It’s fall in Montana which means that the bears are on the move — there’s been a black bear down in the creekbed woods behind the dog park where we walk and last night Raymond came home covered in bear shit. Bad dog! Bad dog got washed with cold water from the hose in the backyard. Bad dog got washed with the stinky leftover orange-rosemary shampoo that he hates — I keep hoping this will deter him from rolling in stinky dead things, however, I seem to be hoping in vain. I haven’t seen the bear, but we’re all having…
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Somehow we’ve managed to live a little too large here at LivingSmall, the debt-to-savings ratio has gotten itself upside down, and so we’re trying to cut back wherever we can. I’m the kind of person who buys pantry staples when I’m feeling existentially anxious, and so, in the spirit of economizing, I’ve found myself looking in the pantry and remembering that I can feed myself a whole week’s worth of lunches, for example, off a nice pot of pea soup. Pea soup costs almost nothing. Today I made a batch — I pulled a couple of carrots and a late…
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You’ve probably seen by now that Madeleine L’Engle has died. Despite having been the kind of kid who could walk between classes with my nose in a book and never bump into anyone (I also became very quick at taking tests because we were free to read after we were done), I was never a big fan of A Wrinkle in Time. As a kid, I had a horror of stories where things turned into other things — Alice in Wonderland, for example. Perhaps it’s because I had the kind of life where 180s were all too common, where people…
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Once the heat wave passed it seems like everyone in town has been riding around on those retro-cruiser bikes. I was on the verge of going to buy one when I remembered that duh! I have a bike! I bought this bike a couple of years ago for forty bucks at the pawn shop around the block, and so instead of buying a new bike, I took it to our local bike shop and got it tuned up. New tires, brake pads, shifter cables (which came undone yesterday so back it goes on today) and the crowning glory, the cargo…
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For those of you coming in from Ethicurean … welcome, take a look around. For my regular readers, I have a guest post over there called “What’s in Your Freezer” (with an embarassing photo of my frosty freezer).
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Somehow the subject of canning is everywhere on the interenets, and it’s spawned a bastardized version of “Surfin Safari” inside my head. You’ve got a lot of time to think of things like this while waiting for water to boil. On the home front — I put up a couple of jars of marinated eggplant last night. Our local truck farm had these gorgeous mottled purple eggplants, and since the eggplants in my garden are not going to win the annual race with frost, I snapped up a bunch. I bought that big Silver Spoon cookbook when it was all…
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A million years ago, when I was still in graduate school and working at the bookstore in Salt Lake City, I picked up Blue Jelly by Debby Bull. I loved this book. I tried my darndest to sell it to people but for some reason, the folks who wanted Bridges of Madison Country didn’t want to buy this odd little book about a woman who cured her broken heart by canning. Here’s my favorite quote: Canning may sound like a strange path out of the dark woods of despair, but all the other ways, from Prozac to suicide, are really…
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Maryanne just returned from a visit to her sister’s place in Western Colorado and she brought me peaches. Real peaches. Delicious, dead-ripe Western Slope peaches. Yes they’re a little lumpy — there are a few bruises and blemishes where some bug or something made a mark. But cut them open, and this is what you get — glistening ripeness all the way through, and a taste that’s almost floral. You may remember my dismay with the grocery store peaches I bought earlier this year. I swear, I’d rather only eat four peaches a year (which is what Maryanne brought me…
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When I first moved to California in my 20s, I was shocked at the amount of stone fruit going to waste in peoples’ yards. To a Midwestern kid who grew up thinking that a ripe peach in February was a great treat, the sight of peaches by the bushel rotting on the ground because someone had a peach tree in their yard that had been planted as an ornamental and they didn’t want to deal with it — well, I was genuinely shocked. And now I have a yard with two different varieties of plums, and four apple trees. The…