trying to widen my veggie repetoire, and I seemed to remember an entry early in the Julie/Julia Project about cauliflower gratin, so I thought I’d give it a whirl. I added carrots to mine because, well, it was a small cauliflower and it was so white … I like a little color in my food. Here’s what I did: cut the cauliflower into florets and cut one big carrot…
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Since Jeanne d’Arc was nice enough to post my response to her blog on the Vatican’s rush to cannonize Mother Teresa, and since I did say in the header that this blog would be partially about faith, you may want to look at The Stigmata Incident, a piece I wrote for the Salt Lake Acting company a couple of years ago.
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Bookslut has a surprising conversation about the independent bookstore issue. I must say, I agree about the clique-ishness of too many independent bookstores. If they want to survive, they need to stop vibing people
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The Meat Problem The problem for me is not whether one should eat meat, but how to eat meat without supporting factory farming. Here in Montana, several of my neighbors accomplish this by only eating wild meat, which aside from raising your own animals, does seem to like one of the least hypocritical paths out there. When it’s a deer, or elk, or antelope one has killed and butchered oneself, there’s no denying that death is an integral part of the cycle, nor that we can eat meat and retain our innocence of this fact. It’s been years since I’ve…
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How to Save a Soup Because I am a slightly obsessive person, once I discovered Julie Powell’s amazing blog, the Julie/Julia project, I went back and read the entire thing (thank goodness she only started in August, but on the other hand, the writing is so terrific, that I wish there had been more). As I was driving back from Bozeman with a carload of groceries and organic meat (more about that later) I became fixated on the memory of a garlic potato soup with saffron she described on November 20 and decided I had to make it. I have…
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I spent New Years Day gardening. This would be unremarkable except that I live in Montana. Livingston, Montana. Where it is supposed to be winter, real winter, not like the fake winters when I lived in the Bay Area. Don’t even get me started on my season’s pass to Bridger Bowl … that pass has yet to make it off my bulletin board and onto my jacket. So, I’m a little superstitious about New Year’s day, and I think you should start the year out right. Since, in the brave new world of global warming, it was 40 degrees and…