Here’s what I woke up to this morning — yup, that’s snow. About four inches — and it’s supposed to keep coming down all weekend. Yesterday I woke up to a hard frost — I went to check the tomatoes and they were dead. Dead dead dead dead dead. So I pulled them up and threw their soggy carcasses into the compost. I salvaged enough late ones to make this big pot of frostbitten-tomato sauce. That’s the last of the tomatoes, a couple of carrots, and a sautee’d onion — later I added a can of Muir Glen organic…
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There’s a really interesting piece in this morning’s New York Times about the town of Hardwick, Vermont and the Center for Agricultural Economy. Hardwick was, like many small rural towns, emptying out — main street was full of empty buildings, and there was no way to make a living. Then a group of local agricultural entrepreneurs got together, meeting monthly, loaning one another money, figuring out ways to share skills and resources so that they all prosper. Their website says that their goal is programs that: …will recognize that the 21st century food system balance be tipped towards localization over…
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I’m having another one of those weeks at work where there is too much to do and not nearly enough time alotted to do it — So here’s a couple of links — Bob del Grosso contemplates the chicken-and-the-egg nature of cooking on a farm. And Shuna gives me hope that even though I’m currently in the weeds, there might be a way out …
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It’s all harvest all the time here at LivingSmall right now — I put tomatoes up this weekend in the terrifying pressure canner, and there’s all that kale and chard I’m going to have to deal with at some point — but in the meantime my Roma beans finally came in — they got such a late start I didn’t think they’d come through, but they’ve been producing like gangbusters for a few weeks now. I’ve taken to cooking them up in big batches, then freezing them into what I like to think of as hockey pucks. One of the…
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As anyone who has been reading here for a while knows, I’m no vegetarian (I tried in college, but I missed sausage, and lamb, and bacon, and cheeseburgers). But I have to admit that with rising food prices, and global warming, and my increasing unwillingness to eat meat that wasn’t raised by someone I know (which means I’m paying a lot more for meat) — well, I’m eating less meat. Mark Bittman wrote a rather inspirational post about this earlier this summer that got me thinking — it’s really easy to just slip into that meat-veg-starch dinner formula. And it’…
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So, in trying to find my mother an apartment that she can afford, and that isn’t a shoebox, and that is in a building that’s not just full of old people on oxygen, we wound up going to look at some buildings in Milwaukee. I hadn’t been to Milwaukee since my 6th grade field trip to the Stroh’s Brewery, and I remembered it as a grey colorless place, an industrial city full of tanneries and breweries and factories. Well, Milwaukee has certainly come up in the world. We looked at a number of very cool industrial buildings that had been…
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My trip last week was a great success — my mother and I had a very fun time together, and we found two apartment buildings that look interesting and cool and that she can afford — but it was a busy week. I put just over 1000 miles on the rental car, but the trip did have some very restorative aspects, one of which was the amount of time I got to spend in my friend Posy’s garden. Because there was no wi-fi connection in the guest house, I had to take refuge under this beautiful pergola, which looked out…
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LivingSmall will be travelling all week. I need to go back to where I grew up and give my mom a hand. Looking forward to seeing some old high school friends and my 97 year old granny. Back next weekend.
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All summer I was getting up about 5:30 because that’s when the sun came up and I was really enjoying it. I had time to get a lot done before having to sign on at work — write a blog post, walk the dog, water the garden. It was lovely. And then the earth tilted back the other way and I found it harder and harder to get up in the morning. I thought about buying one of those fancy light alarm clocks that are supposed to simulate the sun rising — you set the timer and they gradually light…
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Just as I was reading this article in the SF Chronicle about people buying meat shares (which mentions my friend Bonnie over at Ethicurean and her meat CSA she’s starting), Matt, my butcher called to say that my pig was ready. Well, half a pig, actually. I bought it from my Milk Lady, and while it was stupendously expensive, what can I say? I grew up with the heirs to the Armour and Swift fortunes and well, I’d rather buy Isabelle’s kids new school clothes. Plus, if her pork is anything like the delicious Jersey milk or those eggs I…