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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This isn’t the greatest photo in the world, but here’s the 2008 pancetta in progress. This year I used the gorgeous pork I bought from my Milk Lady — it was significantly meatier than the commercial pork belly I bought last year. This proved something of a challenge when it came time to roll this puppy — it was more like wrestling than rolling, but I did finally get a nice, tight cylinder. I started out with the pancetta in the basement, because it’s cooler than upstairs, but it’s so dry down there (this is the west, after all). I…
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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…
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Just as I was reading this article in the SF Chronicle about people buying meat shares (which mentions my friend Bonnie over at Ethicurean and her meat CSA she’s starting), Matt, my butcher called to say that my pig was ready. Well, half a pig, actually. I bought it from my Milk Lady, and while it was stupendously expensive, what can I say? I grew up with the heirs to the Armour and Swift fortunes and well, I’d rather buy Isabelle’s kids new school clothes. Plus, if her pork is anything like the delicious Jersey milk or those eggs I…
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I don’t have a photo of last night’s yummy dinner because well, I ate it instead of photographing it, but it was one of those delicious surprises that happen sometimes when you’re just making something out of what you have. I had a bunch of tomatoes that were about to go bad on me — not enough for a real pot of sauce, three or four big-ish red ones, a few Jaunne Flammes and a handful of cherries. I dithered for a while because I didn’t really feel like cooking, I felt more like heating something up but I didn’t…
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Sigh. It’s that time of year again. My house has been wide open since the middle of June and in the last week it’s become clear that it’s time to close the windows and, double sigh, turn the heat on again. It’s time to come inside. It’s cold out there — in the low 40s at night, and we’ve had rain so it’s damp. No more sitting in the backyard under the Coleman lantern reading novels into the night. Even with the firepit going, it’s just too cold, and too damp, and unpleasant. Part of me loves this back-to-school feeling.…
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Over at the gorgeous A Way To Garden, Margaret asks what your tendency is, to savor or store the produce bounty that anyone with a garden confronts this time of year. I’ve written before about what an inspiration Joan Dye Grussow is to my garden project, and so I think there’s nothing more to say than, yeah, I’m a hoarder. So here’s this weekend’s tomato harvest. The weather has gotten cold, and I’ve had to cover the row of plants with plastic, so now we’re in that dodgy part of the year when I have no idea whether there will…