Jeez oh Pete, so spring is here, and it seems to have brought along the first “canning is dumb” article. This year it’s at Slate, where last summer, it was at Salon. I’ve addressed this subject once already, last summer, when Salon published a ridiculous piece “debunking” the “myth” that canning will save you money, but I guess if they’re going to write the same article over and over, I’ll have to keep throwing in my two cents. Canning is useful if you have an excess of something. It’s a method of preservation. If you want to make a hobby…
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I’ve been obsessed with nori rolls lately. I got the idea from Cathy Erway’s delightful book, The Art of Eating In: How I Learned to Stop Spending and Love the Stove, which I reviewed for Bookslut about a month ago. After this long winter, I’ve been craving crunch, and veggies, or maybe there’s something in the seaweed that my body craves, but it’s been nori rolls for lunch for a couple of weeks now. The thing is, nori rolls are actually quite easy. I like the rice warm, so I either make up a fresh batch in the rice cooker,…
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Ever since last fall’s episode of food poisoning, I’ve been meaning to finish enclosing the garden. However, I had to wait for the ground to thaw, and well, the freelance life means that finances have been just tight enough that I didn’t want to go out and buy copper pipe. But this weekend, I finally got it done. I tried to come up with some solution other than more expensive copper, but since I’d done the rest of the trellis/fences that way when I built the garden (this is summer number eight — how did that happen?), well, I just…
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It was a big weekend of gardening here at LivingSmall. The temperatures were in the mid- to high-fifties, and so I decided to see if I can jumpstart the season a little bit. I’m deathly tired of eating other people’s vegetables. I want greens of my own again. So I built a little hoop house over one of my beds. I bought four ten-foot lengths of 1/2 inch pvc pipe, and since wind is a perennial problem here, I ran one lengthwise, with the other three crosswise. I planted some arugula, spinach, Japanese mustard, mache, and escarole — just half-rows…
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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VJgb2bCfzE Michael Ruhlman started a meme a couple of weeks ago where he asked people to blog about why they cook. Above is his TEDxCLE talk about why cooking is essential to making us human, to making us families, and to making us reasonably healthy human beings. It’s well worth the fifteen minutes (and he’s sort of adorably nervous, as one would be). He says in the video, and on the follow up post on his blog, that we need to make cooking an imperative. With which I agree. But I guess one of the things I’ve been trying to…
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According to the BBC, the town of Mouscron, in Belgium, has 50 pairs of chickens it plans to give to residents as a way to decrease the waste stream. I have to say, my chickens have both significantly lowered my household and garden waste, and here in the arid west, they’ve exponentially sped up the composting process. Composting is a real problem here, because it’s so dry. Because there was an 8×10 concrete pad in the back part of the yard, that’s where I built the chicken coop. And because the compost heaps were already in that part of the…
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My new cookbook slut column is up at Bookslut: Greece is the Word. It’s been a delightful month of lemon and garlic and lamb around here. Several new recipes/techniques going into regular rotation from How to Roast a Lamb: New Greek Classic Cooking by Michael Psilakis, Vefa’s Kitchen by Vefa Alexandiou, and Michael Symon’s Live to Cook: Recipes and Techniques to Rock Your Kitchen.
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These are the chives that overwintered in my mudroom — they started coming back about two weeks ago, which makes overwintering them totally worthwhile. Although it’s warm here — nearly 60 degrees yesterday! And the sun is beginning to shine again, the ground is still frozen, and the garden chives and parsley have only just begun to think about greening up. Yesterday I got the seeds out, and started organizing them again. I usually start tomatoes and peppers around the fifteenth of march, under lights in the basement. But it’s always an adventure deciding what to plant this year. I…
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There was a good article in the Billings Gazette this week about our local Livingston Hospital. They’ve been making the change to local product and cooking “from scratch” (as long-time readers know, this phrase is one of my pet peeves). It’s been a big success, with 3000 more meals served this year than last, and folks who aren’t sick, or visiting someone, actually going to the hospital cafeteria for lunch. We have such great product around here, and it sounds like Jesse Williams is doing a lot of the same things that Rick Bayless does in his restaurants, thinking ahead,…
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So I have a new writing project — it’s in the tiny larval stages so I don’t want to talk about it too much, but I’m working on a murder mystery. One of my dearest friends here in town is Maryanne Vollers, author of the amazing books Ghosts of Mississippi: The Murder of Medgar Evers, the Trials of Byron De La Beckwith, and the Haunting of the New South and Lone Wolf: Eric Rudolph: Murder, Myth, and the Pursuit of an American Outlaw. We were both at a dinner party last night, and Maryanne arrived with a big bag of…