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…
Tag: soup
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
A Change Of Season
Winds of change have been blowing white cottony clouds low across the blue sky all week. Hurricanes are brewing in the ocean far away. The old hens are looking molty and tattered, and one by one the huge orb weaver spiders that wove golden webs around the kitchen eaves are disappearing. In the dry afternoons…
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…
Chicken, Chickpea, and Spinach Stew
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…
Summer Pumpkin Soup
This is really a summer squash recipe, not a pumpkin recipe, but summer squash are ideally harvested when they are small and tender, and the reality of gardening is that no matter how diligent you are at picking, eventually you will find monster squash on your hands! Blimp-like zucchinis, and yellow squash that can only…
Mock Artichoke Soup
All the ingredients for this soup were home-grown (well, except the black pepper!). The potatoes are just now ready to dig, and the pairing of the fresh potatoes and the patty pan squash give this soup an unusual flavor of artichoke! Benning’s Green Tint is an heirloom variety of patty pan squash that has been…
Toadstools And Fairy Rings 