This is my “new” Griswold cast-iron skillet and it’s changed the way I think about cast iron altogether. I’ve had a 12-inch Lodge skillet forever, and it’s great for searing meat or for big stir-fries, but it’s really heavy, and the skillet surface is sort of pebbly. This new skillet (which I got in an antique store) is smaller, 8 inches, and lighter, and has a smooth surface. This is the best pan I own. I love this pan. Because it was old it was pretty much seasoned, and with a swipe of olive oil after each use, it’s non-stick…
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So Bob over at The Hunger Artist has thrown down the gauntlet with his Fanatics Proposal, item number one of which is “Do not buy food.” I’ve been kicking this around because I have so much food I put up, and so much food in my pantry, and quite a lot of pork and lamb and antelope and elk in the freezer, and yet, I still find myself in the grocery store a couple of times a week. Part of it is habit, part of it is entertainment, but I’d been thinking that this winter in particular, as I work…
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Yesterday was the Day of the Cabbages. Since Christmas, I’ve been strangely obsessed with cabbage — am I deficient in vitamin C perhaps? I wonder …. My last batch of sauerkraut fermented up just fine, but unfortunately, the plastic bucket in which I made it retained a whiff of the Mrs Meyers cleaner I’d used to scrub the bucket out, so I wound up throwing out the whole batch. Yesterday I found a lovely 3 gallon stoneware crock at a local antiques store, so it was time to fire up another batch of sauerkraut. I did pretty much the same…
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The wind is howling outside this morning — a morning that dawned slow and grey although it looks like the sun might try to peek through sometime later. Drifts are piling up — all that lovely, sparkly, dry snow that has fallen in the last week or so is swirling into strange shapes. I love winter here. Summer I spend outside in the garden, driven out into the yard from the time I wake up until it’s finally time to shut down the kerosene lantern hanging from the apple branch and go inside to bed. But winter has a different…
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There’s a pretty good article in the New York Times this morning about the way people are economizing on their food budgets. The shocking part, to me anyhow, is that the article cites several families who were eating out four to five nights a week. What? Perhaps I’m old, or cheap, or a misanthrope or something, but this seems really shocking to me. Of course, it might be different if you live in a big city. We have a very limited number of restaurants here in town, and I remember when I was young and broke and working two jobs…
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My beloved Milk Lady recently sold her calves, so my weekly gallon of milk has been coming topped with a full quart of cream. Which is a lot of cream. This weekend, I had about a pint of cream left from last week when looking at my new delivery, and so, I decided to make butter. I found this terrific tutorial over on Saveur which was very helpful. I used my trusty old KitchenAid, and while I’m sure one isn’t supposed to make whipped cream before making butter, I did discover that the gorgeous Jersey cream whips up beautifully. The…
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I’ve been listening to a lot of back episodes of The Splendid Table lately. My local NPR station doesn’t carry it, but I’ve been downloading episodes to my iPod and listening to them in the car or at the gym. Apparently, they had a year-long listener experiment in locavorism — they selected a dozen or so readers who tried to eat 80% local food for one year and blogged about it. So yesterday I had to do some errands and I was listening to the host check in with one of the locavore eaters, this is perhaps the second one…
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While it was indeed a lovely drive up the Clearwater river yesterday on the way home from Seattle, it made for a very long day in the car — I didn’t get back until nearly ten and I was all road buzzy when I got here. But today was lovely — walked the dog, did some grocery shopping, and then tried to decide what to do with the requisite homecoming chicken. I seem to be compelled to cook a chicken after returning from a trip. I’ve written any number of times about my mystical belief in the power of a…
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So, these past few weeks have been killer at work — we’re moving to some new tools, which is exciting and frustrating and involves a lot of training, and of course, everyone is a little nervous in the current economic climate — so it’s been long days at the computer after which I reel out of my home office slightly stunned that I can be as blinky and fried as I am considering that I haven’t even left the house. The weirdness of telecommuting — your job comes to you. However, the silver lining has been that I was slightly…
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I have a confession to make. I don’t really like salads much, particularly not in winter. Salad just seems so cold somehow. However, I am a big fan of what I like to call “winter salad” — a sort of cole slaw. Cabbage, red onion, carrot all shredded up and dressed with lime juice, salt, olive oil and some New Mexico chile. It’s crunchy and tart and goes with just about any sandwich or lunchtime quesadlila. I made this one last week from one of my four savoy cabbages I grew this summer, and the onions and carrots also came…