There are mornings when you just can’t quite summon the will to proceed, mornings where you’re groggy, and dreading your job, and feeling like it’s all a long treadmill of the same old same old and here you are again. On those mornings, sometimes all it takes is a good egg. A nice piece of toast with some butter, and a three minute egg you bought from your local chicken farmer. I buy mine from Isabelle, my milk lady, and while they are very expensive — about six dollars a dozen, they are really great eggs. I say this as…
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Here’s the winter herb garden on the mudroom porch. As you can see, the shiso and the basil bit the dust. It was just too cold out there. The funny thing is that for a long time all of them were just sort of dormant. The mint did nothing for months — I did have a little aphid infestation on the mint when I first brought it in last fall, but even after I killed them off, the mint just sat there with these little tiny nascent leaves that never did anything. Then about three weeks ago, it came back…
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The last two nights remind me why I spent all that time last summer putting food away. Even though I believe that Sunday’s require the smell of something braising, that warm scent of something bubbling gently filling the house, this Sunday was so gorgeous that I went outside all day long. By dinnertime, I was hungry, but not particularly interested in something meaty. So I rummaged around in the freezer until I found a couple of stuffed cabbage rolls I put away last summer. I went on a saffron-rice-and-leftovers kick last summer; in particular, a saffron-rice-and-leftovers wrapped in cabbage leaves…
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It’s funny, when I make up a dish, I don’t really think of it as a recipe. I was watching the Superbowl with a couple of friends the other night and I told them how I’d cooked a pork shoulder roast that afternoon even though I knew I wasn’t going to be home that evening. It just feels wrong not to have something cooking on a Sunday afternoon (and leftovers are what I live on all week). I was saying that I’d sort of crossed the Italian pork braised in milk technique with something Southwestern-y because a girlfriend sent me…
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Mornings in Montana lately have featured subzero temperatures and, as is the case this morning, 30-50mph gusts blowing right up against my kitchen windows (that sun porch I want is seeming less like an indulgence and more like an investment in insulation on mornings like this). At any rate, it’s been deepest winter here. Dark. Cold. Windy. And so, I’ve become addicted to this stuff, Zergut Hot Ajvar: It’s from Bulgaria. It contains peppers, eggplant, sugar, sunflower oil, salt, garlic and hot peppers, oh and some acetic acid (Vitamin C). It’s bright red. It tastes like summer. The jar says…
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One of my projects for 2009 is to take up Bob del Grosso’s challenge — the Fanatic’s Proposal. I’m going to see how little food I can buy, how much of that food I can buy locally, and how much I can live out of my own garden, pantry, and freezers. So here’s the roundup of what I bought and ate this first week of the project. Bought: 1 3lb. bag navel oranges 1 doz farm eggs 8 lbs organic potatoes (trade for 2 gal. milk paid for but not received) 4 bottles cheap red wine (>6 bucks each), 1…
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Over at Grist, Tom Philpott has a fascinating proposal for how to use the stimulus money to stimulate the local food movement. Among his proposals: reinvest in local food infrastructures: slaughterhouses, meat lockers, and school kitchens cook real food in schools again — he proposes a Cook for America program for culinary school grads mired in debt. Based on the Teach for America program, it would get real food, cooked on site, back into our schools. The comments are also worth reading because Grist’s readers have some terrific ideas. I know that I would not be able to eat as…
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It’s a recessionary January, and I came into this new year wondering how on earth my credit card balances has mushroomed like they have? With the state of the economy being what it is, and layoffs happening right and left, I find myself in a bad position. A position that all this LivingSmall stuff was supposed to protect me from. So I’ve been drawing up budgets, and it’s a good thing I have full freezers and pantries and a garden that will eventually thaw out and come back to life, because if I’m to get out from under this terrifying…
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As I noted last week, I’m taking up Bob del Grosso’s challenge — the Fanatic’s Proposal this year. I’m going to see how little food I can buy, how much of that food I can buy locally, and how much I can live out of my own garden, pantry, and freezers. So here’s the roundup of what I bought and ate this first week of the project. Bought: 6 Tangerines 1 bunch scallions 1 gallon farm milk Cooked/Ate: breakfast: toast with melted cheese, or breakfast of champions last week’s ham and bean, and escarole-potato soup (lunches) turnip greens from the…
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I’ve been making no-knead bread for a couple of years now using the following formula: 3 cups flour (1 c. all-purpose, 1 c. bread, 1 c. whole-wheat) 1 tablespoon salt 1/4 teaspoon yeast 1 1/2 cups sourdough starter 1 cup water This makes a nice loaf of bread, but I only bake about once a week, and I was getting tired of wasting so much flour to re-animate my sourdough starter every time. I’ve been intrigued for a while with the idea of sourdough starters that aren’t a slurry, but rather are dough. Martha Stewart had a guy on at…