Because it’s Friday, and because we ate and drank just a tiny bit too much last night at Patrick’s Posthumous Birthday party (which was delightful and jolly and because our friend Jim hung Patrick’s picture on the restaurant wall, it sort of felt like he was among us) — this morning LivingSmall brings you that staple of the exhausted blogger: a list of links. Hugh Fearnly-Wittingstall expounds on the joys of hunting mushrooms (and I wish I lived in England so I could have gotten the free mushroom guide with my copy of the Guardian). If it ever manages to…
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Somehow we’ve managed to live a little too large here at LivingSmall, the debt-to-savings ratio has gotten itself upside down, and so we’re trying to cut back wherever we can. I’m the kind of person who buys pantry staples when I’m feeling existentially anxious, and so, in the spirit of economizing, I’ve found myself looking in the pantry and remembering that I can feed myself a whole week’s worth of lunches, for example, off a nice pot of pea soup. Pea soup costs almost nothing. Today I made a batch — I pulled a couple of carrots and a late…
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Somehow the subject of canning is everywhere on the interenets, and it’s spawned a bastardized version of “Surfin Safari” inside my head. You’ve got a lot of time to think of things like this while waiting for water to boil. On the home front — I put up a couple of jars of marinated eggplant last night. Our local truck farm had these gorgeous mottled purple eggplants, and since the eggplants in my garden are not going to win the annual race with frost, I snapped up a bunch. I bought that big Silver Spoon cookbook when it was all…
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A million years ago, when I was still in graduate school and working at the bookstore in Salt Lake City, I picked up Blue Jelly by Debby Bull. I loved this book. I tried my darndest to sell it to people but for some reason, the folks who wanted Bridges of Madison Country didn’t want to buy this odd little book about a woman who cured her broken heart by canning. Here’s my favorite quote: Canning may sound like a strange path out of the dark woods of despair, but all the other ways, from Prozac to suicide, are really…
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Maryanne just returned from a visit to her sister’s place in Western Colorado and she brought me peaches. Real peaches. Delicious, dead-ripe Western Slope peaches. Yes they’re a little lumpy — there are a few bruises and blemishes where some bug or something made a mark. But cut them open, and this is what you get — glistening ripeness all the way through, and a taste that’s almost floral. You may remember my dismay with the grocery store peaches I bought earlier this year. I swear, I’d rather only eat four peaches a year (which is what Maryanne brought me…
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When I first moved to California in my 20s, I was shocked at the amount of stone fruit going to waste in peoples’ yards. To a Midwestern kid who grew up thinking that a ripe peach in February was a great treat, the sight of peaches by the bushel rotting on the ground because someone had a peach tree in their yard that had been planted as an ornamental and they didn’t want to deal with it — well, I was genuinely shocked. And now I have a yard with two different varieties of plums, and four apple trees. The…
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Grist links to a piece on urban gardening and the class divide that still plagues the sustainable food movement. The article covers why the folks who run the Food Project decided to keep selling in their own neighborhood and not at the fancy downtown market where they could make more money, and perhaps assure the sustainability of their own organization. Steve Sando tours industrial bean fields and comes to understand why people are so astonished at how great his beans taste (really folks — his beans are delicious). I ordered several packages of beans from Steve last spring when we…
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Let’s all try to go out and affect some kind of change today — no matter how small. (Me, I’m still trying to figure out how to recycle that plastic — can’t do it in Livingston, so I’ll have to check next time I drive to Bozeman. Otherwise, I’m mailing it to one of you who has plastic recycling in your town …) From “All My Habits are Bad” the Salon interview with A.M. Homes (via Bookslut) Do writers have a moral obligation? Oh, I think all human beings do. So if all human beings have it, then writers have…
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The San Francisco Chronicle had an article a couple of weeks ago about pastured chickens, followed closely by this article in the NY Times questioning whether “cage free” as it’s practiced in chicken houses around the country is really any more humane than battery chicken. I’ve been buying eggs for a couple of years from a local outfit called Willow Bend Eggs. They are the most astonishing eggs I’ve ever eaten. They’ve ruined me for all other eggs. They’re brown, and large, and the yolks are the deepest marigold color you’ve ever seen and they stand up all perky and…
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After last week’s post on cleaning out my freezer, my old friend Constance emailed me from Taiwan (where she has lived ever since she married the Chinese Pop Star). Constance wrote: I suggest that you go Vietnamese with your Game and Pork burgers- I did an Indochine Burger thing with Buffalo and pork at my parents’ this summer. Very tasty, basil, fish-sauce,green onions,ginger and peanut butter or sesame paste. Nice with a little parsley and basil mayonnaise Hmm. I thought. Yum. I thought. Constance has always been one of the best cooks I know, so this afternoon when I took…