Raymond wants to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas. And he says he’s sorry about eating the fluffy pompom off the hat (but it was so like a bunny and he just couldn’t help himself).
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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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Winter has arrived with a bang here in southern Montana. That’s my patio furniture which is suddenly buried. The storm came in yesterday, but the real snow seems to have fallen overnight. I shoveled yesterday, and it was a only a couple of inches of powdery fluff; this morning, nearly a foot, and a little heavier (but I think that’s because the ground was still warm). I don’t dare peek in the hoop house, because it’s supposed to go down below zero tonight, and I’m hoping the snow will insulate. We’ll see if anything survives. It’s slated to run a…
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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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This time of year the only safe place to hike is Yellowstone, so since it was a gorgeous day yesterday, off we went. It was the last day that the roads are open, so we headed down to Swan Lake flats and took off to the west. About an hour in, we saw two grizzlies, high on a ridge to the south of us, eating grubs or something. I don’t have a photo, but they were unbelievably beautiful up on the high ridge with the sunlight gleaming off their guard hairs. They were illuminated. Meanwhile, a couple of magpies were…
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This month in my Bookslut Column, I take a look at Recipes from an Italian Summer and Around My French Table: More Than 300 Recipes from My Home to Yours. And for even more fun, Dorie Greenspan herself tweeted yesterday that she liked my “thoughtful” review. I’m always shocked that anyone out there actually sees anything I post … nice surprise.
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I got an email yesterday from a local organization that is hosting a fundraising dinner in mid-October. The chef they’re bringing in wanted “wild-foraged greens” on the menu. Sounds good, doesn’t it? Wild. Foraged. Local. etc … In mid-October in Yellowstone?! Look, chef types, if you’re going to go all wild-and-local at least pay some slight attention to where you are. Yellowstone in October will, in most normal years, have experienced it’s first snows. And wild greens? wild greens are a spring food. Read Patience Grey. Or even Euell Gibbons (whose books still hold up). By October most “wild greens”…
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So, last night I was feeling festive, and suggested to the Sweetie that we go out to celebrate. I put on girl clothes, and some makeup, and he cleaned up, and off we went. We live in a very small town. The options for dining out are very limited. There are two Chinese restaurants of the old-fashioned chop suey variety, a Mexican restaurant that isn’t bad, but is heavy on the shredded yellow cheese, a Bistro, an Italian restaurant owned by a very good friend (closed on Mondays), an inexplicably popular rib and chop house that I don’t like because…
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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 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…