It has been a very warm and summery winter. I have cosmos blooming in my garden, and ripe cherry tomatoes at Christmas! This is the warmest winter I have experienced as a gardener, and I worry about next year’s pests, with no hard freeze so far. However, I am still enjoying, for the moment, wearing…
Category: Recipes from my kitchen
New Milk Custard Pie With Mulberries
This post is not timely, unfortunately. A while ago the mulberries were finished fruiting, and the season for new babies is nearly over. But the truth is this post is a difficult one for me to write – because there was trouble this season, and people who don’t live with this kind of thing –…
Tangy Radish Salad
I feel like I slept a long time under the winter darkness. Even in the bell-cold mornings under the blustery sky, and working beside the smoky hearth. While I walked I still slept in the quiet. Slowly – it happened as the days uncounted, stretched beyond the threshold. First things reached out to me through…
Mint and Pecan Chutney
I love the bare, crystalline mornings, edged with frost and sharp with ice, when the blue sky is so clear as a bell you want to dive in between the bare branches as the birds do and fly up and up. I got frostbite one morning on the bottoms of my feet from crunching barefoot…
Holiday Potsticker Dumplings
I love the long, long nights of this holy season. The restful darkness so bright with stars, and the low, grey days so gentle on the eyes. I’ve been hibernating – trying to sleep twelve full hours a day, wrapped in wool and long clothes, slowly letting go of all the unreachable things, the things…
Rice and Pigeon Peas
The hardest freeze in two or three years came through last week, wilting the whole garden. The weedy sweet potatoes, the remains of the roselle, and the tall pigeon peas were dark and limp when I woke up on that cold, cold morning. The whole orchard and all the pastures were white. The rest of…
Roselle Sweet And Sour Pork
The weather is so cool and sweet after the latest storm. I love those quiet moments that always seem to happen this time of year, when the afternoon sun sweeps glorious golden arms through the tops of the trees, and the bare branches of the sleeping trees look so lonely… Melancholy settles on me…
Harissa
I often get ideas for recipes not in the kitchen, but in the garden. The plants, they talk. They give you hints and nudges. Not in words, of course, but in little whiffs of smells – or the irresistible beauty of their fruits and roots and leaves. I’m trying again with the garden. It’s hard…
Pumpkin, Bean Sprout, and Shrimp Rice Bowl Stir-fry
I’ve very strongly felt the gathering darkness this Michaelmas season. It feels like humanity’s darkest shadows are swirling in the winds of change – Fear, Greed, False Virtue, Revenge. In my heart it reminds me of the dark times that still live in the ancestral echoes in my cells – times when the ancestors were…
Three Hot Sauces
Once again this season – this whirling, swirling season of new gardens and homeschool, birthdays and busyness and expectations, has picked me up and crushed me like a hurricane from the Gulf. Every day feels so, so busy – every moment so very, very full. I feel like I’m suffocating under all the work. Some…
Lime Basil Pesto
I write here from the garden this evening – the sounds of the chorus of cicadas swell in the trees, and make the whole world alive with sound. The sun is setting, still bright at the edges, with small clouds like little golden fairy castles floating above the pines. It isn’t quite gloaming yet, but…
Summer Eggplant Curry With Millet Dumplings
Midsummer is such a strange time – just like the winter solstice, when you can faintly feel the little flicker of light behind the darkness, here you can sense the dark shadows behind the stark brightness of summer. The garden is still beautiful, even in the middle of summer. This year it has been the…
Toadstools And Fairy Rings 