Early yesterday morning I heard the cold winds of a front rustling the branches of the naked cherry trees and making acorns rattle down on the roof from the oaks that grow all around and over us. I lay awake for a while, listening to the strange thumps and rumbling of paws outside. From far…
Category: Recipes from my kitchen
The Best Pumpkin Dish Ever
It’s amazing what comes from one tiny seed, one small spark of life given at the end of the season, a hope for the next one, waiting in darkness until the light and rain call forth the potential. And the patience of those seeds that wait for years, maybe centuries, for that moment to unfurl. …
Cheese, Chicken, and Spinach Pie
Every day for so many days I have been finishing my work of milking and chores as soon as possible and rushing into town for various reasons. It is such an intense world out there in those places of asphalt deserts baking off heat and trampled every minute by the mad monster of traffic, where…
Wild Muscadine Meringue Pie
Suddenly everything seems to have changed. New flowers are blooming bright yellow in the weedy ways, Bidens and Sida, partridge pea and golden rod. Ripe poke and beauty berries bend the slender branches waiting for the birds. The golden and gossamer webs of the orb weavers stretch high up between the trees, and the weavers…
Spinach Pesto Pizza
Last week was all rain, and all kinds of rain. There was the gray, dripping rain that blanketed everything in damp and made interesting kinds of mold sprout under the shelves in the kitchen from the ambient humidity. There was rain that came down in silver sheets, moving towards you like a fog and obscuring…
Sweet and Simple Blueberry Cobbler
This is the height of the grass season, when milking and making cheese and yogurt and kefir and butter fill up my days. Every day I skim the yellow cream from four gallons of milk, and churn three-quarters of a gallon of cream into golden butter. Every day after milking, the cows, sleek with their…
Black Cherry Clafoutis: A Native Florida Custard Cake
I am always unprepared for the intensity of this season, ruled by the sun and violent storms. The heat feels suffocating and damp, and when the wind blows, it is a hot wind. Every day the shining white clouds build up into flickering, violet storms piled high in the hazy sky, and where they break…
Early Summer Garden Pizza
Someone brought a fellow gardener, introduced to us as a Master Gardener, out to see our garden, thinking that since we both are absorbed in the cultivation of earth we should get along great. Unfortunately he sneered at my companion-planted garden rows and the huge number of tomato plants I’m growing – one row to…
Bread, From Seed
“Our bread doesn’t shine like that,” said Cordelia. “That is the pity of it,” said the peasant woman. “What makes yours shine?” asked Cordelia. “The sun in the wheat,” said the peasant woman. -The Shining Loaf by Isabel Wyatt In January this year I planted four kinds of hulless barley, the kind that is easiest…
Spiderwort Soda, A Magical Elixir
I have always been enchanted with the herb Spiderwort (Tradescantia ohioensis I think is the Latin). The thin, succulent leaves, like grass leaves, poke out at a pixie-like angle, and the luminous blue three-petaled flowers, each petal delicate like a fairy’s wing, whose color delights the eye and changes even as you stare, shifting between blue…
Pink Sauerkraut
The winter garden is fading fast. The onions, once growing in neat rows, must be hunted for among the ragweed and evening primrose. The lettuce has become tall spires of bright yellow flowers, and the Brussels sprouts have been harvested all the way up the stalks. The cabbages this year have begun to split open…
Coconut Chicken Curry
It’s been a very cool, wet spring but now the days are longer and hot, and at noon the sun feels too bright and strong. I’ve been waking early again, going out in the cool, misty mornings, enjoying the gentle and almost alpine air to work in, and spending the bright, hot part of the…
Toadstools And Fairy Rings 