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…
Category: Recipes from my kitchen
Chocolate Chevre Cheesecake with a Chocolate Cookie Crust (grain-free)
The high days of summer have brought the rains at last, the grey and sandy days broken by the tropical sun. Nothing is gentle here in summer. The rolling thunder and pounding rain, the blinding sun and baking heat all work an alchemy and draw the green and the sweetness out of the earth for…
Six Cooling Herbal Drinks For Hot Weather
Summer has set in. The days are long and so hot the wind feels like the air from a baking oven on my face, and the grass looks like uncut hay, all shriveled and dried in the pasture. It has been days and days of dry, bright sunshine over 100 F. The ticks and yellow…
Loquat and Mulberry Cobbler (grain-free; Paleo)
We stopped in at my mom’s house in town to pick mulberries from the ancient mulberry tree in her front yard. The tree is huge and covered with berries, but the birds have begun to eat the ripe ones already and we mostly found berries which had just recently fallen. My mom tempted the girls…
Spring Soup
I have been very much enjoying the warmth and beauty of this 35th spring I have experienced. The garden is covered in flowers, and it is the time when the laurel and live oaks shed their old, tough leaves, and they come down like rain in gusty swirls with each gentle breeze. One morning I…
Kale, Apple and Cheddar Salad
It was the middle of the night when I seemed to hear the dogs barking in the midst of a dream, gradually drawing me back from an immaterial world and into the loft under the dark rafters. I lay listening for a moment, wanting to roll over and drift back to sleep, but the voices…
Turmeric-Coconut soup with Calamondins
These are the cold, cold days of January when the fronts come through in the pattern of hot and sticky, silver chilly rain, and then the glittering mornings laced with frost. The rain has already come through, which is why it hardly ever snows, though it is cold enough to. It leaves a damp, chilly…
Grilled Pork Medallions with Fresh Turmeric and Calamondins
The weather has been mostly cool and beautiful since the December Warm Period is over. Every December we get a couple of weeks of hot, damp awful weather and everyone starts talking about climate change and doomsday and turns on the AC. I just plan to start all my eggplants and tomatoes and peppers those…
An Irreverent Ramen
Looking back over the past twelve months, this year has been a difficult year. I think if I had known it would be so fraught with peril, I would have wanted to just give up and stay in bed for all of 2018. It started right out with two long-time friends being so horrible to…
North Florida Pecan Pie
The first of the winter frosts came through last night. We spent yesterday chopping cassava stalks, making a shelter for the goats, and moving flats of tiny lettuce into the cold frame. It got later and later in the day and by the end of the afternoon we realized we didn’t have enough cover or…
Savory Sweet Potato Stuffing
All the days lately have been either full of silver mist with sunshine at the edges, or golden and blue with somber grey in reserve. Some very sad news reached us a few days ago – a very dear family friend passed away suddenly and unexpectedly over the weekend. He was only a few years…
November Mustard and Cheese Wraps
The horrible, hot humid weather lasted so long this year. Still, it was startling to see how quickly Autumn took over, greying the skies and laying the tall grasses of summer flat against the ground overnight. The bright early fall wildflowers are replaced by pale late blooming ones, and the honeysuckle vines are empty and…
Toadstools And Fairy Rings 