Nov
19
I may still have a little chard, carrots, oregano, and rosemary alive in the garden, but my garlic’s planted, my horseradish is harvested, and outdoor gardening season ’09 is pretty much officially done. Although Seeds of Change has apparently lost its mind and started sending spring seed catalogs in November (!!), it’s early, even by …
Nov
04
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 …
Nov
01
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 …
Oct
28
A friend on mine recently asked me for some advice on eating a low sodium diet because she was recently diagnosed with high blood pressure. I realized as I typed up all my tips that a heart-healthy diet looks a whole lot like an Earth-friendly one. Just another reason to think about the foods we …
Oct
26
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 …
Oct
25
A few weeks back, I was interviewed for an article in the Boulder Daily Camera called Preserving Your Roots about home root cellaring. I got quite a few questions from friends about one particular part of the article: storing carrots. Since I harvested a full 5-gallon bucket’s worth of carrots this week from our community …
Oct
15
Today is Blog Action Day and I’m proud to be participating with other bloggers around the world in raising awareness about the topic of climate change. With all the press the upcoming talks in Copenhagen have been getting, doing something tangible about climate change can seem overwhelming, or out of our hands as individuals. It’s …
Oct
14
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 …
Oct
05
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 …
Sep
29
Autumn at our house almost always means harvest, and food preservation typically follows. Unfortunately, along with the boxes of tomatoes, buckets of garlic, and oodles of other fruits & veggies come the fruit flies. I can tolerate a couple of flies, but when they reach critical mass, I start exclaiming things like “Die, evil vermin” …
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