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…
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A couple of days ago I got a voice mail from Wendy-the-Buddhist. She had a terrible head cold. Her kids were sick. She needed some novel recommendations because as she said on the phone, “I’m tired of all this Zen crap.” (One of Wendy’s best qualities is that while a dedicated Zen practitioner, she also understands that taking one’s Zen too seriously belies a fundamental misunderstanding of the principles.) So I went downstairs into my lovely hidey-hole office where the library currently resides and started looking through the fiction section (legacy of my bookseller past, my library is sorted by…
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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…
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Hi folks — welcome to the new and improved LivingSmall. This should be the last move — we went from Blogspot to Typepad, and now we’ve moved to WordPress, which allows one to use blogging software and host it anyplace. There wasn’t anything wrong with Blogger or Typepad, but they were starting to feel restrictive. I haven’t been happy with my template for a while now, nor was I crazy about the idea of all my work being hosted out there in anonymous-land someplace. WordPress requires a little more work on my part, but it’s open-source, and there’s no Big…
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Some days a girl just can’t get it together. Sunday was like that — weekends are pretty much the only time I’ve got to do any real writing these days. The Corporate Job is full time nine-to-five so I’m trying to shoehorn my entire creative life into those two days a week. Some weeks it’s fine. Some weeks, well, I just don’t get anything done. Sunday was like that. I was rattling around the house trying to get down to work but mostly just frittering my day away. I did get some laundry done, but that was about it. I…
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I spent my long weekend painting the two grotty little bedrooms in the basement, and turning one of them into an office. I also install chair mats for office use for safety and comfort. It was one of those projects that, for much of the weekend, felt like I’d never get to the other side of it. First I had to move all the furniture out of those little rooms — I’d been using one as a guest room, so other than moving a queen-sized mattress by myself, it was pretty simple. But the other room I’d been using as a…
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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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… instead of pulling characters and situations from his imagination, he had borrowed them from real life. Perry and Dick, Herb Clutter and Alvin Dewey were as much figures in history as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. He could no more have altered their characters for the sake of his story than he could have affixed a moustache under Washington’s nose or shaved off Lincoln’s beard. He was fenced in by the barbed wire of fact. … In Cold Blood may have been written like novel, but it is accurate down to the smallest detail — “immaculately factual” Truman publicly…
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The memoir brouhaha continues to niggle at me — my hunch is that it’s gained such cultural traction because it’s a symptom of a larger problem that America is having with telling and recognizing the truth. In a year in which the American Dialect Society votes that “Truthiness” is the “word of the year” should it come as any surprise to us that we’re also beset by an avalanche of literary hoaxes? “Truthiness” the ADS website declares, “refers to the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true.…