A million years ago, when I was still in graduate school and working at the bookstore in Salt Lake City, I picked up Blue Jelly by Debby Bull. I loved this book. I tried my darndest to sell it to people but for some reason, the folks who wanted Bridges of Madison Country didn’t want to buy this odd little book about a woman who cured her broken heart by canning. Here’s my favorite quote: Canning may sound like a strange path out of the dark woods of despair, but all the other ways, from Prozac to suicide, are really…
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Maryanne just returned from a visit to her sister’s place in Western Colorado and she brought me peaches. Real peaches. Delicious, dead-ripe Western Slope peaches. Yes they’re a little lumpy — there are a few bruises and blemishes where some bug or something made a mark. But cut them open, and this is what you get — glistening ripeness all the way through, and a taste that’s almost floral. You may remember my dismay with the grocery store peaches I bought earlier this year. I swear, I’d rather only eat four peaches a year (which is what Maryanne brought me…
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I had a small fit earlier this week and decided, after mulling it for a long time, that I have to get rid of all my plastic food containers. Even though they’re #5 plastic, which from what I can find on the internets, aren’t leaking bisphenols into my food — but how do we really know? They said those hard, clear, polycarbonates were better than the softer plastics, and now look what they’re finding out. So I had one of those moments on Monday where I decided they were all bad, I cleaned out the drawer where they lived, and…
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Monday night I got a phone call from my cousin Jason’s wife. I thought she was calling to thank me for the baby present I’d sent a few days earlier, but it turns out she was calling because my 95 year old grandmother, who lives on our farm with Jason and Jackie and my Aunt Molly and her husband had been taken to the hospital and was going in for emergency surgery. She’s 95. Surgery is always daunting when you’re that old. She’s been pretty open the last couple of years about being ready to go … “I wish I…
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The San Francisco Chronicle had an article a couple of weeks ago about pastured chickens, followed closely by this article in the NY Times questioning whether “cage free” as it’s practiced in chicken houses around the country is really any more humane than battery chicken. I’ve been buying eggs for a couple of years from a local outfit called Willow Bend Eggs. They are the most astonishing eggs I’ve ever eaten. They’ve ruined me for all other eggs. They’re brown, and large, and the yolks are the deepest marigold color you’ve ever seen and they stand up all perky and…
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After last week’s post on cleaning out my freezer, my old friend Constance emailed me from Taiwan (where she has lived ever since she married the Chinese Pop Star). Constance wrote: I suggest that you go Vietnamese with your Game and Pork burgers- I did an Indochine Burger thing with Buffalo and pork at my parents’ this summer. Very tasty, basil, fish-sauce,green onions,ginger and peanut butter or sesame paste. Nice with a little parsley and basil mayonnaise Hmm. I thought. Yum. I thought. Constance has always been one of the best cooks I know, so this afternoon when I took…
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There’s no ground lamb in town right now. You don’t think of meat as being a seasonal product, but around here, lambs are slaughtered in the early fall, and last years supply seems to have run completely dry. I was looking for lamb because it’s also that time of year when we all look into our freezers and see what’s lurking in there. It’s time to clean out/use up last year’s stuff before we put up this years vegetables and meat. So I was downstairs last week looking at the: glut of chicken carcasses. It’s still too hot to think…
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Fire season arrived in our neck of the woods yesterday. There have been a bunch of big fires burning west of us, over by Missoula, but until now we’d managed to duck the worst of it. A lightning strike set of a small blaze Friday afternoon and yesterday, the winds kicked up and it blew. Those aren’t clouds in the photo, it’s smoke. And you can’t really see from my point-and-shoot, but the clouds of smoke were tinged a weird orange from within, from the gasses burning inside them. Very spooky. And this morning we’re swimming in a thick layer…
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When I first moved here, I joined the gym because, well, everyone tells you joining a gym is a good thing, and it wasn’t very expensive, and it was only a block away from my house. Like most people, I went pretty regularly for a while, and then I think there was a span of about a year and a half where I paid my monthly dues and never darkened the door. Finally, I quit (which I’d been avoiding because I didn’t want to tell them that I was quitting), and I started walking the dogs in the morning instead.…
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The heat wave in July was both record-breaking and unpleasant. But look what it brought. Tomatoes! Basil! Breakfast in summer is toast rubbed lightly with a clove of garlic, smeared with goat cheese, and topped with sliced tomato from the garden and shredded basil. A drop or two of nice olive oil and some fleur de sel and well … what more could anyone want for breakfast? For the record (which I’m terrible about keeping garden records), the first tomatoes this year were the Whippersnapper cherries, followed by Galina (a yellow cherry that spreads all over the garden, but produces…