A friend asked for some tips on packing lower-plastic and lower-waste lunches for her school-age son. This rather surprised me, since this particular friend is genuine cloth-diapering, Keystone XL Pipeline-protesting, etsy-craft-selling kind of girl. And in fact, when further questioned, it turned out my friend was already packing a pretty green lunch, but was looking…
Archives for January 2012
Photo Tour Of The Winter Garden
This has been such a mild winter. My chard and lettuces are still going strong, along with some herbs I never would have thought to be harvestable in January, like cilantro and lemon verbena. It’s such a treat to be able to harvest this kind of food rainbow in the dead of winter. Scenes…
Your Chance to Win 'The Urban Farm Handbook'
What better way to celebrate the new look and feel of NW Edible than with a chance to win the best new urban homesteading book on the market? When Annette Cottrell, co-author with Joshua McNichols of The Urban Farm Handbook and author of the site Sustainable Eats, asked me if I’d like to host a giveaway…
Big Upcoming Changes On NW Edible
Well, the times they are a changin’….Or at least, this blog it is a changing. Tomorrow, and through the weekend, I will be implementing some pretty big changes to the look and structure of this blog. What this will mean for you, the reader: It will be easier to find the posts with recipes, the…
Avoiding Plastic Wrap In The Kitchen
I’m not dogmatically anti-plastic, but I try to be thoughtful about how and where it is used in my house, and I am trying to cut down. My garden at this time of year grows under a tunnel cloche of plastic. Freezer stuff gets entombed in plastic, because it’s the best at preserving the bulk orders of…
How To Render Beef Tallow From Marrow Bones
I recently made beef stock with marrow bones (sometimes called pipe bones) and in the process rendered out a heck of a lot of beef fat (tallow) from inside the bones. Two birds with one stone, and all that. See all the white stuff inside the bones? That’s marrow. It’s either a great culinary delicacy…
The Productivity Junkie Had A Baby
It sounds like the beginning of a joke, doesn’t it? So, this productivity junkie had a baby…. I got a very kind email from a reader a few weeks ago that boiled down to this, “how do you do so much while having little kids?” This reader had recently had her own child, and was…