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…
-
-
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…
-
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 …
-
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…
-
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…
-
The San Franciso Chronicle has an article about companies that have instituted walking programs to improve employee health. The 10,000 steps concept is actually what spurred me to start walking the dogs to and from the dog park in the first place. I bought a two dollar pedometer, and discovered that adding that 2 miles to my day put me generally up in the 10,000 step zone. Discovering that the sound of running water, and the sight of a few birds in the morning helped with my general stress level was just a nice side effect. Powered by ScribeFire.
-
Fire season arrived in our neck of the woods yesterday. There have been a bunch of big fires burning west of us, over by Missoula, but until now we’d managed to duck the worst of it. A lightning strike set of a small blaze Friday afternoon and yesterday, the winds kicked up and it blew. Those aren’t clouds in the photo, it’s smoke. And you can’t really see from my point-and-shoot, but the clouds of smoke were tinged a weird orange from within, from the gasses burning inside them. Very spooky. And this morning we’re swimming in a thick layer…
-
When I first moved here, I joined the gym because, well, everyone tells you joining a gym is a good thing, and it wasn’t very expensive, and it was only a block away from my house. Like most people, I went pretty regularly for a while, and then I think there was a span of about a year and a half where I paid my monthly dues and never darkened the door. Finally, I quit (which I’d been avoiding because I didn’t want to tell them that I was quitting), and I started walking the dogs in the morning instead.…
-
The heat wave in July was both record-breaking and unpleasant. But look what it brought. Tomatoes! Basil! Breakfast in summer is toast rubbed lightly with a clove of garlic, smeared with goat cheese, and topped with sliced tomato from the garden and shredded basil. A drop or two of nice olive oil and some fleur de sel and well … what more could anyone want for breakfast? For the record (which I’m terrible about keeping garden records), the first tomatoes this year were the Whippersnapper cherries, followed by Galina (a yellow cherry that spreads all over the garden, but produces…
-
I haven’t had a chance to read Barbara Kingsolver’s new book, Animal Vegetable Miracle yet (it’s still out at the library, which I’m trying to use more because if I fail at living small, it’s on the book front), but the sheer volume of press it’s getting has had me thinking that it was time to revisit Joan Dye Grussow’s earlier book on the same subject, This Organic Life: Confessions of a Suburban Homesteader. One of the things that sold me on this house was the big, if fallow, vegetable garden in the back yard. Eight children grew up in…