Roast Chicken to Cure the Blues My darling brother has a new girlfriend, and of course, when you are no longer young, new relationships tend to come with some baggage. The Nice Girlfriend had a tough day yesterday, her baggage was all noisy with her about the fact that she’s moving on in life, and she was a little blue. She’s also renovating her house, and domestic disarray never helps when feeling blue. Plus, the brother has a cold, and was a little low himself. So late in the afternoon they came over and we sat on the new, comfy…
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Things you can do instead of planning Part Two of your new novel. I finished Part One the other day … well I didn’t exactly “finish” it but I do have a draft that seems sort of alive and is stable enough that I have to stop tinkering with it and go on to the next part of the book. I’m trying not to dwell on the fact that it’s taken me almost four years to get to this point, nor to dwell on the fact that I’m back at the edge of terra incongnita, that place where I have…
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Even cafeteria Asian food tastes amazing after four months in southeastern Montana, which despite its many many charms is an ethnic food wasteland. I’m in San Jose for work this week, and today was something of an epic. I left Livingston at five this morning, only to run into whiteout conditions on Bozeman Pass. Who needs coffee before an early-morning flight when you can have a big old jolt of adrenaline? (Don’t worry Dad, I’m fine.) So, by the time I got to Cisco, I was hungry, but I had a lot to do, and about fifty emails to answer,…
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Marion Cunningham, one of my food heros, has a great piece in today’s San Francisco Chronicle about the demise of family cooking and mealtime. I don’t get it. My family life as a kid was pretty chaotic, but my mother always cooked, and taught both my brother and I to cook along with her. Most of my happy memories of my Mom’s house revolve around days we spent cooking, either experimenting with new dishes, or cooking things we all knew we liked. I’ll never forget the first curry I ever made, with instructions from a woman I remember only as…
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The Buffalo Stew went over well … it didn’t in the final analysis taste all that different from beef stew, but it was delicious. Bill and Patrick ate big plates full, and the dogs are happily scrapping over the short rib bones in the living room.
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Book Alert For the past couple of weeks I’ve been reading Buffalo for the Broken Heart: Restoring Life to a Black Hills Ranch, by Dan O’Brien. He’s one of those writers who other writers rave about, but who isn’t well known to the general public, but he should be. This is a terrific book about O’Brien’s long struggle to keep his ranch afloat, and the huge leap of faith he took in the early nineties when he converted the ranch from cattle to buffalo. It’s also about the ecosystem of the great plains, and how we’ve messed it up, and…
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Vegetable Experiment of the Day — Braised Endive One reason I’m experimenting with vegetables is that I’m planning my garden for next summer, and I don’t want to wind up with a freezer full of fine organic veggies that I don’t like to eat. Also, I’ve been living the past couple of years with my brother, a guy who won’t eat “wet leaves,” so now that we’re no longer roommates, I’ve been going to town with wet leaves. About a week ago, I bought some endive. At least I think it’s endive. It’s a variety that isn’t as curly as…
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Cauliflower and Carrot Gratin Who would have thunk it? This was outrageously delicious — and to think, I’d been about to write it off as a disaster. Here’s the deal, I’m trying to widen my veggie repetoire, and I seemed to remember an entry early in the Julie/Julia Project about cauliflower gratin, so I thought I’d give it a whirl. I added carrots to mine because, well, it was a small cauliflower and it was so white … I like a little color in my food. Here’s what I did: cut the cauliflower into florets and cut one big carrot…
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The Meat Problem The problem for me is not whether one should eat meat, but how to eat meat without supporting factory farming. Here in Montana, several of my neighbors accomplish this by only eating wild meat, which aside from raising your own animals, does seem to like one of the least hypocritical paths out there. When it’s a deer, or elk, or antelope one has killed and butchered oneself, there’s no denying that death is an integral part of the cycle, nor that we can eat meat and retain our innocence of this fact. It’s been years since I’ve…
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How to Save a Soup Because I am a slightly obsessive person, once I discovered Julie Powell’s amazing blog, the Julie/Julia project, I went back and read the entire thing (thank goodness she only started in August, but on the other hand, the writing is so terrific, that I wish there had been more). As I was driving back from Bozeman with a carload of groceries and organic meat (more about that later) I became fixated on the memory of a garlic potato soup with saffron she described on November 20 and decided I had to make it. I have…