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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When I first moved to California in my 20s, I was shocked at the amount of stone fruit going to waste in peoples’ yards. To a Midwestern kid who grew up thinking that a ripe peach in February was a great treat, the sight of peaches by the bushel rotting on the ground because someone had a peach tree in their yard that had been planted as an ornamental and they didn’t want to deal with it — well, I was genuinely shocked. And now I have a yard with two different varieties of plums, and four apple trees. The…
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Grist links to a piece on urban gardening and the class divide that still plagues the sustainable food movement. The article covers why the folks who run the Food Project decided to keep selling in their own neighborhood and not at the fancy downtown market where they could make more money, and perhaps assure the sustainability of their own organization. Steve Sando tours industrial bean fields and comes to understand why people are so astonished at how great his beans taste (really folks — his beans are delicious). I ordered several packages of beans from Steve last spring when we…
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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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Since I seem to have lost the day to a series of lighting fixtures I put up (don’t even ask about the screw with the stripped threads, and the hacksaw, and the swearing …), here’s some Friday Links to keep everyone entertained: Had lunch today with another Livingston Blogger: Go check out Livingston, I presume Found an interesting piece over at Ethicurean on the sort of small meat processers that we depend on around here. I’m planning to buy a lamb this fall from my dog groomer, and without Sheep Mountain Processing, I’d be sunk. Check out Postcards from Cowboyland …
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I had my friend Margo over for dinner tonight and I experimented with this recipe from the LA Times Food pages: Braised Romano Beans with Pancetta and Cherry Tomatoes. Except, in my usual fashion, I messed with it a little. I don’t have a ton of tomatoes right now (and the Whippersnapper Cherry isn’t worth growing — it’s has no flavor — it’s like a little tiny grocery store tomato — very disappointing. Unlike Galina, which is a sprawling yellow indeterminate cherry tomato that will take over your whole garden, but which will reward you with fabulous, juicy, tomato-y yellow…
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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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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…