Things have gotten more interesting on many fronts, including the food front, here at LivingSmall, because we have a new sweetheart — we’ll call him the Mighty Hunter (MH). He hunts, and fishes, and pounds nails and cooks, and one night last week he called to say he was going to cook me dinner. “Great,” I said. “What are we having?” “Antelope liver,” he answered. When there was a long pause on my end, he said “Is that all right?” I’m not big on organ meats, but I’m game, so I said sure, but suggested that maybe we might need…
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The garden is finally starting to come in this summer. I’m on vacation for 2 weeks, and I spent a lovely morning the other day puttering in the vegetable garden. I pulled out all the peas, which did really well this year, but which were starting to get woody. The tomatoes are starting to pop after a couple of days of hot weather — it really takes until August to get a tomato around here, but once they get past that 6-inch stage it feels like summer’s really begun. I have a lot of greens, and more onions than I…
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When I was in France a couple of years ago, we shopped in the local ville most nights. it was more expensive than going to the big Carrefour warehouse store, but it was much more convenient and we liked the idea of supporting the local economy. Plus the butcher was loquacious and fun to visit, and despite his heavy Provencal accent, after a few days, I began to understand him and could converse a little. It was a lovely store — not only cuts of meat, but any number of prepared foods as well, and if you wanted to buy…
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Thinking about food, that is. The San Francisco Chronicle has been running a whole series called The Faces of Organic — there’s this profile of Jim Cochran, who started Swanton Berry Farm and grows organic strawberries (regular strawberries use approximately one ton of pesticide per acre). There’s a good piece on Earthbound Farms, about which I have such mixed feelings. It’s definitely organic, but also industrial, which I find troubling — the article does a good job parsing the issues. There’s a nice piece on Clover Stornetta — organic milk from non-industrial co-ops is one of my pet issues —…
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The garden is starting to come in again — fresh chives on my morning egg for the past couple of weeks, the mint is coming back so my morning pot of tea tastes fresh and green again, and as always, onions are poking up from all sorts of odd places among the perennials. I’ve begun planting, the tomato, pepper, eggplant and cucumber seedlings are in the cold frame. And it’s spring, so I’m craving greens — spinach or asparagus, for example. But at the supermarket I look at those crinkly packages of baby spinach, or mixed greens and I just…
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The mini-daffodils are blooming in my side yard and yesterday I turned over the vegetable beds, planted peas. Tonight it looks like rain (or maybe snow) is on the way, but yesterday was sunny, nearly seventy degrees, and a lovely day. Things outside the garden are still a little alarming, but inside the yard there are dogs, and plants starting to green up, and tiny little spinach seedlings coming up.
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For big dead animals. I drove up to Suce Creek this morning to run the dogs, and there were two guys standing looking into the bed of a pickup truck. Once of them was wearing camoflage, always a tip-off. So as the boys ran up the hill in search of grouse, I walked over and took a peek. “What’d you get?” I asked. “A moose,” the one guy said. “That’s not a moose!”I said looking at the big black dead animal, “The antlers are wrong.” It was a very beautiful, dark, almost black elk. He was nestled in the bed…
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Sorry I’ve been such a bad blogger lately — there are any number of things afoot here at LivingSmall as I attempt to make some big changes in my daily life. When it seems safe to go public, believe me, you all will be the first to know … And so here’s a little photo of some of this year’s garden love. I’ve finally got some tomatoes — made a nice pot of sauce with the bowl you see here. Not shown in the photo are the milk crates of greens — chard, escarole, endive, kale — all of which…
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A guy came to my door today selling fish. More specifically, a ratty old blue mini-pickup pulled up in front of my house, a truck with a chest freezer in the bed, and a guy got out and came bounding up my steps with the false cheer of a true door-to-door salesman. I was on a conference call at the time, and I tried to get rid of him by telling him I was on a call, that I work at home. “What time do you get off work?” he said. “I don’t buy things from people who come to…
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It’s 63 degrees outside at 3pm today. Nina tells me from her house down valley that it’s snowing on the peaks. And my tomatoes and zucchini have taken on their late-summer clothing — swaths and swaths of clear plastic sheeting. I’ll probably be able to get a few tomatoes to ripen — last year they all ripened in my basement while I was in France. It may freeze tonight, so this afternoon, I was the Basil Fairy — running around town delivering big ziploc baggies of basil to various friends. It happens every year about the first of August —…