The past two days have brought us grey skies and pouring, drizzling, sprinkling, thundering rain. Rain making a puddle out of the patio, pooling in old buckets, pattering and rattling on the roofs, and pinging like chimes on the pile of junk under the eves of the barn. Last night between rains the sky flashed…
Category: Recipes from my kitchen
Pumpkin and Broccoli Casserole
The dreamy blue-skied spring weather, so warm it is almost hot, has called forth the flowers of all kinds. There is a narrow definition of flower in our minds, the colorful, the beautiful, the many-petaled ones, but there are so many more, such as the scaly dimorphous cone flowers of the pines, or the catkins…
Wild Chickweed Salad with Ranch-Style Dressing
All around the earth is greening. The forest looks lacy with new leaves, and the pastures have begun to grow. Not only have the summer grasses thrown off their winter sleep and have started to poke up their heads and send out new shoots, all the pretty weeds of spring decorate the ground between the…
January Chicken Pot-au-feu
The chickens are on my list lately. Not only have the bold, bad things been making raids on the kitchen, strewing the contents of the piggie bucket all over the place and devouring the cat kibbles, but they have also been getting into the garden. When I see them, plump and nonplussed with bulging crops,…
Roasted Radishes, 3 Different Ways
I guess it’s cold when you turn the tap on in the morning, and you get a cup of ice, and that’s only after it’s had some time to thaw. In some ways it’s hardship out here in the cold, but at the same time i feel much stronger and healthier than when we lived…
Return Of The Light Grain-free Lemon Cake
It’s been unusually cold lately, cold enough to snow although we weren’t so lucky. Hard frosts for several days in a row left everything sparkling with minute crystals in the early mornings, the ground hard frozen, and we marveled at the layers of ice on the water troughs that had to be broken through. The…
Thrifty Leftover Turkey Pie With Garden Vegetables
Cold weather and busy days. There’s so much I’d like to get done before the new year, but the short days run by so quickly, and I’m left wondering to myself how it’s so easy to stay up so late knitting by the fire when the nights are so long. There are lettuce and collard…
Old-fashioned Pumpkin Pie
I was lugging a wheelbarrow full of hay and manure into the garden when the weather changed. The air was warm and still, and seemed to hang like a muggy curtain around the pea trellis and rows of young cabbages, lettuce, and broccoli as i trundled clumsily along the narrow path. A sound almost like…
All-Raw Eggnog
There was a raccoon raid on the chicken coop last night. We had seen the scoundrel lurking around the barn earlier in the evening, and in retrospect we should have dispatched him then. But everyone was tired and chilled, and Ethan felt really ill. Much later, long after the restless teenager had ceased to flick…
Radish Salad With Roselle Dressing
Radishes are one of my favorite things to grow, although they weren’t always. They are very easy and reliable, some years the only vegetable we could manage to grow in the early years of gardening, before we had cows and goats to enrich the land. I’ve pickled them, served them with butter, chopped the roots up for salad, …
Callaloo Curry With Flatbread
The cold weather is here at last! Sweet-smelling woolens have been taken out of the cedar chest to air in the beautiful dry air, and we are enjoying the last of the summer garden’s offerings…. spinach-like amaranth greens. Amaranth is really more of a weed than a garden plant; indeed, the spiny, weedy amaranth torments…
Roselle Sour Gummy Candies
The cooler weather that has drifted through lately has found us gathering in the kitchen around our old woodstove we call Calcifer. Calcifer is old and finicky, and the seals need replaced. He billows smoke at us when the logs start to burn, and the oven temperature can vary wildly. But on chilly mornings and…
Toadstools And Fairy Rings 