Hot. It’s hot hot hot here. We’re going into another week of 100 degree weather, and with the crazy pace my day job at the Big Corporation lately, I took the opportunity to prep some cold food in advance. I roasted a baby chicken one night last week when it wasn’t so brutal out, and so this afternoon I pulled the breasts off. I was going to make some chicken salad, but I decided that cold roasted chicken breasts by themselves would give me a wider variety of options (that’s how hot it was last week, pulling the chicken breasts…
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Work at the Big Corporation has been crazy lately — and last night was one of those evenings where I just couldn’t figure out what to do about dinner. It was hot — we’re having a heat wave — and although I have some gorgeous fava beans, I wasn’t inspired to do anything with them. And they’re too gorgeous to squander — so I rattled around in the kitchen trying to figure out what to do about dinner. I must admit, I considered all of the following: mac and cheese in a box, fried chicken from the grocery store, ordering…
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Yes — that’s my dad, happy — hard to believe from the grumpy look on his face — and he’s happy because I sent him a big box of mac-and-cheese for his birthday. Dad lives in the Czech Republic and he too has a blog, PragueWriter.com From Dad: Post lady stopped by yesterday morning with your birthday gift. Wow, all that comfort food. Your chef friends would crack up if they knew what you sent your dad for his birthday. The really amazing thing is that the box hasn’t changed a bit in 60 years–still all that great Dow Chemical…
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This photo doesn’t do the soup justice — it is a much more vibrant green — a lovely live-plant sort of green. So, this morning I was confronted with half a dozen spinach plants that really did need to be picked — they’d bolted and well, it was beyond time to do something with them. I wanted soup, but spinach can get tricky — it gets that funny soapy taste on the back of your teeth — wanted to avoid that. I surfed around in the cookbooks for a while, and finally found a soup that sounded good in Rick…
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I have an abundance of mint in my garden — which is partially my fault because I deliberately transplanted some mint from the front garden to the back — I knew I might regret this, since mint is really weedy, but so far, I kind of like it as a ground cover. It’s invasive, and I’ve pulled a lot of it out, but I also really love this mint in particular — it’s somewhere between a spearmint and a peppermint — not too strong and not too sweet. I crush up a big handful in my pot of tea every…
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Reading this article in the SF Chronicle this morning has me wondering, is it gender that separates the show-off chefs from the nurturing chefs? Gender seems like both a simplistic and sexist way to separate out these very different approaches to food — (especially when published in the edition of the Sunday paper dedicated to Gay Pride weekend). Myself — I’m what this author calls a “mama cook” — I don’t cook what I think of as “restaurant food” at home. My cooking tends toward braises, marinated things on the grill in the summer, tarts, cakes … home food. I…
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Forest fires are a huge drag when they’re happening, although I have to say last summer as we watched this column of smoke rise behind Livingston peak, we were thinking of morels. The Jungle Fire was scary — it roared down seven miles of drainage in an afternoon — my friend Scott who was over there covering it for the paper said it sounded like the loudest jet engine you’ve ever heard. And yet, a few months later, here’s what’s happening in the burn — morels. Lots of morels. I went up early yesterday morning and it’s fascinating up in…
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Here are the first roses of the spring … Therese Bugnet, I think — I’m terrible about putting the markers in the ground. The cranesbill geraniums in the background are starting to bloom and the Iris that my friend Andrea gave me a couple of years ago have finally really come in. They’re huge and gorgeous this year. So, the weather warmed up, and the flowers are starting to bloom, and just about everything survived our little snowstorm. I think I lost one or two cucumbers, but I have plenty and can afford to lose a couple. The peas and…
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Because I put the peppers and eggplants and cucumbers into the garden on Saturday, it is snowing this morning. I covered as much as I could last night — we’ll have to see what lived, and what didn’t. Ah, spring in Montana …
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If it’s Memorial Day, then it’s time to get the garden put in (I love that phrase, it’s so old-fashioned) — I jumped the gun a little on the tomatoes this year — they were getting so leggy in the cold frames that I had to put them in — and last week’s spate of cold, wet weather didn’t do them any good. It went down to 28 degrees at least twice — although sheets draped over the trellises seem to have kept them from giving up the ghost entirely. This year I’m experimenting — these are the eggplant seedlings.…