My trip to Chicago for Thanksgiving featured any number of family heirlooms — my grandmother and I went through a boatload of old family photos from the turn of the century, including piles of heartbreaking condolence letters received when her grandparents went down on the Lusitania, and a whole album of her own baby pictures (naked baby granny playing on the farm was pretty adorable). And then my mother gave me not only my great-grandmother’s silver flatware (more about that later) but this aluminum roaster. I love this roaster. The very first thing I remember learning to cook for myself…
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Big game season ended yesterday, and the Mighty Hunter didn’t get his elk this year. He got antelope and deer, so it’s not like any of us will go hungry, but no elk, which is too bad. I like elk. This morning I went over to check New West Network and found this terrific piece on the intertwined pleasures of hunting and providing for oneself and one’s family: “The Thrill and the Meat” by Greg Lemon. I realize that in most parts of the country that hunting is an anathema, but out here, a lot of people like Lemon rely…
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Although the house I woke up in this morning on my grandmother’s farm is not the house we all grew up in, the view out the window, a pale landscape of late-season standing corn, hazy Midwestern sky just pinking up to the east, and section lines marked off by rows of old, half-broken oak and elm trees is one I know in my bones somehow. The way we learn places as kids is so intense, so different than the way grownups know space that despite waking up in the new house my Aunt built on the site of my great-great…
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I’ve been meaning to blog about the No-Knead Bread recipe that Mark Bittman ran in his Minimalist column last week in the New York Times, but Luisa at The Wednesday Chef pretty much beat me to it. Go read her post — it’s terrific and says most of the things I wanted to say about this recipe. Like Luisa, I usually don’t even read the Minimalist columns — the food always seems sort of okay, but Bittman likes things much sweeter than I do, and seems to be a fan of my least favorite combo — fruit and meat. I…
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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’ve been trying for days to figure out a way to write about this topic without sounding like a scold. Maybe the key is to ask you all (well, the three or four of you left after my various lapses in blogging) — what is it with dinner in America these days? Why is it so hard? Estimates vary, but it now seems that something like 30-50% of American families are not eating dinner together on any given night. I don’t get it. I’m not talking about pulling off some gourmet multi-course meal. I’m just talking about dinner — a…
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I’ve been meaning to write about this article, BACK TO THE RANCH: Consumers are going to the source for pastured beef, pork, poultry and eggs in the SF Chronicle food section since it came out (which to my horror, was a month ago). Anyhow, looks like more and more families in the Bay Area are buying meat directly from ranchers — I’ve written before about knowing your meat, and my astonishment that most Americans are totally freaked out by this idea. When Patrick and I lived in the Bay Area we talked about finding someone to buy a side or…
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 Look what I found once the frost killed off all the foliage — a zucchini as big as my leg! I thought I’d done a pretty good job keeping up with them but this one was lurking in the back, hidden by the cucumber trellis. I may try to save some seeds from it — for now I just pose it places and take pictures. The garden is pretty much done. My other big surprise of the season was these beautiful raddiccio heads. I took them to a party where first we admired the pretty colors, and then the visiting…
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It’s an odd week here at LivingSmall — September 11 rolls around once again and I can’t help but remember calling Patrick, who was in the truck on his way to work. He hadn’t wanted to wake me up before he left, just after the first plane hit. We were on the phone together when the first tower fell. Seeing all the footage makes me miss him. He was the person I knew I could call any time, and we all need that person in our lives, the one we know we can pick up the phone when something happens.…
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Things have gotten more interesting on many fronts, including the food front, here at LivingSmall, because we have a new sweetheart — we’ll call him the Mighty Hunter (MH). He hunts, and fishes, and pounds nails and cooks, and one night last week he called to say he was going to cook me dinner. “Great,” I said. “What are we having?” “Antelope liver,” he answered. When there was a long pause on my end, he said “Is that all right?” I’m not big on organ meats, but I’m game, so I said sure, but suggested that maybe we might need…