Category Archives: Blather

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 →

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 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 →

The blueberries did it

In my last couple of entries, I discussed getting to feeling like all things associated with food were terrible and then how I moved past that situation. That could be a sufficient set of posts to put out there, but I felt like I should post a bit on how I got there. This is as much for myself to have something to look back to as it is to share, but I hope others will find it valuable as well.

So, what the hell went wrong?

Lots of things, but let’s start here: I love a farmers’ market. Oh, MAN, do I love a farmers’ market. I love the bustle of people. I love looking at all the produce and the cheese and the plants and the flowers (this time of year).… Continue reading →

Fixing Food

In my last entry, I wrote a little bit about my return home and discovering that I suddenly had quite the adversarial relationship with food. In truth, it probably wasn’t as sudden as it seemed, but it sure did hit me hard when it finally came to a head.

I, quite literally, spent the first five days upon returning home thinking about what the hell had happened here. Why did the very thought of cooking, writing a blog post, reading a food book or food blog, or really anything fill me with an intensely snarly feeling?

When had food, by which I mean every single thing that could fall under the umbrella of that word, become a chore?

And how do you fix that when it’s not just your hobby, your major source of entertainment, and a great deal of your intellectual pursuits, but also something you can’t just totally walk away from?… Continue reading →