It’s that time of year, the time of year when there’s suddenly a dearth of canning jars in my house, when I run out of white vinegar, when my sweetheart comes in each night and looks at another stack of jars and just shakes his head at my propensity to stock up for winter. “We do have supermarkets, you know,” he’ll note. Yes, yes, I know — but we have all this lovely produce right now, and I have a cookbook review to write this weekend, so I’ve been playing around. This week I put up eight beautiful (and gigantic)…
-
-
I pretty much quit making yogurt when I stopped buying raw milk from my rancher friend. However, this spring, I’ve been craving yogurt again — on fruit in the morning after my bike ride, and mixed with Aleppo pepper, salt, herbs and olive oil on almost everything else. So I’ve been buying yogurt, which bothers me on two fronts. For one thing, the plastic containers — they add up. I don’t use plastic anymore for food storage, and we don’t have good recycling here, and it just seems unnecessary. The other problem is that commercial yogurt has weird things added…
-
There’s a great piece over at Civil Eats this morning, Our Deadly, Daily Chemical Cocktail on the sheer amount of chemicals in the food most people eat. Here’s the quote that got me: Based on the anecdotal information I see in my client’s food journals, people eating processed and packaged foods are taking in exorbitant amounts of artificial ingredients and additives. Typically, a client will say something like, “I eat a bowl of cereal with low-fat milk, have yogurt for a snack, and a Subway sandwich for lunch.” While this sounds relatively harmless, here’s what it might actually look like…
-
A couple of weeks ago I took a stab at the Classic Rye Bread recipe that Michael Ruhlman ran on his site. My beloved likes rye bread, and had asked for a sandwich bread. The recipe was really simple, so I took a shot at it (minus the caraway seeds because neither of us really likes them). The first loaf I made was sort of heavy, and the crumb lacked elasticity. It wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t great. So this time, I did a mashup between the original recipe and the no-knead sourdough that I do weekly. I added a…
-
We’ve had about ten days of snow and temperatures, sometime daytime as well as nightime, in the single digits. We’ve had over two feet of new snow, which is good, because it insulated my one experimental hoop house where I planted cold-hardy greens. There’s one row each of chard, laccinato kale, bok choi, and arugula, plus I started komatsuna seedlings in mid-October (they’re tiny). I also transplanted a row of scallions between each row of greens, since they’re the one thing I buy most often during the winter. Here’s what the hoop house looked like before I dug up the…
-
I’ve been just the tiniest bit obsessed with peppers this year. I grew a bunch of different varieties — Hungarian Wax, Cayenne, Aci Sivri (a Turkish pepper), hot Italian cherry peppers, Spanish pequillo — and for once, I got a decent crop. I also bought a few bags of hot peppers from the local farmer’s market (as well as several bags of roasted New Mexico green peppers from another vendor). I made salsa out of the roasted green peppers, and I pickled just about everything else. For the pickled peppers I used Michael Symon’s Pickled Pepper recipe (via Michael Ruhlman).…
-
Fall must be upon us since I’m back to making no-knead bread. I bake once or twice a week during the winter — seems goofy to spend four bucks on a loaf of bread when I can make it myself, but in the summer I can’t bear to heat up the house any more than I need to. So this new loaf of bread felt like the beginning of cooler weather and more cooking. My sourdough starter is getting it’s mojo back, and this loaf came out so pretty that even though I’ve posted a zillion no-knead bread pictures on…
-
Seven chickens, it turns out, was a little more than my yard can really handle, and for the past several months, I’ve only been getting 2-4 eggs a day from the bunch. I’ve been trying to figure out what to do — and while I thought about trying to pawn them off on someone else, really, I knew all along that the responsible thing to do was to cull a few of them. (And for all of you Angry Vegans out there, I have heard your arguments, especially in light of my post at Ethicurean about how I don’t consider…
-
The hoops I built over the beds of greens worked so spectacularly well that I’ve hooped the tomato bed and planted the tomato seedlings a little early. I did discover that it makes a difference whether you use thin or heavy plastic — I think I’ve lost one seedling, and a couple others got a little burned up, but once I replaced the thin plastic with the heavier, the tomatoes are looking better. I think it’s not only the warmth, but the humidity. I also moved a bunch of greens out of one hooped bed, arugula, spinach, and some endive,…
-
[I’m up against a bunch of deadlines, and just don’t have any blogging mojo right now, so here’s an oldie but goodie from the archives. Back soon.] Behold, my gorgeous