My love of Joan Dye Grussow‘s work, particularly This Organic Life, is well documented on this blog. Her experiences over the years growing and storing most of her own food was absolutely inspirational to me when I built my garden, and it’s still a book I go back to again and again. This video has been kicking around the blogosphere for a while now — it’s Joan Dye Grussow, Michael Pollan and Dan Barber of Blue Hill discussing ethicurean issues and trying to figure out how to eat in ways that are good not only for their health but for…
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Because Politics is in the tag line — all I can say is Wow — Obama not only won it, he won it in a rout. I know there are naysayers. I’ve heard all the “experience” talk. And you know what? I don’t care … He inspires people across the spectrum — I’m hearing apocryphal stories about independents and Republicans who will vote for him. He inspires me. Imagine if we could have an inspirational candidate on the Democratic side — not a candidate that we know is the smartest person in the room, not the candidate that we know…
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So, I’ve been buying raw milk from a local rancher since last fall — she shows up every Tuesday with a glass gallon pickle jar full of milk, with a nice layer of cream on the top. The cream has been getting thicker the past couple of weeks — I used to skim about a pint of cream and now I’m well up to nearly a quart. My milk lady left me a note this week stating that she’s going to have to suspend delivery after the 28th until sometime in April after the cows calve. It’s been a hard…
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I saw this in a garden catalog and had to have it: Preserving Food without Freezing or Canning: Traditional Techniques Using Salt, Oil, Sugar, Alcohol, Vinegar, Drying, Cold Storage, and Lactic Fermentation By The Gardeners and Farmers of Centre Terre Vivante The Centre Terre Vivante is an “ecological research and education center” locate in Southeastern France. They publish a magazine, Les Quatre Saisons du jardin bio and apparently, this book resulted when they asked their readership to send in recipes and techniques for traditional food preservation. There are intros by Deborah Madison and Eliot Coleman, and I can’t wait to…
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I haven’t figured out how to embed a YouTube video on my page yet (must go learn that) but check out this clip of Barack Obama’s victory speech in Iowa last night. It’s long, but it’s worth watching the whole thing. I think either Hillary or Edwards would be perfectly good presidents, and certainly better than that man who currently resides in the White House — but neither of them inspires me in the least (and I’m really not crazy about putting all the old Clinton folks back in — in general, I believe life should go forward, not backward.)…
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The New York Times ran a piece in it’s travel section over the holidays about Georges-Louis Leclerc, the Comte de Buffon. Buffon was, along with Linnaeus, one of the great early botanists and naturalists. Among other things, Buffon built the Jardins des Plantes — that enormous garden on the banks of the Seine. I’d never been there until my last trip to Paris when I stayed down in the 5th arrondissement — it was my last day in Paris and the sun was shining and I was getting a little lonely for green spaces and nature, so I went off…
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Inspired by this article in the Times of London, I holed up and took a lovely, restorative vacation at home after Christmas. Christmas was lovely — we all had a great time. There was lots of food and wine and by ten that night we had six kids under five doing the Toddler Disco in the middle of the living room floor. Perfect. Look into Alpenglow rentals if you are planning a relaxing vacation. I woke up on the 26th a tiny bit hung over, and decided the tree was coming down. It was a pretty tree and we had…
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I managed to get the last packaged in the mail this afternoon and I’m swamped putting out some last-minute fires at my Corporate Job. In the meantime — check out this five-part investigative piece on the Ameya Preserve that New West is publishing. I’ve only read part one thus far, but seems like a cogent discussion of the issues.
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The least interesting part of Doris Lessing’s Nobel Prize speech has been getting a lot of attention this week — the part where she claims that the speed by which the internet has been developed has led to a sort of mesmerism by screen, and has subsequently caused a serious devaluation of the book and of reading and of education and expertise. I don’t think she’s entirely wrong, nor do I think the online reaction, that this is the part of her speech where she sounds most like a cranky old woman, is invalid either. But that was not the…
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The last few months I’ve gotten into a writing rhythm that has really been working for me. I’ve been doing a blog post every day during the week, and weekends have been devoted to my new book. When I decided to get serious about the blog and to write on a regular basis, it was really to bring this little blog back to life. It never occurred to me that the discipline of taking care of the blog would bleed over into my creative work and prove a boon to that, but it has. Because I’ve written something of my…