Author Archives: Tasha

Five kitchen items I regret purchasing

Note: I’m having impressive technical difficulties resulting, I believe, from a power outage on Monday. Namely, I cannot get at my photographs. Computers. So delightful. So frustrating! Anyway, I will edit this post to include photos when I can get at them. And next week I’ll share the story of what it’s like to cook by kerosene lantern when you have company over. ETA: Photos added 12 Sept 2012.

This was a delightfully hard list to pull together, actually. Not because I haven’t purchased a variety of kitchen tools I later wished I hadn’t, but because it seems I’ve been pretty aggressive about purging them from my home. In a small home, this is a vital thing, and I didn’t expect to be as good at it as it seems I have been.… Continue reading →

A link worth sharing

I appear to have been wrong, yesterday, in saying my next post would be all about kitchen items I regret buying. Of course, I was also expecting not to have another post until Wednesday; a post which is already scheduled to go up, so I guess I should just accept occasional wrongness. Or call this a bonus post.

BONUS POST! WOO!

I’d like to share Tracie McMillan’s article called “Cooking isn’t fun, but you should do it anyway”. It hit Slate yesterday, so I figured I might as well slip this link in today and then go back to regularly scheduled blogging tomorrow.

Frankly, I really appreciate this essay. I considered simply tweeting about it, but I wanted to get into how great this essay is.… Continue reading →

Five kitchen tools I use all the time

The other day, my friend Jen asked me to do a post on kitchen stuff I really love. She also asked me to do a post on things I regret buying, which will be the next post.

I have provided links for those things that are easy for me to find links on Amazon or elsewhere, in case you wish to purchase something. These are not affiliate links. Bill and I did, in fact, sign up to be Amazon affiliates when we fired up this blog, but they ceased running the program in Illinois. Just so you know. 27 April 2014 Note: The Amazon.com links are now affiliate links. This means that if you buy any of these, I get a tiny cut of the price.… Continue reading →

A gift of produce

In light of my last post on interdependency, I thought it might be nice to show a fun little slice of it. In this case, it ties back to Ellen and Grant.

As I said in the linked post, I met them on Twitter. So this is maybe 90% of how we interact. Ellen, a bit ago, tweeted something about eating tomatoes for every meal. She also said something about Grant abandoning her with a prolific garden.

You see, Grant and Ellen share a large garden and some chickens somewhere in the north of Chicago. I guess Grant is traveling right now, and so not pulling his weight in terms of eating the food they’ve grown. And apparently there’s only so much Ellen and the chickens can eat.… Continue reading →

A little bit on gardening and self-sufficiency

Bill and I just renewed the lease on our apartment, so we’ll be staying in this house about another year. It’s already the longest I, personally, have stayed put in my adult life. By the time we leave, which we intend to do next year, it will feel as if we’ve lived in this home forever. In fact, it’ll have been a little less than three years.

The first year we lived here, we moved in the middle of the summer. Heck, we mentioned it briefly here on this little blog. Of course, August is entirely too late in the year to plant anything, so for our first summer here, we grew nothing.

Last year, I posted about our first little garden early in the year, and then basically nothing for the rest of the year.… Continue reading →