Winter has returned to Montana — it’s been three days of cold, dank weather with low grey skies. Now the heat wave we got in the early part of March was as little scary — it’s not supposed to be in the mid-70s that early, and it was alarming to have to break out the sprinklers. But this, well, it’s completely expected, not a surprise, and yet … sigh. We’re all ready for some blue skies, some sunshine, for the fruit trees to start filling town with pretty flowers …. in the meantime, we’ll have to settle for daffodils in…
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It was cassoulet-o-rama last night here in Livingston — our friends are home from LA for their spring break, and we all gathered over there last night to eat Paula Wolfert’s Toulouse-Style Cassoulet from The Cooking of Southwest France. This contains pork, pork skin, duck legs confit, pancetta, proscuitto, sausage — oh, yeah, and beans. This has been a three-day cooking event involving Nina and Elwood and my MH and last night the gang of us all got together — it was so much fun, and the oeneophiles brought so many bottles of Bordeaux that after a while all I…
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Nothing says spring in Montana like six inches of new wet snow — I’m thrilled, actually — we need the water very badly — it’s been so dry that I had pulled out the sprinklers before I went to Arizona. My bathroom is all but done — we need to hang the towel bars etc… this afternoon, then it’ll be done! Of course, now I have to paint the pantry, kitchen and repaint my bedroom because the construction impacted all those rooms too, but the bathroom is done. And my fake kids are home for Easter week — we had…
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People are funny — they keep asking me what I’ve been doing, when for me, the whole point of a vacation is to sit in a chair in a lovely spot and read books, interrupted, if I’m lucky, by stretches where I actually get some writing done. This is why, if you are leaving a beautiful house, with dogs, and a tricky koi pond, and you need someone who wants to hang around the house a lot, what you’re looking for is a writer (well, maybe not a poet — sometimes they don’t notice things like the koi pond pump…
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So, four days into my Arizona sojourn, I’ve come down with a massive chest cold. It might be the flu. It’s not hot here, but it’s not really cold enough to have built a fire during the day or to be wearing a big old fleece jacket I found lying around the house. I’m freezing. And I woke up with a chest that felt like when I used to get croup as a kid — I had to rocket off and stand in a hot shower for ten minutes before I could breathe. And so, about noon, after not eating…
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I’m in Arizona for a week — just south of Tucson, housesitting for my dear friend Jim who has taken his beloved and her daughter to Italy for two weeks. It’s a perfect writer vacation — I’ve got three little dogs to take care of, two of whom need to go for a walk in the morning and in the evening. This morning we spent an hour meandering through the trails in the riverbottom through which all the birds in North America are migrating — the entire place is alive with the twitter of songbirds. The MH was teasing me…
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It’s happened again — the world has come around and has begun to tilt back toward the sun again — and our northern world is turning light again. When I moved up here my California friends were horrified by the prospect of cold, but having survived childhood and college in Wisconsin, the coldest place on earth, I wasn’t worried about the cold. It was the dark that concerned me. Winter is long and dark here — months on end where the sun disappears by five, doesn’t show itself again until after eight. It’s one of the things that keeping a…
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Ten thousand years ago, when I was in my 20s, I spent a couple of months in Taiwan. My college roommate had married a Chinese guy and was clearly going to stay there, and I was in between jobs, and I wanted to see what her life was going to be like, so off I went. We were so young that it never occurred to us that having a third person move in with a couple who had just gotten married might not be the greatest idea, although I have to say, for the most part we all got along…
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So Meg at megnut is throwing up her hands and isn’t going to worry anymore about what she eats while at Salon, Barry Glassner talks to Tracie McMillan about the religious and sociological roots of America’s strange and inconsistent anxiety about food. Meanwhile, at the LA Times, Alain Passard comes to America to cook with his fellow chef/gardener David Kinch at Manresa and notes that “If I didn’t have my gardens, I would no longer love to cook.” Seems to me the only thing to do is to join Meg, and simply start following Michael Pollan’s key points about food,…
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This weekend it’s time to start the tomatoes, eggplants, cucumbers and zucchini in the basement under the grow lights. I’ll probably also put in spinach, arugula, and onions — the earliest of early spring crops — the things that can withstand some snow, a few more frosts. There are bulbs coming up, and the iris are poking through the debris of the winter … Because I’m underwater at work, here’s a link to a great article about building gardens in low-income neighborhoods — teaching people they can grow their own food in areas where there are not only no Farmer’s…