Quince is an interesting fruit. It’s hard and dry and astringent when raw, but floral and delicate if cooked. If you put your nose into a bag full of ripe quince, the perfume of the fruit shows its promise. Quince paste (often called by it’s Spanish name, dulce de membrillo) is a popular spread in…
Archives for January 2014
Seed Selection Made Very, Very Simple
Heather, a friend of mine and a fellow blogger over at Queen Bee Coupons, emailed me last week and said, I’m completely overwhelmed by the options in the seed catalogs. I just want you to tell me what to order. I want simple and I want a little bit of everything – a selection of…
Beet Greens with Lemon, Bacon and White Cheddar
With beets, you get two great vegetables for the price of one. The greens are very similar to chard (beets and chard are closely related) but with thinner stems and a smoother, smaller leaf. This easy preparation is a variation of my standard, go-to method for skillet cooking greens. Here, beet greens get paired with…
The Boeing Cocktail
It’s Friday! Time for the possibly-soon-to-be-regular feature Cocktail of the Week! Tonight, a house variation of a very old school cocktail called The Aviation. The combination of gin and cherry brandy or maraschino liquor (no relation to those God-awful bleached-and-died cherry things) is better than it sounds. Our house variation is a bit sweeter, but…
Organizing Kids Toys: The Toy Closet Solution
If you have kids then you know how toys can multiply, especially over the holidays. Here’s how we solved the Kid Toy Madness issue our house. We took the vast majority of our kids toys and moved them into The Toy Closet. The Toy Closet didn’t start out as a toy closet. It started as the…
Stop Chickens From Scratching Up Your Trees and Shrubs
Happy chickens scratch. They scratch a lot. Trees and shrubs are not so fond of having their roots unearthed by chickens, but that does not dissuade the chickens, who will happily scratch and dig until they practically uproot a small tree if they think there might be a worm in it for them. In my yard,…
To Do In The NW Edible Garden: January 2014
It has been an unusually pleasant January up here in Cascadia – fairly dry and mild – and I’ve been out in the yard more, tidying and futzing and making a few changes to the layout of the garden. I am very eager to get going on this year’s garden. You know how some years…
{Giveaway} High Mowing Organic Seeds Garden Starter Collection
I’ll make this brief so we can get to the good stuff, which is Free Seeds. Something happened a couple months ago when I started getting death threats for writing this blog. I had my own “put up or shut up” moment and realized that, in writing here, despite what I’d been telling myself about…
Habits, Not Resolutions. Here, Not There
It is January 1st, 2014 and I have no resolutions. Looking back at the past several years – what they were, not what I resolved them to be – 2012 was The Year That Knocked Me On My Ass, and 2013 was The Year of Recovery from 2012. And so here we are on the…