This weekend it’s time to start the tomatoes, eggplants, cucumbers and zucchini in the basement under the grow lights. I’ll probably also put in spinach, arugula, and onions — the earliest of early spring crops — the things that can withstand some snow, a few more frosts. There are bulbs coming up, and the iris are poking through the debris of the winter … Because I’m underwater at work, here’s a link to a great article about building gardens in low-income neighborhoods — teaching people they can grow their own food in areas where there are not only no Farmer’s…
-
-
Winter is on the wane — it was in the mid-fifties today, blue skies, sunshine, birds singing and I dug the quackgrass out of an entire bed at the front of the house. Three years of serious spring composting and my dirt is lovely — even after being trampled hard last summer during construction. Stick a fork in it and it just turns right over, all nice and loose and friable. Hardly any clumps. Big fat earthworms. The youngest dog was quite interested in the whole process, which isn’t surprising since digging holes seems to be his outdoor hobby. Tomorrow…
-
The seductive thing about Theory is that once you get a meme like hyperreality in your head, you can spend days (weeks, years, academic careers) viewing various unrelated bits of news through the filter of that particular theory. For example, writing the headline … is it because I spent so many years in academia, or because I am submerged in the welter of culture that the phrase “creeps in” is automatically followed in my head by “on little cat feet.” I have to go look up that it’s Carl Sandburg, but it’s stuck there, just like so many other bits…
-
I spent last weekend in Seattle — I had two days of meetings last week for my Corporate Job, then hung out with my stepmother for the weekend. Susan’s only eight years older than I am, and she and my dad have been divorced for a long time, but we kept her after he moved to Europe. During all those years I was the bratty teenager living with Susan and my Dad it would never have occurred to us that all these years later that Patrick and Dad would be gone and it’d just be the two of us together,…
-
I have four apple trees in my backyard. They’re old, and overgrown, and today I went out and scalped them. Pruning doesn’t quite describe what I did out there — I cut off everything that was sticking straight up into the sky. I cut off everything that was bigger than an inch and a half in diameter. I cut off everything I could in an attempt to take what was four scraggly trees that, granted, did provide good shade, but which also didn’t produce very well and when they did produce, the apples were 20 feet in the air where…
-
This morning’s blog find, via Serious Eats, is The Paupered Chef — I first really learned to cook when I was living in New York, working as an editorial assistant on a bunch of cookbook projects and, because I was an editorial assistant without rich parents in the suburbs to pay my rent, I was absolutely flat broke.
-
Michael Ruhlman had an interesting post last week about white meat and Jesus (Whiteliness is Next to Godliness), and the comment discussion in particular got me thinking about greens. I eat a lot of greens, largely because I have a garden and they grow really well here — but I’m a latecomer to cooked greens. We didn’t eat greens growing up because, well, “nice people” didn’t eat greens. Poor people ate greens. Black people at greens. We were upper class (even if we were broke most of the time) and we ate white food — chicken, fish, potatoes, pasta, salad…
-
So, after three years of avoiding it, I’m finally tackling the bathroom. Part of the reason I’ve been avoiding the bathroom remodel, is that there are just too many things to buy and too many decisions to make when renovating a bathroom. Some decisions were easy — the ceiling fan for example, but other decisions were more of a challenge. I mean, on the one hand I want it to look nice, but really — does the universe need so many styles of towel bars? To say nothing of tile — what kind of tile? pattern? shape? chair rail or…
-
I’ve added a couple of features to the blog — if you look to the left you’ll see a link to Interviews and Profiles, and Place Last Seen. One of the things I’m liking about WordPress is having the flexibility to post some longer pieces. In the Interviews and Profiles section I’ve posted an profile I wrote for the Corporation for the Northern Rockies of Rick Bayless. I spoke with Bayless shortly after returning to Montana after a visit to Chicago where I was astounded by the vibrant Farmer’s Market culture that has grown up in the 20 years since…
-
I had to go to California last week — the Corporate Job was calling. My office in CA is right next to my favorite store in the world, the Ranch 99 Market. The Ranch 99 has many wonderful things including fresh shellfish in little tanks through which fresh water continually flows, a stupendous selection of condiments, and Hong Kong-Style roasted items. The Mighty Hunter wanted a roast duck, so the morning I was leaving I bought one, and with a significant amount of pantomime communicated to the man behind the counter that while I wanted the head and neck cut…