Since I seem to have lost the day to a series of lighting fixtures I put up (don’t even ask about the screw with the stripped threads, and the hacksaw, and the swearing …), here’s some Friday Links to keep everyone entertained: Had lunch today with another Livingston Blogger: Go check out Livingston, I presume Found an interesting piece over at Ethicurean on the sort of small meat processers that we depend on around here. I’m planning to buy a lamb this fall from my dog groomer, and without Sheep Mountain Processing, I’d be sunk. Check out Postcards from Cowboyland …
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I had my friend Margo over for dinner tonight and I experimented with this recipe from the LA Times Food pages: Braised Romano Beans with Pancetta and Cherry Tomatoes. Except, in my usual fashion, I messed with it a little. I don’t have a ton of tomatoes right now (and the Whippersnapper Cherry isn’t worth growing — it’s has no flavor — it’s like a little tiny grocery store tomato — very disappointing. Unlike Galina, which is a sprawling yellow indeterminate cherry tomato that will take over your whole garden, but which will reward you with fabulous, juicy, tomato-y yellow…
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There’s no ground lamb in town right now. You don’t think of meat as being a seasonal product, but around here, lambs are slaughtered in the early fall, and last years supply seems to have run completely dry. I was looking for lamb because it’s also that time of year when we all look into our freezers and see what’s lurking in there. It’s time to clean out/use up last year’s stuff before we put up this years vegetables and meat. So I was downstairs last week looking at the: glut of chicken carcasses. It’s still too hot to think…
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The heat wave in July was both record-breaking and unpleasant. But look what it brought. Tomatoes! Basil! Breakfast in summer is toast rubbed lightly with a clove of garlic, smeared with goat cheese, and topped with sliced tomato from the garden and shredded basil. A drop or two of nice olive oil and some fleur de sel and well … what more could anyone want for breakfast? For the record (which I’m terrible about keeping garden records), the first tomatoes this year were the Whippersnapper cherries, followed by Galina (a yellow cherry that spreads all over the garden, but produces…
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I haven’t had a chance to read Barbara Kingsolver’s new book, Animal Vegetable Miracle yet (it’s still out at the library, which I’m trying to use more because if I fail at living small, it’s on the book front), but the sheer volume of press it’s getting has had me thinking that it was time to revisit Joan Dye Grussow’s earlier book on the same subject, This Organic Life: Confessions of a Suburban Homesteader. One of the things that sold me on this house was the big, if fallow, vegetable garden in the back yard. Eight children grew up in…
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I was showing my house to some visitors from LA last week, and Brooke noticed the jams and preserves lined up at the top of my pantry. “Do you know someone who makes those for you?” she asked. “I did that,” I said. “Really?” she seemed surprised, as if she’d never known anyone who made jam. “If I’m here next summer will you show me how?” “Sure,” I told her. “It’s easy.” It got me thinking about skills that used to be considered perfectly ordinary: making jam, running up a skirt on a sewing machine, growing some of your own…
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A few groovy new sites I found: Leslie Land, the GreenGrower: check out the instructions for building a gorgeous twig garden arch in her blog. The Daily Green: has a piece on an upcoming scientific paper on colony collapse disorder. Also, in the New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert writes about colony collapse disorder and her own experience keeping bees. There’s also some great footage of the pulley system she’s devised to try to keep the bears out of her hives.
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Look what I found yesterday? One perfect little porcini. It was just off the trail, it’s little brown cap barely poking through the duff. We’ve had a few afternoon thunderstorms lately, and on a whim, I went up to the trail where I’ve sometimes found boletes … this was the only one I found, but look how beautiful it was. Here’s the cross section: Not one single bug. A perfect porcini. I ate it sautéed with butter and a little olive oil, with some garlic, and parsley from the garden. It was delicious. Perfect.
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If you’re like me, most travel involves investigation of grocery stores. The Guardian UK asks, “What do you stuff in your suitcase?” Last trip I took was to Seattle — I returned with the following: Paella pan from The Spanish Table spices from World Spice Market cooler full of oysters from Mutual Fish Asian vegetable seeds from Umajiwaya Question for you readers — what did you stuff in your suitcase last trip?
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From CNN: Eat your Yard From Salon: Why I pick lettuce for the Black Panthers