There was much food, drink, and merriment- we had two couples come stay with us for the weekend as we all attended Debi and John’s wedding. The weather was perfect, perfect, perfect, and everything unfolded at a tranquil pace that made for lots of refined hedonism and good time with good people. Only one of the four- Andrew– was with us for dinner on Friday, after a not-so-successful mushroom-hunting walk; it’s been really dry here…
Year: 2008
I joined the local mycological society in the spring, but they evidently had some staff shake-up and never contacted me due to lack of organization. Since I was hardly around this summer, it’s probably no great loss. But next year I hope to go on some of the walks. And a mycologist friend of ours is coming for the weekend, so with any luck we can go hunting. In the meantime, one of our local…
I finally got to spend some quality time in the studio, and finished a drawing. This is important because I have a show coming up in 3 weeks, and I’ve lost a lot of time. I knocked off early enough to make another beautiful jar of sambal, cure the sockeye salmon for Sunday, and bust out some more peasant food for dinner. In keeping with the ultra-local theme of late, everything in this dinner was…
Funny how my prediction came true and today was completely- and I mean all the way- devoted to dealing with Fruit Mountain. 18 quarts of applesauce (ingredients: apples) and 21 pints of wicked hot spicy peach-habañero chutney that also included lime basil, red onion, and cider vinegar that I infused with cinnamon, pepper (pink & black,) cardamom, star anise, bay, fenugreek, and mustard seeds. I also added some honey to balance the vinegar and let…
Christine finally caught The Cold, so Milo and I let her sleep and went apple picking. It was another perfect, crystalline Fall day where the impending doom of Winter sharpens our appreciation of the bounty that still surrounds us- and makes us load a metric ton of fruit into the back of the car. And then we get home and realize that we have to do something, sharpish, with said fruit or it will rot,…
Because of my still-new life as a hick, but also in part because of the economic high colonic we’re all involuntarily undergoing at the hands of some creepy old unelected super-rich white dudes (who aren’t even wearing rubber gloves) I’ve been fixated somewhat lately on wringing tear-inducing depth of flavor from the humblest of ingredients. Partly it’s due to my nature; I’ve always preferred Italian cooking to French. The core difference as I see it-…
Until last night, I was an avowed Obama voter. I felt passionately that the amoral cabal currently in power are the worst thing ever to happen to this country, and that they have truly pried open the gates of hell, lubed the tracks, and cut the brake lines in order to get us there as fast as possible, all the while pillaging the astonishing wealth of this nation so that their corrupt, greedy comrades can…
It’s been raining for days now, but when the sun breaks through the smell of wet leaves on the crisp breeze is as pungent a memory tonic as I know of; it transports me back to myriad times during my childhood and burnishes an inexpressible longing for the wide-open joy and freedom of that period. Fall has always been my favorite season, and that feeling only grows each year. All of this nostalgia has been…
Christine went out to get a chicken, and I mustered enough strength to convert it into soup. This is a two-stage process, because I always like to make a good broth and then strain and tinker with it more depending on what it’s going to end up as. In this case, the chicken simmered with onion, carrot, celery, and parsley for a couple of hours. I reserved the “broth carrots” as Milo likes to call…
One of the great joys of parenting is that it’s like having a VIP preview to all of the season’s latest must-have microbes. Milo got a cold on Friday, and of course inevitably I got it a couple of days later. Since it was just the two of us this weekend, I made a big vat of minestrone with a chicken carcass, lots of roots and herbs from the garden, alphabet pasta, and heirloom cranberry…