One request for the day

My friend Ellen of One Hundred Meals recently wrote about her fifth meal. I have not gone through all the links and comments, but just the words she wrote are valuable.

I want to thank my friends and readers for all the times you all have pulled me out of the echo chamber it’s so easy to get into1. I hope I am doing the same for you.

I’ll catch you guys Friday with a post about Apple-Pumpkin Brown Betty.



fn1. And the people I follow on twitter. But many of them don’t even realize they’re doing this for me, as they may not follow back. So they’ll never see my gratitude. Nevertheless, it’s there.… 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 →

The first meal.

To get the full context for this post, please read both Grant’s post and Ellen’s post over at the blog One Hundred Meals. The meal described in those posts and below was prompted by this project Ellen and Grant have launched. To get the fullest context, you really should read the full blog archives which, as of today’s post, are only six posts deep―and that’s including the two I linked to above. Maybe you won’t do all that now, but I hope by the end of my post, you’ll be convinced to do so.

This isn’t a widely read blog. I’m terrible at paying attention to analytics, so if I had to guess, I would guess I have no more than ten regular readers. Most, maybe all, who read this blog regularly know me personally.… Continue reading →

A progress report

When I announced that I was trying again on my “Eating In Challenge”, I mentioned that I’d had questions about if drinking out was okay, or if I would accept a restaurant meal paid for by someone else, and that I’d come to the conclusion that “no” was the appropriate answer for these things.

So, first a confession. I’ve already gone out to a bar for drinks. I went out with a friend for a few beers after she had dinner at our house. I’m surprisingly comfortable with this. I had said “no” to drinks out because they lead to food out. This very much did not – we had a solid meal at home, then went out for drinks and had only a couple of beers.… Continue reading →