This summer took me from this tiny kitchen to this one:
Actually, what I love is that it isn’t a tiny kitchen but a tiny house-kitchen. It’s nothing but kitchen. Which is my favorite place to be. (And…that big sloping ceiling is really just part of the giant roof of the big ole swallow filled barn [...]
On a quiet day last fall I flipped to an article in the latest Harper’s entitled “American Electra: Feminism’s ritual matricide” It didn’t really seem like an uplifting topic, but I was pulled into reading. I often find discussions about feminism relevant to the topic of cooking and other disappearing domestic skills. It’s a tricky association [...]
For the past year I have had the pleasure to spend 15 hrs straight each week in the lovely kitchen of the Marin Headlands Center for the Arts assisting Eduardo Morrell in the production of his naturally leavened breads, which are sold primarily at the Berkeley Farmer’s Markets as “Morrell’s Bread”. The video below was [...]
The cast iron skillet is, to me, the best symbol of the wisdom and quality of traditional food. Beyond just a great tool for many cooking tasks the cast iron skillet represents aspects of the whole lifestyle of a sustainable food culture. It functions beautifully over a flame, with even heat that is held efficiently [...]
While post Thanksgiving might be a funny time to bring up the merits of a roasted bird, it seems like a good time to point out the fact that this is anything but a special occasion-only dish. I roast a chicken almost once a week. This makes a meal that is always a wonderful dinner, [...]
The weather this year (not to mention my blog posts) seemed to just just skip summer. I got away to some blazing Oregon days, swam in a some rivers and helped out a bit with a new baby in the family. But Fall seemed to just shove its way in and it felt like no [...]
Explaining why cod liver oil is so good for you sounds like a pitch for a miracle cure or for some snake oil* hoax. The Weston A Price Foundation, who considers the stuff a super food states: “There is hardly a disease in the books that does not respond well to treatment that includes cod [...]
There is a post below on the limited visual experience of eating locally in the winter. Yes, even in the Bay Area where so much is available year round from not too far away, shopping at the farmer’s markets reveals growing seasons that limit choice and we saw, color. We have gone beyond emerging from [...]
It’s great that I can choose to spend the extra money on Organic food, so that I don’t have any conventionally grown food available in my house and so that every penny I spend on food (which is a high percentage of all my pennies- more like 20%, versus the national average of 9%) But [...]
Over the past few months I’ve changed my relationship with these sourdough beasties I’ve befriended to leaven and flavor my baked goods. I’ve both expanded the amount and variety of goods that I can make with them and I’ve let the little things be warm and active for longer periods. That is to say by [...]
