The fair pastures are growing and growing, still silver-crested with daisy fleabane, white under the silver-lined clouds, heavy with thunder, that wander over the sky. The air is so humid it hangs like a mist around lights, and i feel like I’m gulping water when i breathe. The ubiquitous sand sticks to everything – feet,…
Category: Recipes from my kitchen
The Odd Bits: Blood Loaf
Just after we moved from my childhood home to a lonely neighborhood, i started having panic attacks. A month before we had moved, I got eight new silver amalgam fillings, triggering a severe kidney infection that didn’t respond to antibiotics, asthmatic bronchitis that i didn’t fully recover from for years, and a heart arrhythmia. I…
The Odd Bits: Crispy Chicken Feet
These past few weeks have been so perfectly beautiful – clear as a bell and full to the brim with flowers and the unfolding of fresh green leaves, ready to meet the sunshine. The mornings have been dew-strung and misty, illuminating the careful lacy weavings of the spiders in the golden light, and at night…
The Odd Bits: Beef Heart Stew
I love this blooming, gentle season, with its bright blue days so beautiful they seem like a dream, and skies that are like gazing into the eyes of a beloved. They shift so easily into the pattering, grey days when the slick tree trunks stand out from the blushing green. Perhaps it is the flowers…
The Odd Bits: Fried Testicles
Despite the warmth of this winter, we at last passed through the frost-bearded days of our wintery spring, the dark, chilly nights pinpricked by the undying stars, when i wake up before light to sprinkle the frozen, rattling garden; crunching bucket-laden to the honking geese in the white dawn through the field of bright glass-green…
Solstice Brownies (Paleo, Grain-free, Gluten-free)
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the return of the light, and what it means to wait in darkness, closed in, caught in long moments of obscurity, almost forgetting that there was anything but stagnant midnight, longing for and trying to believe in the first ray of morning. I have been trying to sleep…
A Counter Garden: Adventures With Sprouting
It was so hot and tropical this fall. Finally, the day after Halloween, the cool weather came, blowing away the heavy, damp heat. The light is different now, beaming in long, honey-colored rays through the afternoon trees. The last yellow cherry leaves are wavering at the tips of tiny branches where little birds flutter and…
Grain-free Pecan Chestnut Ginger Cookies
I started with roots this time in the garden. Flowers, herbs and roots. It’s not like me at all. I usually like to get a healthy selection of greens going, and drag my feet on the radishes, carrots, beets, parsnips, and salsify. They grow slowly and need extra soil amendments, and it usually feels daunting,…
Pumpkin Coconut Curry
It’s that time again…. The time of hauling 5-gallon buckets here or there, full of this or that, tucking in the tender starts, securing seeds in the soil, and wandering the edges of the garden gesturing and muttering to myself… I’m not just communicating with the unseen, this is actually how I plan my garden….
Chocolate Covered Wensleydale Chevre Bonbons
For most of the summer, Stinky decided he was a cow. When i got home and tried to reunite him with the rest of the goats, he was skeptical, but agreeably walked in when i held the gate open. He spent a minute sniffing everyone’s tail, and then followed me out again to be with…
Roselle Honey BBQ Sauce
This is the season of dry, whirling wind, of butterflies and ragged grass, tall plumes of dog fennel, yellow flowers, and change. Lime rock dust hangs over the country roads like fog, and in the quiet nights the almost cool wind stirs the mixing bowl clouds around the hesitating moon. In the hot afternoons, the…
Welcome Home Soup
It was a difficult journey home, and Florida greeted us with old friends – mosquitoes, fire ants, a thunderstorm, and a hurricane. We had had trouble with a misunderstanding at the airport. I thought Ethan had checked the Teenager’s bag beforehand, and we didn’t have enough money to check it when we got there and…
Toadstools And Fairy Rings 