Yesterday was the Day of the Cabbages. Since Christmas, I’ve been strangely obsessed with cabbage — am I deficient in vitamin C perhaps? I wonder …. My last batch of sauerkraut fermented up just fine, but unfortunately, the plastic bucket in which I made it retained a whiff of the Mrs Meyers cleaner I’d used to scrub the bucket out, so I wound up throwing out the whole batch. Yesterday I found a lovely 3 gallon stoneware crock at a local antiques store, so it was time to fire up another batch of sauerkraut. I did pretty much the same…
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A few days before Christmas I made the rounds with this year’s gift bags (despite the fact that it was 10 below 0 out). What I love about homemade presents is the sheer bounty you can give to people without feeling like you’ve broken the bank. This year everyone got a half-pint jar of pate, one of artichoke spread, a jam or two, and I made a few boozy little fruitcakes. I also tucked a box of crackers in the bag. All in all, a festive and fun little bundle. But the really fun part was what came back my…
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So, my post-Christmas mania has been getting rid of services I don’t need. I’ve been chafing at my cable bill for almost a year now — it went through the roof, nearly 90 bucks a month (I had HBO and all that). For a while I thought about getting rid of the premium channels, but that would only save me about 10 bucks a month, so it hardly seemed worth it. And then when sorting out a mess with my TiVo bill, I noticed that TiVo had a new thing — if you hook your TiVo to your home network…
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The wind is howling outside this morning — a morning that dawned slow and grey although it looks like the sun might try to peek through sometime later. Drifts are piling up — all that lovely, sparkly, dry snow that has fallen in the last week or so is swirling into strange shapes. I love winter here. Summer I spend outside in the garden, driven out into the yard from the time I wake up until it’s finally time to shut down the kerosene lantern hanging from the apple branch and go inside to bed. But winter has a different…
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After nearly a year of surgery and recovery and then blowing the achilles tendon repair, my vet and I decided to go for an exoskeleton solution. This is Owen in his very fancy orthotic device that the nice folks at K-9 Orthotics in Canada built for him. We made a fiberglass cast of his leg (and cutting it off was the most traumatic part of the whole saga of the leg — poor guy, that cast saw completely freaked him out, and he was on a lot of drugs at the time) and they built him this spiffy brace. Unfortunately,…
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There’s a pretty good article in the New York Times this morning about the way people are economizing on their food budgets. The shocking part, to me anyhow, is that the article cites several families who were eating out four to five nights a week. What? Perhaps I’m old, or cheap, or a misanthrope or something, but this seems really shocking to me. Of course, it might be different if you live in a big city. We have a very limited number of restaurants here in town, and I remember when I was young and broke and working two jobs…
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My beloved Milk Lady recently sold her calves, so my weekly gallon of milk has been coming topped with a full quart of cream. Which is a lot of cream. This weekend, I had about a pint of cream left from last week when looking at my new delivery, and so, I decided to make butter. I found this terrific tutorial over on Saveur which was very helpful. I used my trusty old KitchenAid, and while I’m sure one isn’t supposed to make whipped cream before making butter, I did discover that the gorgeous Jersey cream whips up beautifully. The…
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I’ve been listening to a lot of back episodes of The Splendid Table lately. My local NPR station doesn’t carry it, but I’ve been downloading episodes to my iPod and listening to them in the car or at the gym. Apparently, they had a year-long listener experiment in locavorism — they selected a dozen or so readers who tried to eat 80% local food for one year and blogged about it. So yesterday I had to do some errands and I was listening to the host check in with one of the locavore eaters, this is perhaps the second one…
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It was seven degrees this morning and originally I was going to leave Raymond at home and go to the gym instead of going for a walk. It’s a block and a half to the gym, and warm in there, while walking the mile and back to the dog park was going to be cold. But when I stepped outside and realized the wind wasn’t blowing, I went back in to suit up. My winter dog-walking outfit must be a sight. When Patrick died, I kept his really really nice North Face jacket, which is, understandably quite large on me.…
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Using my cold frame as a refrigerator. But it works! Last night, I put the pot with the chicken in it outside in the cold frame for the night. The pot is too big for the fridge, it was in the high 30s last night and even now it’s only in the mid-40s. Really, about the same as my fridge — and I don’t have raccoons or other critters to worry about. And as you can see from the photo, the cold frame is right outside the back door, which is off the mud room, which is off the kitchen.…