Although I have mixed feelings about TED, which too often seems very self-congratulatory, this TED talk by Dan Barber, of Blue Hill Farms, is both hilarious and really informative. Veta la Palma is a completely innovative fish farm in the south of Spain, where they’re growing fish for restaurants in a natural, clean, reclaimed wetland. Figuring out how to farm fish is crucial for those of us who want to continue eating fish, since we’ve drastically overfished the oceans, but Veta la Palma has also reclaimed a wetland to do what wetlands are supposed to do, cleanse water.
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I’m sure no one will be surprised to learn that my major decorating theme around here is piles of books. I have bookshelves, and even a wee library in my basement office, but the books, they still seem to pile up. So here are a few things I’ve been reading lately: This terrific article about how the David Foster Wallace archives found a home at the Ransom Center in Texas. We had our first glimpse into Wallace’s creative process in 2005 with our acquisition of the papers of Don DeLillo. Unexpectedly, the archive included a small cache of letters between…
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I’ve been obsessed with nori rolls lately. I got the idea from Cathy Erway’s delightful book, The Art of Eating In: How I Learned to Stop Spending and Love the Stove, which I reviewed for Bookslut about a month ago. After this long winter, I’ve been craving crunch, and veggies, or maybe there’s something in the seaweed that my body craves, but it’s been nori rolls for lunch for a couple of weeks now. The thing is, nori rolls are actually quite easy. I like the rice warm, so I either make up a fresh batch in the rice cooker,…
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Ever since last fall’s episode of food poisoning, I’ve been meaning to finish enclosing the garden. However, I had to wait for the ground to thaw, and well, the freelance life means that finances have been just tight enough that I didn’t want to go out and buy copper pipe. But this weekend, I finally got it done. I tried to come up with some solution other than more expensive copper, but since I’d done the rest of the trellis/fences that way when I built the garden (this is summer number eight — how did that happen?), well, I just…
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It was a big weekend of gardening here at LivingSmall. The temperatures were in the mid- to high-fifties, and so I decided to see if I can jumpstart the season a little bit. I’m deathly tired of eating other people’s vegetables. I want greens of my own again. So I built a little hoop house over one of my beds. I bought four ten-foot lengths of 1/2 inch pvc pipe, and since wind is a perennial problem here, I ran one lengthwise, with the other three crosswise. I planted some arugula, spinach, Japanese mustard, mache, and escarole — just half-rows…
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It’s not quite the lions and the lambs, but pretty close — we’ve had a big breakthrough in the domestic realm this week. The dogs seem to have developed the ability to mingle with the chickens without killing them. It’s a fragile truce, and one that requires close supervision, since the poor bird dogs are fighting generations of breeding that tells them to get the bird, but so far, we’ve had several episodes of domestic harmony. Which makes gardening much easier, as the compost heap is inside the chicken run. At any rate, I’m very proud of my boys. Such…
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So all this talk about cooking, just ordinary cooking, has gotten me thinking about go-to recipes, the ones you rely on and can do without really thinking. For Michael Ruhlman it’s a roast chicken. Which I’ve got to second. I use Marcella Hazan’s “recipe” which is nothing more than a roast chicken with a lemon stuck full of fork holes inside it. The lemon does wonders. I’m having the girls over for Oscar night on Sunday, so I’ve been thinking about what to cook.There’s going to be a bunch of us (the Sweetheart is fleeing to his cabin, not a…
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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VJgb2bCfzE Michael Ruhlman started a meme a couple of weeks ago where he asked people to blog about why they cook. Above is his TEDxCLE talk about why cooking is essential to making us human, to making us families, and to making us reasonably healthy human beings. It’s well worth the fifteen minutes (and he’s sort of adorably nervous, as one would be). He says in the video, and on the follow up post on his blog, that we need to make cooking an imperative. With which I agree. But I guess one of the things I’ve been trying to…
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The cover of Preservation Magazine proclaims this month that “Old is the New Green.” It’s an interesting concept on a lot of fronts, especially in the way it undercuts the idea floating around out there that we can shop our way to sustainability. Sustainability, and being green, aren’t about buying clothing made from bamboo (which is really just rayon, the manufacturing of which brings a host of problems) or changing the lightbulbs, or well, buying different stuff instead of the stuff we’ve been buying all along. We’ve got to start thinking about ways to NOT buy stuff. To buy less…
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I’ve read several articles in the last few days that have me all het up about the food thing. There seems to be a new and annoying meme out there, that eating real food will make one a “slave” to one’s kitchen. That somehow, “cooking from scratch” is so difficult and so time-consuming that no one can really do it. It’s just too hard. Well maybe it’s too hard if you’re being an obsessive yuppie about it. People, grow some common sense. Exhibit A is this article in the Sacramento News Review, “Fast vs. Food: How the sustainable-food movement drove…