The savoy cabbage in the garden isn’t ready yet, but I used a beautiful head of Chinese cabbage and made Halupki.  It wasn’t quite the same, but it was a decent home-grown substitute.  I learned how to make it from my French grandmother, who learned it from her Slovenian mother-in-law, my great-grandmother Anna. 1…

I’ll be honest – 2014 was a tough year.  I think starting off the first week of January with whooping cough made a really bad start!  And it was the Year of the Horse, supposedly a bad year for us Rats.  It wasn’t really a bad year.  Just intense, and I kept hurting myself and…

I’ve been woken up lately, in the middle of the night.  Fears have visited me in the darkness.  This happened last year, too.  Fears of what the new year might bring.  There are whispers of drought, disease, destruction.  The Karma of decades of Earth-abuse.  Radiation.  Petrochemical spills.  I never knew it would be so hard…

Christmas day was, as usual, very full.  I think we definitely made the most of the season, even if we never managed to put up a tree or lights or anything.  At least we did the snowflakes.  Not to mention pumpkin pie, the Angel chimes, gingerbread men, caroling in the neighborhood, and a wreath (Mirin…

I forgot to do a garden post last week!  But the garden new is good news – everything is green and growing.  No more rabbit damage so far.  I planted a whole row (the one Clothilde is tugging on) of new lettuce starts from Forage.  Melissa Desa gave out starts for many different lettuce varieties…

We celebrate Christmas three times – the result of having lots of family close by.  Christmas Eve is when we celebrate dinner with my family, tomorrow will be with Ethan’s extended family, and probably over the weekend we’ll have a smaller, quieter celebration with just Ethan’s parents.  Whew!  And somehow I ended up making most…

It’s funny how things work out sometimes.  All last week I had planned to make snow flakes with the big kids, but they never showed up for it.  As soon as they woke up I would say, “I have something fun for us to do after breakfast.” They would nod and run away outside, and…

Rose’s last ballet performance was yesterday.  It was an intense week with five performances, two on one single day.  She loved it, but it was hard on her, too.  It was wonderful to see how happy she was to be in a real ballet, but a relief now that it’s over.  Her poor cheeks are…

Today was the Solstice – the day the sun stands still.  The shortest day, surrounded by two long nights that nearly swallow the sun – tomorrow we shall see if he is reborn again.It was a quiet, grey day.  We got the first precious drops of rain for weeks.  This fall has been so cool…

This is what happens when a pumpkin pie is unsupervised with a toddler for five minutes…. It had turned out of the oven to be such a nice pumpkin pie.  It had grain-free gingerbread crust and it smelled amazing.  I was just in the other room, lying down for a few minutes and trying to…

We hand-painted some wooden beads to make ornaments with, and they turned out very pretty.  Mirin painted some elaborate ones with sunflowers and holly.  Rose did some pretty blue and purple beads.  Clothilde made one that looks like a reindeer dropping.  The fine paintbrush was in much demand with everyone, even Clothilde. Today is Rose’s…