To wrap up home-cooking-week, I thought I’d give you all a little summary of the blogs I read most often. These are the ones that inspire my own home cooking, give me interesting ideas, send me off on projects, or that I find inspirational. The Slow Cook — I love this site — although I’m jealous of his long growing season in DC, I always learn something here. Especially about pickling. This was the site that inspired me to make sauerkraut. He’s got a particularly good piece at the top of the blog right now, Food Lessons for Hard Times.…
-
-
I don’t have a photo, because it didn’t even occur to me until this morning that the dinner I made last night was a good illustration of what we’ve all been talking about this week — eating at home is not rocket science. As you can tell from the erratic nature of mid-week blogging, my day job has been a little insane lately. I’m lucky enough to have a remote position with a Big Corporation, but the level of fear and anxiety that working in a Big Corporation entails these days as layoffs fall all around like autumn leaves in…
-
NPR has been running a series this week about how people are changing their eating habits during this recession and I’m finding it really depressing. So far, it’s all about how people aren’t eating out, or ordering in, but they’re eating prepared foods out of the frozen food aisle. They had a home economist on yesterday pointing out that a bag of frozen french fries costs about five bucks, and for that you can get a five pound bag of potatoes. Granted, if you want fries, there’s the scary frying part, but as the home economist pointed out, is there…
-
The sun has come back. We feel like pagans here in MyLittleTown, ready to thow a party and rejoice. We were not forsaken! The sun came back! It’s been light before seven in the morning and until nearly six at night. It’s like being let out of jail. And so, because the evenings have not come slamming down at 4:30, and because it’s been sort of mild and pleasant out, I’ve fired up the grill again. My new friend Sabrina came for dinner mid-week, and I marinated some local lamb chops in yogurt, lime juice, olive oil and spices, then…
-
There are mornings when you just can’t quite summon the will to proceed, mornings where you’re groggy, and dreading your job, and feeling like it’s all a long treadmill of the same old same old and here you are again. On those mornings, sometimes all it takes is a good egg. A nice piece of toast with some butter, and a three minute egg you bought from your local chicken farmer. I buy mine from Isabelle, my milk lady, and while they are very expensive — about six dollars a dozen, they are really great eggs. I say this as…
-
So, the past few years my grandmother (via my aunt with whom she lives) has been sending family things for Christmas presents. This year I got a wonderful box full of many random things including a set of table linens that once belonged to Kate Dolly. Kate Dolly’s mother and my great-great-grandmother were sisters. Kate’s mother moved to St. Louis and married Thomas Dolly, and my great-great-grandmother went on a blind date (in her sister’s stead) and married Charles Plamondon, had five children, and died on the Lusitania. Somehow, most of “Aunt Kate’s” stuff wound up back in Leland, on…
-
Here’s the winter herb garden on the mudroom porch. As you can see, the shiso and the basil bit the dust. It was just too cold out there. The funny thing is that for a long time all of them were just sort of dormant. The mint did nothing for months — I did have a little aphid infestation on the mint when I first brought it in last fall, but even after I killed them off, the mint just sat there with these little tiny nascent leaves that never did anything. Then about three weeks ago, it came back…
-
The last two nights remind me why I spent all that time last summer putting food away. Even though I believe that Sunday’s require the smell of something braising, that warm scent of something bubbling gently filling the house, this Sunday was so gorgeous that I went outside all day long. By dinnertime, I was hungry, but not particularly interested in something meaty. So I rummaged around in the freezer until I found a couple of stuffed cabbage rolls I put away last summer. I went on a saffron-rice-and-leftovers kick last summer; in particular, a saffron-rice-and-leftovers wrapped in cabbage leaves…
-
As I noted, I sat outside and read this weekend. Tinkers by Paul Harding — months ago my friend Anna told me about this subscription program that Powells Books in Portland runs, Indispensible. Every six weeks they send you a little box with a book and some other stuff in it. This was my first shipment, and it had Tinkers, a video magazine by the McSweeneys folks, and a poster by a comic book artist. So, there I was with a lovely afternoon and a new book — a first novel that like many of my favorite books, isn’t particularly…
-
Today was like being let out of jail. The sun was shining. There was no wind. The sun, did I mention? It was shining. It was warm outside — 40s up into the 50s. I cleaned up the yard (dog poop patrol), cut some hollyhock stalks and put them over where I want hollyhocks to grow next year. I turned over a garden bed. I pulled all the dead stuff off the herb bed so the parsley and the chives can start coming back. I pruned a couple of errant branches off the greengage plum tree. Then I hung out…