Birthday Cake – Localized

Today is my darling husband’s birthday, so this morning the kids & I baked him a cake. I chose my Grandma’s Fresh Apple Cake recipe in part because I had ingredients on hand and in part because it was one I could adapt so that it used mainly local ingredients. Oh yeah, and also because [...]

Garden Primer Part 2 – How Many Vegetables Do I Need?

It took me longer than I’d hoped to get this post out. Part of my struggle was that choosing the veggies for your garden is such a personal choice. But a conversation with a friend last night helped me really focus in on how I choose veggies for my garden.
Start with the limiting factors
If you [...]

Eat From the Pantry Challenge – Week Two

My biggest lesson-learned in the Eat From the Pantry Challenge is not to send your spouse to the grocery store–even with a detailed list–if you expect to hold to eating from the pantry. Oh well, we still were able to use up quite a bit of stuff from the pantry this week, so I can’t [...]

The Eat From the Pantry Challenge

This month, Life as Mom is hosting the Eat from the Pantry Challenge. The idea is that each family spend the month of January trying to eat their way through the bounty in the pantry/freezer/cupboards to save a little money in the New Year.
I am a bulk food addict and I belong to an [...]

A few tips on making Mozzarella

I know a lot of folks who, like me, love the idea of making mozzarella from scratch. But I also know quite a few people, myself included, who have tried it and failed miserably. This weekend, I think I finally had my mozzarella breakthrough, so of course I had to share it here.
First, the recipe. [...]

My make-it-from-scratch philosophy

I blog a lot about things I make from scratch and I realized that I have an underlying philosophy that I’ve never spelled out. So here goes.
When I was young, I was fortunate to spend many of my weekends on a farm my parents owned with a friend of theirs about two hours from the [...]

Quick & Easy Halloween Costumes for Beginners

I wasn’t up for spending $40 a piece on my kids’ Halloween costumes this year, so I decided to make my own. Let me preface this by saying that, although I make a LOT of things from scratch, my skills with needle and thread and pretty much entirely lacking. So I needed something that was [...]

My 15 minutes of fame…

If you read the Boulder Daily Camera, you might have seen a familiar face on today’s front cover. Actually, three familiar faces: myself, Gabriel & Lily. I was interviewed last week about my efforts to cellar onions, garlic, squash, and potatoes over the winter using a system of shelving and lidded bins. Little did I [...]

How I broke my “To Do” list habit

My name is Julie Artz, and I’m a recovering list addict. Having discovered FranklinCovey’s Day Planner–and its system of Priority A, B, and C to do lists–at a rather young age, I became convinced that I could keep myself organized, spend time on the most important things, and achieve all of my long-term goals, if [...]

Making chicken and vegetable stock

Last week, LaLaGirl cracked me up with her story–including pictures–of a moldy carton of Swanson’s Chicken Broth, commenting that she really ought to make her own. I promised I would share my method, so here it is.
I say method instead of recipe, because, like so many of the things I cook up, you can [...]

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Twitter

A nice post about the benefits of home-grown fruit from the gurus of Colorado gardening at Harlequin's Garden:... http://bit.ly/9EJuYH 1 day ago
Struggling with getting started in your early-spring garden? Here's some easy things to do to get you going:... http://bit.ly/btrT8j 2 days ago
We're starting more seeds today! http://bit.ly/aWCzH2 http://bit.ly/dj66OO 5 days ago
Have you struggled with growing potted plants? Here's a little help:... http://bit.ly/b8eFa8 2 weeks ago
Just catching up on follows going back to...January. Ugh. 2 busy 2 tweet. 2 weeks ago

Terminal Verbosity

I write, therefore I am