Sam over at Becks and Posh did a little comparison shopping, and discovered to her surprise that by shopping at the Farmer’s Market last weekend, she saved 29% over what it would have cost her to buy the same items at the supermarket. Considering that she was shopping at Ferry Plaza Market, what’s so exciting about this is that Sam’s also been keeping track of her food expenditures all year — and what she’s finding is that for ordinary produce shopping she’s ahead by going to the market. I’ve shopped Farmer’s Markets for 20 years (scary, that thought — I’m…
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I made two skirts today and I made them without patterns! I used this great book — I hate patterns. I hate the tissue paper. I hate the fussiness of the directions. But I’ve also gotten very tired of spending fifty or sixty bucks on skirts that seem to have two seams and an elastic waist. Now, I’m by no means a seamstress, but even I can sew a skirt with two seams, an elastic waist, and a hem. So here’s the deal — I’m short. I’m not skinny. And I like clothes that don’t look like what everyone else…
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This morning, the food section of the San Francisco Chronicle covers the conflict between Carlo Petrini and the Ferry Plaza Market farmers. There’s a really interesting conversation going on in the comments over at Steve Sando’s blog — Sando, who runs Rancho Gordo is one of the farmers who sells his stuff at Ferry Plaza, and he’s on the board for the non-profit market. He also is one of the folks who met with Petrini when he was in town last week promoting the upcoming Slow Food Nation event next Spring. Petrini has a book out, and was supposed to…
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In my quest for a bread that is slightly more sophisticated than the no-knead bread, but yet, relatively easy to produce on a regular basis, I’ve been playing with Nancy Silverton’s Country white bread recipe. The first one was okay, but I didn’t like the way it baked up. I resisted the temptation to cook it in my Le Cruset pot, and well, the crust was too hard, too thick, and slightly burned on the bottom (I have a baking stone in my oven). Here’s the second try: This second loaf, while quite pretty, is a little tough. The challenge…
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I’ve been making the no-knead bread regularly all winter. A loaf a week or so — last week I made rolls from the dough for sandwiches — they were okay, not as good as the regular no-knead since I didn’t do them in the Le Cruset.Yesterday, I had a loaf proofing and I thought I’d experiment with baking it as a loaf. I have an old carbon-steel loaf pan — I don’t know where it came from — maybe the box of stuff my mother sent me when she gave me her KitchenAid Mixer — but I figured that I’d…
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Via Bookslut this morning: “You know, I thought that Leslie Bennetts was being a little hysterical when she called the reaction to her book The Feminine Mistake a ‘witch hunt.’ Then I scrolled down to the comments section.” I was raised by women who got left holding the bag, by a mother and a grandmother who got stuck trying to support children after having believed they’d never be responsible for the financial end of things. It wasn’t pretty (see below on serial financial disaster). I knew, in my bones, from the time I was about ten that if I wanted…
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This is my gorgeous new bathroom. Everything is new — the tile, the door (was on a different wall altogether) the sink, the curtains, new hot water heater installation — the tub is original, but the paint is new. Oh, and all of the plumbing installation below the bathroom is also new — the grubby old cast-iron pipe has all been replaced with very high-tech water lines after the plumbing repair services and emergency plumber that does plumbing repair in Greenville, SC saw the need to do some water leak detection. I have clean water running through new pipes with…
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Nothing says spring in Montana like six inches of new wet snow — I’m thrilled, actually — we need the water very badly — it’s been so dry that I had pulled out the sprinklers before I went to Arizona. My bathroom is all but done — we need to hang the towel bars etc… this afternoon, then it’ll be done! Of course, now I have to paint the pantry, kitchen and repaint my bedroom because the construction impacted all those rooms too, but the bathroom is done. And my fake kids are home for Easter week — we had…
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So, four days into my Arizona sojourn, I’ve come down with a massive chest cold. It might be the flu. It’s not hot here, but it’s not really cold enough to have built a fire during the day or to be wearing a big old fleece jacket I found lying around the house. I’m freezing. And I woke up with a chest that felt like when I used to get croup as a kid — I had to rocket off and stand in a hot shower for ten minutes before I could breathe. And so, about noon, after not eating…
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This morning’s blog find, via Serious Eats, is The Paupered Chef — I first really learned to cook when I was living in New York, working as an editorial assistant on a bunch of cookbook projects and, because I was an editorial assistant without rich parents in the suburbs to pay my rent, I was absolutely flat broke.