There are some techniques that, when you have been doing them for awhile, seem so natural and automatic it comes as something of a shock to learn some people don’t know about them. For me, this is one such technique: How To Dice An Onion It will almost certainly take you longer to scroll through…
Archives for 2011
No Use For Coupons
I hate coupons. I consider myself frugal, and I love saving money, but grocery coupons just don’t do it for me. I’ve tried. About every 10 or 12 months, I forget that I hate coupons and decide that I could shave some money off our grocery bill if I just applied myself to couponing. So…
Herding Chickens
If you had told me ten years ago that I’d spend part of my Sunday herding chickens through a vegetable garden, I never would have believed you. But as I spent part of last Sunday herding chickens through our vegetable garden, something struck me: herding chickens is essentially – perhaps entirely – probabilistic. Gently persuade…
Kohlrabi Slaw and Baseline Slaw Dressing
And I quote: “Kohlrabi (German turnip) is a low, stout cultivar of the cabbage that will grow almost anywhere.” Now that’s my kind of vegetable. You can keep your hothouse flowering melons and peppers – “will grow almost anywhere” is exactly what I’m looking for in a vegetable, especially if that tenacity is combined with…
Morning Chores On The Modern Homestead
I’m not what you’d call a morning person. Years of culinary training hardened my own bio-rhythms into a preference for about a 1 am bedtime and a 10 am wake-up. Life, school, work, chickens and kids laugh at my own sleep preferences. And so, every morning, I get up, brush my teeth, pull my hair…
The Essential Apple Peeler Gizmo
This is my apple peeler gadget: I don’t know if this thing has a proper name. It seems like something you’d find in the back of a barn somewhere to crank start machinery that no one uses anymore. And in truth it probably was invented 160 years ago and hasn’t changed since. But don’t let the…
Sharing The Good Stuff
I’ve been tending to two sick kids all day, and now that they are in bed, I’ll be honest, an original blog post just ain’t happening tonight. What is happening is a nice bourbon on the rocks and some reading. So instead of trying to pull a blog post out of my ass, I will direct…
Autumn Decor, On Accident
Several weeks ago, I took the kids to the pumpkin farm, where I loaded up on edible squash to supplement to lackluster harvest I managed to home-grow this year. A bit after that, I asked my rural-living sister to pick me up a few bales of straw at non-urban prices when she came into town….
Pasta with Rainbow Chard and Stilton Cream Sauce
Here’s the concept: pasta + greens + very light cream sauce = deceptively elegant, super easy dinner in a hurry with stuff you have lying around. The exact pasta, greens and cheese can be mixed to suit whatever you have on hand. This version is Orecchiette with Rainbow Chard, Tomatoes and Stilton. Chard (like its…
Greeny Guilt
A few days ago on the Facebook page I shared a link to an article called, How to Create a Zero-Waste Kitchen and asked the question, “how green is your kitchen?” I gave myself a B-, which, in this era of grade inflation, isn’t a particularly good grade. B- Really? Do I really work this hard –…
Little Monkeys Making Messes
Dirt. Dirt, dirt, dirt. When you garden, a certain amount of outside comes in. Fine. When you cook 2 to 3 meals a day on a stove (in pork fat, no less!) a certain amount of grease distributes in a fine layer over everything. So in my 7 years as a gardener and my lifetime…
Cross Dressing Fruit and Frustrated Apple Maggots
One of my readers, Robin, left this comment on the October Garden Tour post, where I showed my espaliered apple tree full of apples wrapped in pantyhose footies: I’m really curious about the cross dressing apples as well. I must’ve missed the post that explained it. Why the sexy legwear? And how big were they when…