My kitchen is the one part of my house that has still, after almost 10 years, not been renovated. It’s one of those tricky cases — if I pull the appliances out to paint, I might as well replace the floor. And if I’m replacing the floor then maybe I should have that problematic weird wall pulled out. But I don’t really have the funding to do all that, and well, the kitchen works surprisingly well in it’s unrenovated state, and so, nothing gets done. Sigh. It can be helpful to consult experts before diving into a big project like…
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From this morning’s paper, an AP article about Thanksgiving dinner that had both of us apoplectic with …. with … with outrage at the manner in which the corporate media normalizes Corporate Food. Here’s the lede: No need for a salt shaker on the Thanksgiving table: Unless you really cooked from scratch, there’s lots of sodium already hidden in the menu. … The traditional Thanksgiving fixings show how easy sodium can sneak into the foods you’d least expect. Sneak into your food?!? The salt doesn’t “sneak into” your food — the Big Ag corporations and the Big Food companies put it…
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Sigh. Every year. The endless parade of newspaper and magazine articles, the FoodTV episodes, the endless parade of drek from the media implying that cooking Thanksgiving dinner is on par with neurosurgery, wing walking, base jumping. It’s just a turkey. Thaw it and roast it — make a few side dishes, call the people you love and gather them around your table. That’s it. Doesn’t have to be good china, doesn’t have to be 14 dishes, doesn’t even have to be 14 people — just cook something and invite people to share it with you. Now granted, I learned to…
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For some reason, the annual consumerist frenzy of “Christmas” seems even more dissonant to me than usual. It’s clear there’s a class thing with the Christmas frenzy — there are people for whom the once-a-year pile of stuff under the tree is really really important, and there are people for whom it’s not. I have to admit, I grew up in a family who mostly believed in keeping it simple at Christmas. And although as a kid I was bummed by my parents’ knee-jerk rejection of anything like the “toy of the year” as consumerist claptrap (well, there was also…
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One reason I’ve hardly been blogging at all these past few months is that I’ve had a series of interesting, and fairly lucrative, freelance gigs on the side that have taken up what writing time I had. I like these. They’re interesting, and provide me a tiny bit of financial cushion, and keep me from being entirely dependent on my day job at the Big High Tech Company Who Keeps Laying People Off. The downside to this has been that I’ve been working too much. My weekends are pencilled out for the Freelance Gig, and there’s always that low-level deadline…
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When Patrick died, my manager at work said to me “Welcome to the club no one wants to be in.” Her first husband had dropped dead one day after carrying the groceries into the house. “I knew he was gone before he hit the floor,” she told me the time we talked about it, late at night, stuck in a bar in the Denver airport after a missed flight. She had a two year old at the time. One reason I grow impatient every year with the 9/11 coverage, is that it’s predicated on the idea that Americans had never…
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This month at Bookslut, I review three terrific books about making your own. Click here to read my review: D.I.Y. Delicious: Recipes and Ideas for Simple Food from Scratch Home Made Tart and Sweet: 101 Canning and Pickling Recipes for the Modern Kitchen
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It’s that time of year, the time of year when there’s suddenly a dearth of canning jars in my house, when I run out of white vinegar, when my sweetheart comes in each night and looks at another stack of jars and just shakes his head at my propensity to stock up for winter. “We do have supermarkets, you know,” he’ll note. Yes, yes, I know — but we have all this lovely produce right now, and I have a cookbook review to write this weekend, so I’ve been playing around. This week I put up eight beautiful (and gigantic)…
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Although we need more rain, I did manage to find about a pound and a half of chanterelles this weekend. Now it’s still so dry that there weren’t very many but mushroom hunting was cut short by the very dramatic collapse of one small dog. Granted, he has no achilles tendon on one side and wears an orthotic, but he went full tilt until we were about a mile away from the car, then sat down, panting, and wanted to be carried back. After a refreshing cooling off period in a creek, we walked, very slowly, and very limpily back to the…
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The new chickens have finally started to lay — one wee pullet egg a day. They’re about the size of bantam eggs — maybe half the size of a normal egg. But lovely bright marigold yolks that stand right up off the surface of the white. It’s such a relief to be getting my own eggs again. No offense to any of the very fine ranch egg purveyors here in the valley, but I there’s no comparison between an egg from your own backyard to an egg you buy from someone. Next chore, sending the rooster off to his new…