Sometimes all a girl wants is a nice, simple, dinner-in-a-bowl. I have a lovely bowl my cousin Elizabeth made for me many years ago, during her pottery stage, and it’s the perfect single-chick-dinner-alone bowl. Tonight, I couldn’t figure out what I wanted. There was a leftover chicken breast in the fridge, there were plenty of lamb chops and salmon steaks in the freezer, but none of that was what I wanted. The weather has been odd here lately — mostly unseasonably warm, but after a very windy day, the skies got gloomy and the temperature dropped some, and suddenly, that…
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It’s raining this morning for the first time in weeks. It’s been a weirdly warm and dry spring here in Southeast Montana — the driest March on record at the airport over in Bozeman, and last week I had to break out the hoses and start watering. While the sunshine was a blessed relief after a long dark winter, such a relief that I wound up in my backyard, basking in a strappy tee-shirt despite my long-proven tendency toward sunburn. I felt like one of those TB victims from an old photo — sent outside to soak up fresh air…
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Yesterday I planted peas (2 kinds) and radishes, arugula, a raddiccio mix and an endive mix (from Seeds of Italy), an intriguing-looking plant called Saltwort, also from Seeds of Italy which is apparently all the rage in the finer restaurants of that fair land, laccinato kale, and interplanted spinach seeds amongst the transplants (which are looking sad, but that’s what transplants do for a few days). It’s only March and I know, despite our recent spate of 50 and 60 degree weather, that there will be more snow. But I’ve decided I don’t care! So it snows? So the seedlings…
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I organized the basement propagation center this weekend — it’s fabulous! I took one of the five-shelf utility units from Patrick’s storage unit, bought some cheap shop lights and grow-light tubes, and I now have four shelves set up with lights. Last year, I bought a couple of heat mats to help with germination, since it’s cool in my basement, and I have them set up on another short utility shelf unit. It’s like a real potting bench down there — space to store flats and cells, space for the bucket of potting mix, space to start seeds. It’s organized…
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In the freezer there was both ground lamb and ground elk (thanks Parks!) and after Maryanne and Jimmy’s magnificent dueling sauces for our Soprano’s-spaghetti-and-meatball-dinner on Sunday, I was inspired to make meatballs. I do not come from a meatball people, so meatballs are one of those things I come to late. In fact, I’m not much of a ground meat kind of gal, but when you buy (or are given) meat by the animal, you wind up with ground meat. So, I decided to do meatballs. Because I had lamb in the freezer, and because I made some really yummy…
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I’ve blogged before about ironing. I iron — or at least I did before. I got teased for it a little bit last summer by Patrick and his girlfriend — they’d come over for dinner in the backyard and we’d have a nice, ironed tablecloth and ironed napkins. I believe in table linens, they were the first thing I learned to iron years and years ago at the resort we’d go to in northern Wisconsin. I was a kid who was often bored, and who liked to help, and somehow I took to hanging around the laundry (the bag of…
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There’s a terrific piece in this morning’s San Francisco Chronicle by Hazel White about how gardens keep us connected to “body time” — that is, how gardening keeps us in tune with earth time, the rhythms of the earth and our bodies, as opposed to “mechanical time” — the kind of clock-driven time that all too often has us running to accomplish things according to some external measure. We fall into “mechanical time” when we allow ourselves to be driven by “shoulds” — when we allow ourselves to be driven by plans we’ve already made and wind up all thrumming…
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I always swore I wouldn’t be one of those fancy-pet-food people, but over Christmas Hope and Matt turned me on to this stuff called the Missing Link. It’s a supplement for dogs and for cats that’s full of omega-3 oils and freeze-dried liver and things. Because everyone was having issues with their coats, I switched all the animals from Science Diet to California Naturals, which Hope and Matt also raved about. Then I bought some Missing Link as well — and I discovered that they also have a formula for cats.The dogs have hair issues sometimes — Raymond is nervous…
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So, I’m starting to cook again, which is a relief. Although the Albertson’s frozen lasagna and mac-and-cheese did see me through the worst of it, I always liked cooking, and not being interested was strange to me. Last weekend I made a soup (I blogged it but then lost the entry in a small snafu) from leftover duck stock I found in the freezer, lentils, sausage and a mix of kale and turnip greens (also from the freezer and last summer’s garden). It was great — the unctuous duck stock is the perfect foil for the slightly bitter turnip greens,…
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I’ve fallen in love with cooked greens — thank goodness I put so many of them up last summer. But I am running into leftover issues — I made beet greens for dinner with Bill and Maryanne and Jim last week, and had a bunch left over. They’d already been cooked just about to death, so I didn’t want to eat them the way they were again, so I made a sort of crustless quiche with them. I beat three eggs with about a cup of cream and a nice grating of nutmeg, then put the lefotver greens in my…