Although it’s snowy today, it’s been in the sixties all week, which means I can start drying clothes on the line again. I’ve written before about my clothesline love, and I’m always surprised by the number of people who object to clotheslines on principle. I really don’t get it. When I moved in, my house, like most houses in town, had a huge clothesline made from plumbing pipe that was set into about four feet of concrete below ground. We have famously strong winds here in Livingston, and the legacy clotheslines were built to withstand it. I had that clothesline…
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A few items from around the intertubes: While I appreciate that Iowan’s are using the stupendous agricultural natural resources with which they are blessed to move away from agribusiness models, I do grow tired of the eternal surprise of journalists when they discover, yet again, that the midwest is full of interesting people. Here’s a French journalist who took a tour of some of the state’s more interesting agricultural entrepreneurs. Civil Eats has a terrific interview with Mollie Katzen, author of The New Moosewood Cookbook. She’s written a book called Get Cooking: 150 Simple Recipes to Get You Started in…
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There was an article in Salon the other day that I almost blogged about, but it seemed like such as setup: Hipsters on Food Stamps. The article was a profile of out-of-work “hipsters” in the Bay Area, New York, Baltimore and other urban areas who were, thanks to the ongoing recession and the stimulus package, eligible for and using food stamps. Of course, the twist was that they weren’t eating “government cheese” but were using their food stamp money to buy fruits and vegetables at small stores and farmers markets, and were gasp, cooking fairly delicious meals from them. One…
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Kristi mentioned in the comments that she’s had bad luck starting seeds, and since it’s that time of year again, I thought I’d share my seed starting process. Because I’ve got a basement, I have plenty of space to start my own seeds. My seed starting bench is an old steel garage shelf, above which I strung a cheap florescent fixture with grow lights. This one has enough space for four trays, which is usually about as much as I want to start at one time. Since the light is on an adjustable chain, I can hang it up high…
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Although I’ve made pancetta a couple of times (once even landing myself in the local paper for my efforts), I’ve never made plain old bacon before. Because of my Bookslut gig, there seem to be an increasing number of cookbooks about canning, pickling, and preserving washing up on my doorstep. For bacon, I turned to Jam It, Pickle It, Cure It: And Other Cooking Projects (sorry Ruhlman, wanted to branch out). I had one slab of pork belly left in the freezer, and we’re running out of bacon around here, so I thought I’d make a go of it. This…
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So. Jeans. A perennial problem, the jeans. Remember when we were kids (you geezers out there like me) and there were just jeans. There weren’t five thousand different styles and different fabrics and different makes. There were jeans. Usually Levis. I gave up on jeans a few years ago. Every time I’d find a make that fit, and that was reasonably comfortable and reasonably attractive, they’d go change them on me. And yet, even a LivingSmall type like moi, does sometimes read the fashion rags, usually while the magical Dezray is doing that thing she does to my hair that…
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Spring has sprung here in Montana. My computer is telling me it’s 57 degrees outside, and the sun is shining, and it’s making it very difficult to come indoors. Especially since I’m going to be returning to the Big Corporation part time, probably next week. So, I’m taking advantage of the weather, and the sunshine, and my last few days where I don’t have to be tethered to the computer indoors for specified hours. Which means blogging might be a little slow this week. On the other hand, I’ve been gardening up a storm. I added a second hoop house…
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It’s that time of year, when we’re all buying seeds, and I just want to put a plug in for reading the labels. Seed saving is something I only came to a few years into keeping a garden, and I pretty much just save tomato seeds at this point, but with Monsanto being investigated for monopolizing seed stocks, it seems that seed saving is one place that backyard gardeners can really have an impact. But the thing is, you can’t save seeds from hybrid varieties. So when you’re perusing the seed racks at your local garden stores, if it’s something…
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I had to go to Bozeman yesterday to do some errands, and I had lunch at my favorite little restaurant, La Tinga. There aren’t many things I miss from California, but taquerias and Asian food are among them. I had about ten minutes before my haircut, so I ducked in for a taco or two, including one that had chicken and potatoes and a mildly-hot red chile sauce. It blew my mind. I hadn’t really expected it to, but something about the plain mealy potatoes and the chiles, with a little chicken in the mix, it was delicious. On the…
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Jeez oh Pete, so spring is here, and it seems to have brought along the first “canning is dumb” article. This year it’s at Slate, where last summer, it was at Salon. I’ve addressed this subject once already, last summer, when Salon published a ridiculous piece “debunking” the “myth” that canning will save you money, but I guess if they’re going to write the same article over and over, I’ll have to keep throwing in my two cents. Canning is useful if you have an excess of something. It’s a method of preservation. If you want to make a hobby…