Rodeo Week in Livingston Fourth of July is a big week here in Livingston — the rodeo comes to town, there’s a parade, and everyone I know seems to be having parties. Friday night was the Art Walk, or Art Swill as some of us have come to refer to it — the whole town strolling up and down the street stopping in art galleries and drinking too much cheap art gallery wine. It was one of the first nice warm summer nights, and people had their party hats on. Then last night was a gorgeous potluck barbecue outside of…
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Eating Local We have a little local farmer’s market – when I moved here last fall it was pretty much just one good vegetable merchant and a lot of crafts. Well, they’ve done a great job getting new vendors, and Wednesday there was a local family selling their own pork, raised naturally without hormones and allowed to roam outside. Mr. Miller told me they started because they thought the local 4-H kids were paying too much for their weaner pigs, so they raised some weaners, and then when the weren’t all sold, well, they were in the pork business. So…
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Summer Snowstorm Not here, but over in Yellowstone and up on Beartooth Pass … the pass is closed because they got 18 inches over the last two days. Glad I didn’t take the Wall O’Waters off the tomatoes … it’s just been gloomy and rainy down here, which is a mixed blessing. The plants love the rain, but it’s been so cold that the beans and zucchini are having a hard time getting off the ground. It’s supposed to warm up later this week. Not much happening in the garden right now. The lettuce is coming up really well, as…
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Solstice Hailstorm Well, summer came in on a wave of dark clouds, thunder and lightning, a litte hail, and two days of steady rain. This morning my brother came over and said the Nice Girlfriend reported ice on her windsheild when she went to work, so I went out to check and it looks like the only things I lost were a couple of plants that got dried out last week when it was hot, and didn’t like the flip-flop to cold weather. Oh well, it’s Montana after all, things are going to run hot and cold.
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This question was posed to my friend Wendy when she was in China adopting the darling Scott. Wendy had been describing something to one of her Chinese hosts about eating in America, and this woman just couldn’t believe that we bought fish dead in the grocery store. Who knows what you’re getting if you can’t see the whole fish — how can you tell how fresh it is if you can’t see the eyes or the gills? Better to buy your fish live, out of a tank, like sensible people, no? I got thinking of this because my garden is…
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Requiem for a Bear: R.I.P. Number 264 A couple of weeks ago I blogged about watching our friend Bill Campbell’s documentary Season of the Grizzly on Animal Planet (I’d give a link to the blog entry, but Blogger seems to have decided this morning that all of my archives are unavailable. I’ll have to work on that.) Bill followed bear Number 264 for almost a year and got amazing footage of her and her cubs (although, according to Shannon, the Yellowstone bear biologist who lives two doors down from Bill and Maryanne, Number 264 wasn’t a very good mommy, she…
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A Plug for the Ruminator Review The latest issue of the terrific Ruminator Review arrived the other day and I’ve been devouring it. This issue is devoted to “Cultivation: Rural Lives, Global Issues” and contains interviews with such thinkers on the subject as Gretel Ehrlich, Verlyn Klinkenboorg, Scott Russell Sanders and Maxine Kumin. (This issue also contains a small review of a childrens’ book by yours truly.) One of the unexpected pleasures for me of moving to this small town in Montana is how interested people are in food, in the origins of their food, and in eating close to…
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Breakfast of Champions Not to sound like an Alice Waters clone, but my breakfast these past few days has been local farm eggs (1 yolk, 2 whites, extra yolk makes dog very happy — it’s good to share), scrambled with some arugula out of my garden and eaten over toast with a little goat cheese crumbled on top. It’s so good that yesterday, when I was out of eggs, I found myself cranky that the local natural foods store (which always makes me grumpy because they seem way more concerned with supplements than with food — eat real food people!)…
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Summer Vacation in the Backyard I have this week off from my Big Corporate job, and I’m having an old-fashioned summer vacation … it feels just like when school let out and you’d get to hang around the house for a few days doing nothing (we went to camp every summer for eight weeks, which was wonderful, so I never had enough time to get really bored with summer, a week or two at each end lying around the house reading books and eating popsicles was usually plenty for me). They finished my fence yesterday afternoon, and I am now…