Here’s what was waiting in my inbox this morning: From Kim Carlson at Culinate: We’ve been sitting on this news for a little while, just to be sure it materialized: Your piece on croquembouchehas been selected to appear in the book Best Food Writing 2010. It’s a great piece, Charlotte, and this is much deserved. Congrats! You’ll get a free copy of the book when it’s released in mid-October (it’ll probably be sent to us, and we’ll forward it to you). Bravo! Kim I’m beyond thrilled! As I replied to Kim this morning, it wasn’t that long ago I was…
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I was halfway through my day yesterday before I realized it was Patrick’s birthday — I was putting a date on an invoice, actually, when I saw that it was the thirteenth. That felt like a real achievement, to have gotten to a place where the day was just a day, with a memory attached to it, but mostly good memories, and not a day that stabs one in the heart. I put a nice old photo of the two of us up on Facebook, since a number of my “friends” on FB are friends of his and I like…
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I’ve been watching the hooplah surrounding the publication of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom with something of a jaundiced eye — it’s the Big Book of the fall, and Franzen’s getting similar reviews to the ones he got for The Corrections, that this is the book that explains what it’s like to live in the present moment, the book that expresses what it means to be an American, the one book that sums up everything important about our age. Those kinds of statements always get my hackles up. Really? The Great American Novel? I’d been sort of rolling my eyes at the whole thing, but…
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I’ve written before about the pleasures of buying meat by the share. This year, we bought a whole pig and a whole lamb from our local packer, Pioneer Meats in Big Timber, Montana. This is about half the pig (the other half is at the Sweetheart’s house) and all of the lamb. Plus cider from my trees in the backyard (although we made hard cider out of most of it) and some other random items. These are 4-H animals that Pioneer bought after the county fair — nice clean livestock that never lived in a CAFO. The thing is, we’re only…
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Here’s to a cleaner design, and to more regular posting. There’s probably going to be less cooking and gardening around here in the future (if only because after eight seasons in this house, I sort of feel like I’ve written just about everything one can about my garden, and about what I’m eating for dinner) and more writing about books, and politics and economics. One of the things I can’t seem to get out of my head is Shannon Hayes book, Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity from a Consumer Culture. I wrote about it for BookSlut in last month’s column The…
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New CookBook Slut article is up. I get a little ranty this month about food politics. “The Revolution Is Here” One of the questions that has come up over and over both on my blog, on other food blogs, and when talking to people who aren’t into cooking or food is, why even bother? Why do we cook in the first place, when there are whole supermarkets devoted to replacing home-cooked meals with meals-in-a-box, or in-a-frozen-bag, or even precooked pot roasts direct from the bowels of Swift and Armour right to your supermarket meat case? Why bother when clearly all…
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Seven chickens, it turns out, was a little more than my yard can really handle, and for the past several months, I’ve only been getting 2-4 eggs a day from the bunch. I’ve been trying to figure out what to do — and while I thought about trying to pawn them off on someone else, really, I knew all along that the responsible thing to do was to cull a few of them. (And for all of you Angry Vegans out there, I have heard your arguments, especially in light of my post at Ethicurean about how I don’t consider…
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One of the biggest dilemmas I face trying to live small is what to do when things break. I had a trusty old Roper washer that I bought from our friends Chris and Lon when we moved into the townhouse in Hayward all those years ago (10? was it really 10 years ago — must have been). I think we spent $100 for the pair, and Lon and Chris hadn’t paid much more for them new. They were very basic. The washer had hot and cold settings and that was about it. But it worked, and considering I was in…
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This morning as I was driving back into town, Dr. James Levine was on The Splendid Table (or on the podcast I was listening to). Levine is the guy at the Mayo Clinic who invented the treadmill desk, and who has fifteen years of data on the salutary effects of getting up out of your chair. Walking while working is best, but even standing instead of sitting has positive effects. Here’s a link to a video of him talking about the issue: James Levine on Treadmill Desk I’ve made a few modifications over the past couple of weeks. I was…
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There’s a new community garden here in Livingston, and it’s right up at the end of my alley at the Lincoln School. The Lincoln School was converted years ago into artists studios — they’re not very expensive and there’s always a waiting list for those nice old classrooms with the big windows. There have always been two big patches of lawn out front, and when the International Fly Fishing Center was there, they’d have casting classes in the summer. This spring, someone got the splendid idea of converting all that useless grass into a community garden. Saturday I walked over…