A weekend like this one, when someone decides to murder a bunch of civic-minded folks who have come to a supermarket to chat with their Congresswoman, well, it makes you think about all the things you can’t control in this world. So I came inside, and I cleaned my floors, and washed my slipcovers, and made an angel food cake with all those egg whites left over from the Christmas profiteroles and then made a loaf of Darina Allen’s Brown Soda Bread (since I was out of regular bread and the sourdough starter needed some time). I’ve got a leftover…
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Six years ago today Vivi and Lola arrived in our world. It was the first good thing that had happened in a while — both for me, and for my friend Nina, their mom. We’d both had a rough couple of years — people we loved had died, and we were both sort of losing our faith in the universe. And then this unlikely, and terrifying pregnancy Nina went through worked out. Two squalling babies with full heads of hair emerged, biting the doctors on their way out, and dropped into our world. They were so tiny that they scared…
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Funny, this summer, while the garden was in progress, I found myself uninspired, and not actually eating that much from it. Perhaps its because the season was so strange — once my early success with spring greens under hoops burned out (because it got hot, and the plants burned up), I wound up in this long odd period when there wasn’t much out there a person could eat right now, most of it was things like carrots and beets and tomatoes and peppers and beans that took a long long time this summer to ripen. However, I did put in…
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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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Continuing the discussion about cooking, and having time to cook, Michael Ruhlman threw down the gauntlet at the IACP event in Portland, Oregon last week when he called “bullshit” on the idea that we all lead such busy lives that we don’t have time to cook. Ruhlman’s point is that we all have the same number of hours in the day, and we choose how to use them — many of us may choose not to cook, but by claiming we’re “too busy” we’re just buying into propaganda the food industry has been selling us, nonstop, for the past 30…
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I came back from my week in Seattle and found that the hoop houses have been a huge success. The photo above is my first batch of spring greens — arugula, broccoli rabe, komatsuna, and a few dandelions from the yard. I was just thrilled. There were enough thinnings that I’ve been eating my own greens, fresh from the yard, for the first time since last summer. I have to say, I think part of the reason I came down with strep is that after growing my own veggies, the ones in the store, especially in the winter in Montana,…
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The LA Times Recyclist blog has an entry today about a subject near and dear to my heart — cloth tea towels and napkins instead of paper. First of all, I hate paper napkins — they’re thin and crumply and scratchy. My well-worn cloth napkins (average age at this point — 6-9 years) are soft and absorbant and nice. They don’t slip off your lap. They take care of even the messiest sauce. And when we’re done with them, they go in the hamper just outside the kitchen door. Like the blog poster, the key is quantity. Buy big packs…
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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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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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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…