I haven’t had a chance to read Barbara Kingsolver’s new book, Animal Vegetable Miracle yet (it’s still out at the library, which I’m trying to use more because if I fail at living small, it’s on the book front), but the sheer volume of press it’s getting has had me thinking that it was time to revisit Joan Dye Grussow’s earlier book on the same subject, This Organic Life: Confessions of a Suburban Homesteader. One of the things that sold me on this house was the big, if fallow, vegetable garden in the back yard. Eight children grew up in…
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I was showing my house to some visitors from LA last week, and Brooke noticed the jams and preserves lined up at the top of my pantry. “Do you know someone who makes those for you?” she asked. “I did that,” I said. “Really?” she seemed surprised, as if she’d never known anyone who made jam. “If I’m here next summer will you show me how?” “Sure,” I told her. “It’s easy.” It got me thinking about skills that used to be considered perfectly ordinary: making jam, running up a skirt on a sewing machine, growing some of your own…
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A few groovy new sites I found: Leslie Land, the GreenGrower: check out the instructions for building a gorgeous twig garden arch in her blog. The Daily Green: has a piece on an upcoming scientific paper on colony collapse disorder. Also, in the New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert writes about colony collapse disorder and her own experience keeping bees. There’s also some great footage of the pulley system she’s devised to try to keep the bears out of her hives.
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Look what I found yesterday? One perfect little porcini. It was just off the trail, it’s little brown cap barely poking through the duff. We’ve had a few afternoon thunderstorms lately, and on a whim, I went up to the trail where I’ve sometimes found boletes … this was the only one I found, but look how beautiful it was. Here’s the cross section: Not one single bug. A perfect porcini. I ate it sautéed with butter and a little olive oil, with some garlic, and parsley from the garden. It was delicious. Perfect.
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If you’re like me, most travel involves investigation of grocery stores. The Guardian UK asks, “What do you stuff in your suitcase?” Last trip I took was to Seattle — I returned with the following: Paella pan from The Spanish Table spices from World Spice Market cooler full of oysters from Mutual Fish Asian vegetable seeds from Umajiwaya Question for you readers — what did you stuff in your suitcase last trip?
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From CNN: Eat your Yard From Salon: Why I pick lettuce for the Black Panthers
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Hot. It’s hot hot hot here. We’re going into another week of 100 degree weather, and with the crazy pace my day job at the Big Corporation lately, I took the opportunity to prep some cold food in advance. I roasted a baby chicken one night last week when it wasn’t so brutal out, and so this afternoon I pulled the breasts off. I was going to make some chicken salad, but I decided that cold roasted chicken breasts by themselves would give me a wider variety of options (that’s how hot it was last week, pulling the chicken breasts…
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Work at the Big Corporation has been crazy lately — and last night was one of those evenings where I just couldn’t figure out what to do about dinner. It was hot — we’re having a heat wave — and although I have some gorgeous fava beans, I wasn’t inspired to do anything with them. And they’re too gorgeous to squander — so I rattled around in the kitchen trying to figure out what to do about dinner. I must admit, I considered all of the following: mac and cheese in a box, fried chicken from the grocery store, ordering…
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Yes — that’s my dad, happy — hard to believe from the grumpy look on his face — and he’s happy because I sent him a big box of mac-and-cheese for his birthday. Dad lives in the Czech Republic and he too has a blog, PragueWriter.com From Dad: Post lady stopped by yesterday morning with your birthday gift. Wow, all that comfort food. Your chef friends would crack up if they knew what you sent your dad for his birthday. The really amazing thing is that the box hasn’t changed a bit in 60 years–still all that great Dow Chemical…
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This photo doesn’t do the soup justice — it is a much more vibrant green — a lovely live-plant sort of green. So, this morning I was confronted with half a dozen spinach plants that really did need to be picked — they’d bolted and well, it was beyond time to do something with them. I wanted soup, but spinach can get tricky — it gets that funny soapy taste on the back of your teeth — wanted to avoid that. I surfed around in the cookbooks for a while, and finally found a soup that sounded good in Rick…