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I think if you asked 100 people on the street what their favorite season is, about 80% would say fall. Why is that? Is it just all the pretty colors? The nip in the air? Or does this time of year somehow hit an ancient chord with us, knowing that the harvest is in, the storage bins are full, and there is high hope that we will survive the winter (even if it is by running to the store)? Read the rest of this entry »
My mother’s 1972 printing of the Joy of Cooking, opened to the page on Yeast Breads. This book literally taught me the basics of cooking. It’s a long story as to why I wasn’t taught by the parental units in my life, but thankfully, I’ve always been able to learn by reading! Not quite sure where the grease stain came from.
I’ve been baking bread since my early 20’s. One of my first attempts was a bagel recipe found on the back of the yeast packet. (I had no idea what I was getting into, but reading the bread section of The Joy of Cooking helped. My work mates scarfed them up like they had not been fed for days, but none of us were particularly picky at that age.) Being a small woman without a lot of upper body strength or height, hand kneading dough was (and still is) difficult for me, and so I only made bread occasionally until the bread machine craze of the late 80’s/early 90’s. Read the rest of this entry »
My habit of late is to get up around 7:30 am, make a cup of tea, check email and Facebook, and read any interesting blogs. This morning, I saw a recipe for grape chili-pepper jelly. I wasn’t interested, both because I think grape jelly is mostly for people under the age of 10, and more importantly, I didn’t have any grapes.
Some of these dried chilies are well past their expiration date, but how do you tell, really?
What I do have is loads of apples. I’ve made apple-plum sauce, apple sauce, apple butter, and a lot of apple crisp. But still the apples keep coming. We picked the last of the tree just before our first really hard frost a few days ago. Read the rest of this entry »
A tree full of these beauties makes me feel rich!
I am living in apple paradise. How many times have I moved with boxes collected from the local grocery store, only to see “Washington Apples” on the side? Greenbluff, less than 20 minutes from my house, has a great selection of apples. We drove through one of the major Washington apple growing regions, Yakima, a few weeks ago, and saw wooden boxes of apples the size of a small cabin. Read the rest of this entry »
Salem, the first cat of our marriage.
We have a new kitty. We’ve named him Malcolm.
I attribute a lot of my “back to the land” ways to my father. He loved to cook and garden and had a deep curiosity about how things worked and a willingness to experiment. But my love of cats? That I definitely get from my Mother. She was a cat lover, and taught me to be, early on. We almost always had a cat growing up, despite seven moves before I was 12.
My husband and I have now owned 8 cats in the last 13 years, not counting the kittens we found good homes for after adopting not one but two female cats who turned out to be pregnant. Salem, a big black beauty, was our first. We adopted him from the humane society in Parker Arizona shortly after we got married. Salem had climbed into someone’s RV in California, and accidentally ended up in Arizona before being discovered. Read the rest of this entry »
Like a blueberry…sort of.
You’ve heard of the popular children’s book “Blueberries for Sal”? Well, this is about “Huckleberries for Michael”. My husband grew up in and around Missoula Montana, an area of the country known for huckleberries. These small blue fruits, related to blueberries, have defied cultivation, and have a huge following in areas of the country where you can find them. They currently go for about $40 per gallon at area farmers markets, primarily because it can take two people way more than an hour to pick a gallon of huckleberries. These sweet fruits make you work for it, no question. Read the rest of this entry »
What kind of muffins to make today? The actual muffin is a banana walnut made yesterday. This silicone muffin pan clearly gets a lot of use. The jar of salt (blue lid) is an old fresh salad dressing jar that I’ve had for so long that I think something bad will happen if it breaks. I’ve literally had it since before I got married in 1998. That has got to be some kind of record for recycling a jar!
My husband loves muffins. Pretty much any kind. Whenever I ask what he wants for breakfast, the answer is almost always muffins. I eat two or three. He finishes the rest throughout the day.
So I’m always on the lookout for a good muffin recipe. But for me, a good muffin recipe must be reasonably healthy. I define this as having no more than 1/4 cup fat and 1/2 cup sugar or less per dozen muffins. We’re not talking 400+ calorie a piece, bigger than your fist, covered with icing, coffee shop muffins here. Read the rest of this entry »
The jar on the front right was the refrigerator batch. You can tell because the onions still look raw. You can also tell which ones were boiled in the brine before canning, as they are more translucent.
I have this depression era reaction to fresh abundant inexpensive produce. I buy a lot of it. Even if I don’t quite know what to do with it all. OK, the first step is admitting you have a problem, right?
Thus was the situation when I saw a 25 lb bag of Walla Walla Sweet Onions for the bargain basement price of $10 back in July. They were huge. They were just harvested. They were sweet and wonderful. The issue is that sweet onions (like Walla Walla, Maui and Vidalia) do not store for long periods of time. They are a seasonal item (which is part of why people go nuts for them). Read the rest of this entry »
OK, this batch was made with dried cranberries, because I was out of raisins and the store is 40 minutes away round trip. Don’t tell anyone!
The winter of 5th grade, I was living in Coronado, California, a burg just south of San Diego that is 1/2 naval base. Having lived most of my life up to that point in rural Missouri and Idaho, the multiethnic, multilingual, cosmopolitan feel of Coronado was very new to me.
I was also on the cusp of puberty, and beginning to realize that the world did not totally revolve around me and my immediate needs and wants. If I paid attention, there was some really interesting stuff going on around me. And still being a kid, I could often observe the world quietly without anyone taking notice of me. Read the rest of this entry »
This old nest box, measuring about 12 x 18 inches, was the perfect bean planter
I love it when a plan comes together! Arriving in the Spokane area in early June, there really wasn’t much I could do garden wise (which is pretty much a crisis for me). But I wanted to had to plant a few things. What, besides tomatoes (which is everyone’s answer), did I really love from my garden? And what did I really want to be organically grown? Green beans! (Green beans used to be on the Environmental Working Group’s list of the Dirty Dozen produce items, in terms of pesticide contamination – now they are #16.) Read the rest of this entry »
MilesAwayFarm
Miles Away Farm Blog 