The problem: your kid has a lot of friends, and wants to give gifts to every single one of them. With your money. Of course, it is absolutely wonderful that your charming and thoughtful child is thinking of his or her peers over the holiday, and you want to encourage this independent spirit of generosity. You just don’t…
Grocery Shopping The Winter Garden
In the summer I harvest daily. I have to, or the green beans crawl into my house and take over my couch and the zucchini turns into an uncarved canoe. In the winter, the veggies more or less hang out waiting for me to get off my butt and come pick them. Many days, it’s…
Backyard Eggs vs. Store Bought Eggs: A Side-by-Side Comparison
I did some entertaining last weekend which necessitated purchasing two dozen eggs. I had a few eggs left over, which allowed me to perform a side-by-side comparison of good quality store bought eggs with my backyard hen’s eggs. Left: store bought eggs. Right: backyard eggs. The backyard eggs come in various other shades as well. The store…
25 New Year's Resolutions For The 2012 Garden
This morning a crust of frost danced over the uncovered raised beds and painted the grass with mercurial shine. The garden sits placid and independent under the chill of winter and it seems a bit easier to carve out those chucks of time to reflect upon the year almost past, and the year that is rushing towards…
Are You One Of Those "Organic" People?
Some couple friends of ours came over last week and the wife of the couple mentioned that a friend-of-a-friend was, “one of those organic people.” At this point I had to say, “Well, I roll pretty crunchy-granola, too, ya know.” “Yes,” my friend responded, “but you’re not – you know – one of those ‘organic’…
How To Dry And Use Mandarin Orange Peels
I’ll happily throw all my locavore principles under a bus to get at a box of mandarin oranges. Maybe it’s nostalgia. Growing up, Christmas-time meant a box printed with exotic looking Chinese characters, and filled with loose-skinned, paper-wrapped oranges that were sweeter and juicier than any occidental citrus could be. So when mandarin season rolls around, I can’t say…
The Man's Guide To Manly Water Boiling
My dad, a capable man by any measure, a highly skilled Marine in his youth, a brilliant car mechanic and automotive diagnostician as an adult, and a generally handy-about-the-house guy, has long confessed that he does not know how to boil water. If a man of his skill and diverse competencies cannot boil water then…
Confessions Of A Total Garden Failure
A woman – a great photographer – came by and took pictures of my garden for a book she is doing on urban homesteaders. She was interviewing me and I said something like, “I think if I bought vegetables at the store at this point, I’d feel like a total failure!” This was one of these things…
Putting The Harvest Back In The Harvest Festival
Thanksgiving is my favorite of the celebratory checkpoints in the Fall-to-Winter Holiday Season. Putting aside the historical – ahem – issues regarding the origin story of Thanksgiving, I can really get behind a good celebration of the harvest and a day dedicated to gluttony and loosening one’s pants. This year’s Thanksgiving was a bit different because we…
The Political Act of Making Dinner
Emily Matchar recently wrote an excellent article for the Washington Post raising the question of whether the “new domesticity” was a step back for women. She asks if the burgeoning popularity of Gen-X jam making is a betrayal of the career-mom-and-microwave-meal life made possible by Baby Boomer feminists, and if radical homemakers risk setting our…
The Turkey Vortex: The Next Five Days Of Your Life, In Crayon
Happy Thanksgiving, all. I’m off to go prep for dinner. Have a warm and wonderful holiday, completely free of fried-onions-in-a-can. See you next week, if I’m not sucked permanently into The Turkey Vortex. What are your plans for the mass of leftovers the Grand National Gluttony Festival will inevitably leave you with?
5 Holiday Gift Ideas For The Male Domestic Geek
Black Friday is just around the corner, and let’s just suppose that your idea of a good way to spend the morning after Thanksgiving does not include any of the following: Waking up at 4am to queue (I haven’t done that since the last time Pink Floyd went on tour). Receiving trampling injuries from someone…