Vermont Public Radio's summer school program* learns to spin yarn this week! They visited my friend Kim Goodling over at Grand View Farm.


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I'm practicing a decidedly old fashioned Christmas this year. Along with fruitcake and a coffee bread with a recipe that starts with "scald the milk" we did not get our tree until this week. I certainly won't be taking it down on the 26th either. I'll probably leave it up until January 6th (that's the 12th day of Christmas, after all)


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Sometimes my soups come together like this:

What can I throw into this pot?

This is one of those meals. I picked up my bulk order of winter veggies tonight and knew I wanted to make a veggie soup. In fact I challenged myself to make this soup without even using a meat based stock. And it worked pretty well too!*


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It doesn't seem appropriate to blog about my meat birds all summer, and then skip the final step: we harvested the last of our meat birds last week.

This process is not fun. It is, however, an important part of owning our food. Chicken day lets us say "Yes, we take responsibility of the meat which we eat." And I believe that's important.


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For Neil’s birthday I made him country style pork ribs. I knew (since this was a Birthday Dinner) that I wanted a fancy recipe. And living in the 21st century of course I started online. But of all the recipes I found 90% told me “chop an onion, slow cook the ribs with that and a bottle of BBQ sauce ( Read more... )

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Good news! When I opened the pressure canner wendesday morning* I had nine pretty little jars of corn and black bean salsa. (I feel like I should note that I've never had a jar shatter in any canner. But I have had older jars blow their bottoms off (twice, and some of my jars are decades old) and I had some "limited edition" ball jars where the ( Read more... )

Ok, so my corn crop failed. Is that a good reason to go a little crazy at the farm stand? Apparently the answer is YES! I had originally thought that I'd get 4 dozen ears of corn to put in the freezer. Then I read on Knitspot* that Anne got 10 quarts of corn out of just 3 dozen ears. I almost reconsidered...


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I need someone to write the cross-pollination blues. Because I've got 'em...


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It took over a pound of blackberries, but I did it! I made seedless* blackberry jam! Smoked cardamom blackberry jam to be exact. I broke out the Squeezo for this process. I love my squeezo** for processing tomatoes and back when my mom gave me hers she included the fine-mesh screen for berry seeds - which I've never used before now.


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