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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Today was like being let out of jail. The sun was shining. There was no wind. The sun, did I mention? It was shining. It was warm outside — 40s up into the 50s. I cleaned up the yard (dog poop patrol), cut some hollyhock stalks and put them over where I want hollyhocks to grow next year. I turned over a garden bed. I pulled all the dead stuff off the herb bed so the parsley and the chives can start coming back. I pruned a couple of errant branches off the greengage plum tree. Then I hung out…
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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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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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Tonigh night I was fried. I went out the last two nights, and while it was so much fun last night carving pumpkins with the kids (thanks Dad for that perennially-scary pumpkin face you taught me when I was little) well, the grownups overindulged just a tiny bit, and then today was crazy at work. By seven, I was rattling around trying to figure out what to eat for dinner. I wasn’t that hungry, but I wanted something other than cheese and crackers. And that’s when the antelope bolongese that I put up with the terrifying pressure canner came in…
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I managed to get my herbs in before the big snow which was a relief, especially as it took months for the shiso to germinate and I’m curious about using it. I put the herbs on this table in my mud room last winter, and while they didn’t die, they didn’t exactly thrive either. There’s a window directly opposite the table, and it is the south-facing side of the house, but it doesn’t get a whole lot of sunlight, especially on those gloomy days. So I bought a couple of brackets and a timer, and rigged up one of the…
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Here’s what I woke up to this morning — yup, that’s snow. About four inches — and it’s supposed to keep coming down all weekend. Yesterday I woke up to a hard frost — I went to check the tomatoes and they were dead. Dead dead dead dead dead. So I pulled them up and threw their soggy carcasses into the compost. I salvaged enough late ones to make this big pot of frostbitten-tomato sauce. That’s the last of the tomatoes, a couple of carrots, and a sautee’d onion — later I added a can of Muir Glen organic…
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It’s all harvest all the time here at LivingSmall right now — I put tomatoes up this weekend in the terrifying pressure canner, and there’s all that kale and chard I’m going to have to deal with at some point — but in the meantime my Roma beans finally came in — they got such a late start I didn’t think they’d come through, but they’ve been producing like gangbusters for a few weeks now. I’ve taken to cooking them up in big batches, then freezing them into what I like to think of as hockey pucks. One of the…
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As anyone who has been reading here for a while knows, I’m no vegetarian (I tried in college, but I missed sausage, and lamb, and bacon, and cheeseburgers). But I have to admit that with rising food prices, and global warming, and my increasing unwillingness to eat meat that wasn’t raised by someone I know (which means I’m paying a lot more for meat) — well, I’m eating less meat. Mark Bittman wrote a rather inspirational post about this earlier this summer that got me thinking — it’s really easy to just slip into that meat-veg-starch dinner formula. And it’…
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My trip last week was a great success — my mother and I had a very fun time together, and we found two apartment buildings that look interesting and cool and that she can afford — but it was a busy week. I put just over 1000 miles on the rental car, but the trip did have some very restorative aspects, one of which was the amount of time I got to spend in my friend Posy’s garden. Because there was no wi-fi connection in the guest house, I had to take refuge under this beautiful pergola, which looked out…