With apologies to my blog readers who have seen this bread before, but after several years, what I find interesting is how the weather affects my bread baking. I can’t get a decent loaf to work for me in the summer when it’s hot, but when my kitchen goes back to it’s usual 65-70 degrees, I can make a bomber loaf of bread. This is the no-knead bread I’ve been making for years now. Three cups flour (this is one cup each of King Arthur bread, all-purpose and whole-wheat flours, with a nice sprinkling of Bob’s Red Mill Dark Rye…
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When Patrick died, my manager at work said to me “Welcome to the club no one wants to be in.” Her first husband had dropped dead one day after carrying the groceries into the house. “I knew he was gone before he hit the floor,” she told me the time we talked about it, late at night, stuck in a bar in the Denver airport after a missed flight. She had a two year old at the time. One reason I grow impatient every year with the 9/11 coverage, is that it’s predicated on the idea that Americans had never…
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This month at Bookslut, I review three terrific books about making your own. Click here to read my review: D.I.Y. Delicious: Recipes and Ideas for Simple Food from Scratch Home Made Tart and Sweet: 101 Canning and Pickling Recipes for the Modern Kitchen
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Here’s the fresh cheese I made out of Home Made, a cookbook I’ll be reviewing for Bookslut later this week. It’s a good simple cheese that doesn’t require any special equipment. It is even better topped with the Apple Chutney I made (sort of a mashup between the recipes in Put ’em Up! by Sherri Brooks Vinton and in Tart and Sweet by Kelly Geary and Jessie Knadler). I put up 10 half-pints of this one, and had a tiny bit leftover for an afternoon snack, which was delicious.
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It’s that time of year, the time of year when there’s suddenly a dearth of canning jars in my house, when I run out of white vinegar, when my sweetheart comes in each night and looks at another stack of jars and just shakes his head at my propensity to stock up for winter. “We do have supermarkets, you know,” he’ll note. Yes, yes, I know — but we have all this lovely produce right now, and I have a cookbook review to write this weekend, so I’ve been playing around. This week I put up eight beautiful (and gigantic)…
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Although we need more rain, I did manage to find about a pound and a half of chanterelles this weekend. Now it’s still so dry that there weren’t very many but mushroom hunting was cut short by the very dramatic collapse of one small dog. Granted, he has no achilles tendon on one side and wears an orthotic, but he went full tilt until we were about a mile away from the car, then sat down, panting, and wanted to be carried back. After a refreshing cooling off period in a creek, we walked, very slowly, and very limpily back to the…
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Farewell, Delaware from Charlotte Freeman on Vimeo. Miss Delaware is the bigger of the two Delaware chicks I raised this year, and although I hesitate to say it, she’s my favorite chicken. I never thought I’d be a person who could tell the chickens apart, much less the kind of person who has a favorite. But she’s kind of hilarious — for one thing, she’s very very vocal. And curious. Even when she was a little chick, she’d come over to see what you were doing, or rather, would come over to supervise whatever you were doing. She’s also pretty funny…
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The new chickens have finally started to lay — one wee pullet egg a day. They’re about the size of bantam eggs — maybe half the size of a normal egg. But lovely bright marigold yolks that stand right up off the surface of the white. It’s such a relief to be getting my own eggs again. No offense to any of the very fine ranch egg purveyors here in the valley, but I there’s no comparison between an egg from your own backyard to an egg you buy from someone. Next chore, sending the rooster off to his new…
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Now, it feels like summer. That’s eight pounds of cherries from the empty lot down the street, preserved in four pounds of sugar. It’s not jam, because I don’t really like jam that much, and don’t use it (I tend not to like sweets in the morning). What I do is pit the cherries (while staring out my kitchen window and listening to a book on tape — takes a while, entertainment is good). Then I weigh them, and put them in my big French Copper Jam Pot with half as much sugar by weight. I bring it to a boil,…
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My old high-school buddy Phil Rosenthal, who still lives in Chicago, wrote a piece about the social costs of now-ubiquitous air conditioning last week, and it’s had me thinking. In particular, it’s had me thinking about older houses, and how they were designed to stay fairly comfortable without air conditioning. My house dates from 1903 — it has good cross-ventilation, big windows, and a lot of insulation. If I leave the windows open all night with a couple of fans going, then close the house up in the morning, it stays pretty cool. Right now it’s 92 degrees outside, and…