Because I put the peppers and eggplants and cucumbers into the garden on Saturday, it is snowing this morning. I covered as much as I could last night — we’ll have to see what lived, and what didn’t. Ah, spring in Montana …
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If it’s Memorial Day, then it’s time to get the garden put in (I love that phrase, it’s so old-fashioned) — I jumped the gun a little on the tomatoes this year — they were getting so leggy in the cold frames that I had to put them in — and last week’s spate of cold, wet weather didn’t do them any good. It went down to 28 degrees at least twice — although sheets draped over the trellises seem to have kept them from giving up the ghost entirely. This year I’m experimenting — these are the eggplant seedlings.…
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Swamped with work today, but there’s an interesting piece over at the Columbia Journalism Review on the new direction food reporting is taking: “The world of food reporting had been divided,” Severson told me recently. “You’d have an agriculture reporter who didn’t understand how a kitchen worked and a reporter covering hunger who might not understand what it took to put food on the table at night,” plus the restaurant critics and the recipe editors. Newspapers today, she adds, “are really bringing all of that together.”
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Sam over at Becks and Posh did a little comparison shopping, and discovered to her surprise that by shopping at the Farmer’s Market last weekend, she saved 29% over what it would have cost her to buy the same items at the supermarket. Considering that she was shopping at Ferry Plaza Market, what’s so exciting about this is that Sam’s also been keeping track of her food expenditures all year — and what she’s finding is that for ordinary produce shopping she’s ahead by going to the market. I’ve shopped Farmer’s Markets for 20 years (scary, that thought — I’m…
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When I bought those peaches in the grocery store the other day? Well, I know what I was thinking — I was thinking that I needed some fruit for breakfast, and since oranges are really going out of season (I know, they’re not local, but it’s not perfection we’re after here at LivingSmall), I thought I’d give the apricots, peaches, and plums that had just come in a shot. I lived in the Central Valley long enough to learn that at least they’re coming into season there, and stone fruit from California seemed less egregious than grapes from Chile, so…
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I made two skirts today and I made them without patterns! I used this great book — I hate patterns. I hate the tissue paper. I hate the fussiness of the directions. But I’ve also gotten very tired of spending fifty or sixty bucks on skirts that seem to have two seams and an elastic waist. Now, I’m by no means a seamstress, but even I can sew a skirt with two seams, an elastic waist, and a hem. So here’s the deal — I’m short. I’m not skinny. And I like clothes that don’t look like what everyone else…
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My next door neighbor and I have not always gotten along very well. We both have dogs, and her George and my Raymond play a particularly annoying game of barking-along-the-fenceline. It’s been a source of some tension, but the last few months at least, thing settled into just cool instead of our previous state of low-level hostility. Saturday, I was walking back from the hardware store when I ran into Mike, who lives on the far side of S.’s house. Turns out that part of the reason S. has been so cranky lately is that her mother is dying and…
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This morning, the food section of the San Francisco Chronicle covers the conflict between Carlo Petrini and the Ferry Plaza Market farmers. There’s a really interesting conversation going on in the comments over at Steve Sando’s blog — Sando, who runs Rancho Gordo is one of the farmers who sells his stuff at Ferry Plaza, and he’s on the board for the non-profit market. He also is one of the folks who met with Petrini when he was in town last week promoting the upcoming Slow Food Nation event next Spring. Petrini has a book out, and was supposed to…
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Driving across town yesterday, I looked up and saw a small flock of white pelicans, probably ten or twelve of them, doing big slow turns as they rode a thermal. The white pelicans come back every year about this time, and the thrill never diminishes. For one thing, they’re enormous — watching a white pelican come in for a landing is like watching a big bomber plane come in — one is always astonished that something that big, and that body-heavy can be as graceful as it is. Years before I moved here, when I was doing my PhD work,…
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Look at my new toy! It’s a tractor! It’s a sprinkler! It moves on it’s own accord — follows the hose — all the way around my house! I’d never seen one of these until I moved up here and I did really think they were just a goofy gimmick, but this spring my neighbor across the street had his turned on, and when I took the time to watch it, I saw that it seemed to be pretty efficient. It’s low to the ground, so you don’t lose as much water to evaporation as with the back-and-forth sprinkler —…