Grist links to a piece on urban gardening and the class divide that still plagues the sustainable food movement. The article covers why the folks who run the Food Project decided to keep selling in their own neighborhood and not at the fancy downtown market where they could make more money, and perhaps assure the sustainability of their own organization. Steve Sando tours industrial bean fields and comes to understand why people are so astonished at how great his beans taste (really folks — his beans are delicious). I ordered several packages of beans from Steve last spring when we…
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Let’s all try to go out and affect some kind of change today — no matter how small. (Me, I’m still trying to figure out how to recycle that plastic — can’t do it in Livingston, so I’ll have to check next time I drive to Bozeman. Otherwise, I’m mailing it to one of you who has plastic recycling in your town …) From “All My Habits are Bad” the Salon interview with A.M. Homes (via Bookslut) Do writers have a moral obligation? Oh, I think all human beings do. So if all human beings have it, then writers have…
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I had a small fit earlier this week and decided, after mulling it for a long time, that I have to get rid of all my plastic food containers. Even though they’re #5 plastic, which from what I can find on the internets, aren’t leaking bisphenols into my food — but how do we really know? They said those hard, clear, polycarbonates were better than the softer plastics, and now look what they’re finding out. So I had one of those moments on Monday where I decided they were all bad, I cleaned out the drawer where they lived, and…
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Monday night I got a phone call from my cousin Jason’s wife. I thought she was calling to thank me for the baby present I’d sent a few days earlier, but it turns out she was calling because my 95 year old grandmother, who lives on our farm with Jason and Jackie and my Aunt Molly and her husband had been taken to the hospital and was going in for emergency surgery. She’s 95. Surgery is always daunting when you’re that old. She’s been pretty open the last couple of years about being ready to go … “I wish I…
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Last spring, I was driving back from my morel bonanza, when I came across a small herd of buffalo. There were maybe twenty or thirty of them — cows with calves, a few bulls — enormous, shaggy beasts standing in a swale that green we only get in the spring, with the backside of the Absaroka range rising behind them. It gave you a sense of what it must have been like when this country sustained great herds of buffalo. It was at once an inspiring and disheartening sight. They were so lovely, and there were so few of them.…
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The San Francisco Chronicle had an article a couple of weeks ago about pastured chickens, followed closely by this article in the NY Times questioning whether “cage free” as it’s practiced in chicken houses around the country is really any more humane than battery chicken. I’ve been buying eggs for a couple of years from a local outfit called Willow Bend Eggs. They are the most astonishing eggs I’ve ever eaten. They’ve ruined me for all other eggs. They’re brown, and large, and the yolks are the deepest marigold color you’ve ever seen and they stand up all perky and…
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After last week’s post on cleaning out my freezer, my old friend Constance emailed me from Taiwan (where she has lived ever since she married the Chinese Pop Star). Constance wrote: I suggest that you go Vietnamese with your Game and Pork burgers- I did an Indochine Burger thing with Buffalo and pork at my parents’ this summer. Very tasty, basil, fish-sauce,green onions,ginger and peanut butter or sesame paste. Nice with a little parsley and basil mayonnaise Hmm. I thought. Yum. I thought. Constance has always been one of the best cooks I know, so this afternoon when I took…
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Since I seem to have lost the day to a series of lighting fixtures I put up (don’t even ask about the screw with the stripped threads, and the hacksaw, and the swearing …), here’s some Friday Links to keep everyone entertained: Had lunch today with another Livingston Blogger: Go check out Livingston, I presume Found an interesting piece over at Ethicurean on the sort of small meat processers that we depend on around here. I’m planning to buy a lamb this fall from my dog groomer, and without Sheep Mountain Processing, I’d be sunk. Check out Postcards from Cowboyland …
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I had my friend Margo over for dinner tonight and I experimented with this recipe from the LA Times Food pages: Braised Romano Beans with Pancetta and Cherry Tomatoes. Except, in my usual fashion, I messed with it a little. I don’t have a ton of tomatoes right now (and the Whippersnapper Cherry isn’t worth growing — it’s has no flavor — it’s like a little tiny grocery store tomato — very disappointing. Unlike Galina, which is a sprawling yellow indeterminate cherry tomato that will take over your whole garden, but which will reward you with fabulous, juicy, tomato-y yellow…
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There’s no ground lamb in town right now. You don’t think of meat as being a seasonal product, but around here, lambs are slaughtered in the early fall, and last years supply seems to have run completely dry. I was looking for lamb because it’s also that time of year when we all look into our freezers and see what’s lurking in there. It’s time to clean out/use up last year’s stuff before we put up this years vegetables and meat. So I was downstairs last week looking at the: glut of chicken carcasses. It’s still too hot to think…