Ugh — it was one of those days when I Could Not Get Anything Done. I mean, I got some stuff done — the chickens were mucked out — poor babies. It snowed a foot yesterday, then went into the 50s today, so my backyard is a lake. I got the chicken coop cleaned out and nice new shavings put inside, then bought them some new straw for bedding in their run, which seems to have put them high enough to be out of the wet — but my backyard was a lake, and the wind blew gusts into the…
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Our nation might be in the middle of a political garbage fire, but we all still have to eat. One of the best ways I know to take care of oneself, and keep from going batshit crazy, is to cook. And especially to cook for other people. Our friend Shefije came over last weekend to take a break before tackling her Master’s thesis, and I made a batch of these for her with za’atar, the Middle Eastern spice blend. These are a riff off a recipe I found on the Guardian UK site for a Za’atar bun and since za’atar supposed…
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I’ve been waiting and waiting for “the Utah Fruit Guys” to come to town, and Wednesday evening, there they were at the Farmer’s Market. I did my graduate work at UC Davis, and the University of Utah, both of which are located in the midst of serious orchard country — and it ruined me for grocery-store stone fruit. So I wait. Every year, I wait and wait for the Utah guys, or sometimes we really luck out and get a truckload up from Colorado’s western slope — but we wait for real fruit. And then we make jam. I was…
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Enough talking about making, let’s get to work — it’s summer, and our Hutterite neighbors are filling the local grocery with their lovely green beans — so today it’s dilly beans. They’re so easy, and they’re a huge improvement on the sludgy canned green beans I grew up on (if you want to preserve plain beans for winter, I’d go with the blanch-and-freeze method. They stay much nicer than the pressure canned ones.) So, I use Michael Symon’s pickling brine recipe from his Live to Cook. It’s dead simple — half and half vinegar to water, 2 tablespoons each salt and…
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Thanks to Michael Ruhlman and his bread baking app for the iPhone, I have nearly mastered the baguette. Out here in the sticks, we don’t have access to the kinds of artisan breads that I could get even at my not-swanky supermarket in California. I live with a man for whom good carbs are really crucial — and who loves loves loves good bread. I’ve been making the no-knead bread for ages (as my many posts on that subject attest), but it needs a long lead time and an overnight fermentation. There have been a few times recently when I’ve…
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Last spring when I had backyard greens to spare, I put up several quarts of “green soup.” And boy, am I glad now. It’s winter. It’s not that cold, but it’s grey and windy and grey — and nothing is growing in my garden and yet, down in the basement freezer, there are quarts of this lovely soup, made with my very own greens. A saving grace. Green soup is very easy. Wash and chop greens of any variety — most of last springs’ soups were made with a mix of broccoli rabe, komatsuna, spinach, and mustard greens. In a…
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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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My first post-deadline, post-travel weekend and although I was woefully short on new fiction pages produced, I did get some long-neglected house-and-garden tasks done. First of all, I’m feeling sanguine about winter because, at long last, we got our whole pig! It took a long time this year because, well, the small packer/butcher operation we buy from sold more post-fair pig specials than they had pigs. So we had to wait for them to get more local pigs (they promised me it wasn’t a CAFO pig), and then for them to make the delicious hams and bacon. There’s nothing like…
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With apologies to my blog readers who have seen this bread before, but after several years, what I find interesting is how the weather affects my bread baking. I can’t get a decent loaf to work for me in the summer when it’s hot, but when my kitchen goes back to it’s usual 65-70 degrees, I can make a bomber loaf of bread. This is the no-knead bread I’ve been making for years now. Three cups flour (this is one cup each of King Arthur bread, all-purpose and whole-wheat flours, with a nice sprinkling of Bob’s Red Mill Dark Rye…
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Here’s the fresh cheese I made out of Home Made, a cookbook I’ll be reviewing for Bookslut later this week. It’s a good simple cheese that doesn’t require any special equipment. It is even better topped with the Apple Chutney I made (sort of a mashup between the recipes in Put ’em Up! by Sherri Brooks Vinton and in Tart and Sweet by Kelly Geary and Jessie Knadler). I put up 10 half-pints of this one, and had a tiny bit leftover for an afternoon snack, which was delicious.