They’ve made a movie of Ron Hansen’s brilliant novel, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford — and it’s reviewed in today’s New York Times. It’s a brilliant novel, and so, I have mixed feelings about the movie version. On the one hand, it’s great that Ron Hansen, a novelist I deeply admire (and one on whom I had a serious crush for any number of years — but alas, he went and got married again), gets a pile of money, and with any luck will sell a bunch of copies of the book. But since the…
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I don’t think my point-and-shoot does justice to the glory of these beans. These are runner cannelini beans that I grew from the package I ordered from Steve Sando at Rancho Gordo back last spring when we were all discussing Carlo Petrini’s ill-advised and ill-considered remarks about the Ferry Plaza Farmer’s Market. I’ve had terrible luck with beans since I moved here. I couldn’t figure it out — who can’t grow a bean for goodness sake? But something kept skeletonizing my beans every spring — and so this year I pulled out a whole bed of hollyhock and sunflower that…
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Just called to order a pork belly and it’s going to be a week or so — Matt’s Meats, my local butcher, is making bacon in 2 weeks, so they’re putting in an order for pork belly and are going to set one aside for me. Stay tuned — since Ruhlman himself has ordered me to make the pancetta, I guess I’m making a pancetta. (I hope he’s willing to take email questions if I get stuck).
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I’ve been in a frenzy of food preservation here at LivingSmall. Saturday I pulled and washed and cut and blanched and drained two six-gallon trash cans full of endive. I then wrapped the blanched endive in towels to squeeze out the water and sealed it in bags using my vaccuum sealer and froze them for later this winter. I also shredded the outer leaves that looked okay but not really nice enough to put up for winter and I’m experimenting with making sauerkraut from them — we’ll see how it works out. Right now, it looks like wet salty leaves…
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Because it’s Friday, and because we ate and drank just a tiny bit too much last night at Patrick’s Posthumous Birthday party (which was delightful and jolly and because our friend Jim hung Patrick’s picture on the restaurant wall, it sort of felt like he was among us) — this morning LivingSmall brings you that staple of the exhausted blogger: a list of links. Hugh Fearnly-Wittingstall expounds on the joys of hunting mushrooms (and I wish I lived in England so I could have gotten the free mushroom guide with my copy of the Guardian). If it ever manages to…
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Patrick would be 42 today — it’s always a bittersweet day, to say the least. But even though he’s no longer with us, I like to celebrate his memory on his birthday. Like the Day of the Dead when we decorate graves with flowers and take our dead relatives their favorite foods and drinks as a way of reminding them, and ourselves, that although we’ve been separated, we never really do lose on another. So tonight we’re all having dinner tonight at our friend Jim’s restaurant. We had Patrick’s last birthday there — it was a fun and festive evening…
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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…