life on garden time
You can freeze sandwiches. Why didn’t I realize this about 3 years ago? I have a school-age daughter, and naturally I want her to have nutritious, healthy lunches. My attempts to send my daughter in with various kinds of frugal, left-over based meals have met with mixed success, and all too often my kid would [Continue Reading...]
The cuisine of Mexico is complex, diverse, by turns subtle and bold. And I am a total gringo with only a cursory, Rick Bayless cookbook-skimming understanding of Mexican cuisine. Which is my way of saying, I make no claim to authenticity here, but in my house, this taco formula works. My kids come back for more, my [Continue Reading...]
Last year we performed a taste test. We ordered two, 12 pound turkeys from our local yuppie-hippie market. Both were raised by Diestel, a large, independent, family-owned turkey ranch in California. By all accounts the birds had a good life and one bad day, living on pasture, free-ranging and eating vegetarian feed and whatever bugs [Continue Reading...]
It’s November, and you know what that means. In just a few weeks, all over the United States people will express their gratitude for family, health, and living in this great nation with the annual turkey-gravy-mashed-potato bender. Thanksgiving is, without a doubt, my favorite holiday. Here’s why: I love to cook and eat with family and [Continue Reading...]
I ate my first homegrown strawberry of the year yesterday. You know what that means? It’s time to use up all that damn strawberry jam still kicking around the pantry from 2011. While my love for PB&J only goes so far, my love of Mommy’s Liquid Refreshment knows no bounds. And so, after some arduous recipe development, the [Continue Reading...]
Where I live, far from avocado country, it’s not unusual for organic avocados to be $2.50 or $3 each. “Oh, waaah, you big crybaby,” locavore purists might argue, “avocados are expensive because you live in Seattle, so stop buying non-local food!” To which I reply: “The zombies can have my guacamole when they pry it [Continue Reading...]
My dad, a capable man by any measure, a highly skilled Marine in his youth, a brilliant car mechanic and automotive diagnostician as an adult, and a generally handy-about-the-house guy, has long confessed that he does not know how to boil water. If a man of his skill and diverse competencies cannot boil water then [Continue Reading...]
A fellow personal chef friend of mine who is married to a Finnish man gave me this…uh…suggestive kitchen tool a few years back. I’ll be honest, I wasn’t entirely certain what it was (Scandinavian modern sculpture? World’s biggest muddler? Minimalist bishop from an oversize chess set?) or what to do with it, though several inappropriate [Continue Reading...]
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 [Continue Reading...]
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 [Continue Reading...]
A while back I realized that the cheap scrubbing-mitts I kept in the shower might do for root veggies what they do for my post-garden-work-Hobbit feet: get the dirt off. I bought a pair for kitchen use and put them to work. Here’s how they fared against purple potatoes and sunchokes fresh out of the [Continue Reading...]
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