Now that I’ve (mostly) given up sugar, I make fewer preserves with it. By my count, I’ve made a sugared preserve just three times in the past year: fifty tiny jars of quince apple butter for favors at our wedding party last September, a small batch of Satsuma plum jam when a gift of ripe fruit unexpectedly…
Stewart and I are turning over a new leaf. (Leaves are so light you would think it would be easy to flip one, but it’s not always, is it?) He travels a ton for work and I’ve returned to an almost-full-time job, so we’ve set an intention to make more time for relaxation and play. I can…
I’m going to Holland in January. I didn’t pick that month. Stewart is teaching a workshop then and I will tag along. (Check it out if you want to get creative in the Netherlands.) I know it will be cold. I know I won’t see fields of tulips gracefully nodding their heads in the breeze….
One of my kitchen goals for this year was to learn to make yogurt. From what I understood, it was going to be one of the easiest tasks to scratch off my to-do list. When I investigated yogurt-making methods, however, I became so confused by the number of ways to proceed that it stopped me in…
For in the true nature of things, if we rightly consider, every green tree is far more glorious than if it were made of gold and silver. ~Martin Luther Our cabin in Alaska sits at the base of a ridge overlooking a vast stretch of taiga. We always say that we are “going down to…
Hey! Hello. Remember me — Spike, the porcupine? Shae has gone off to Alaska again. She’ll be back the second week in June and she asked me to watch over her blog while she’s away, like last time. I said yes, even though I wished she hadn’t waited until the last minute to ask me….
Today we did airport things. Very soggy airport things . . . You know how it is. The waiting. The opportunity to spend way too much money on way too much food. Mostly bad food, at that. This time I decided to do air travel differently. I packed all of our food for the day…
Because the apples are falling and the light is fading under its own golden weight. Because a road trip scrubs the rough edges from a tired mind. I threw a bag into the backseat and headed north. Ukiah, Booneville, Philo Elk, Jenner, Freestone I found fruit. I drove. I talked to myself. I drove. I…
A Perfect Day to See Denali Do you ever get tired of using the same old words to describe something — can I say it just once — “amazing”? Consider the white-fisted mountains that knock the breath right out of you, or the sinuous body of a glacial river that silvers along in the late-day…
I’ll be away for three weeks and I’ve decided to leave the porcupine in charge. He’s an industrious dude, perfectly capable of watching over the few posts that will appear here while I’m gone. Besides, if I don’t give him something to do, he’ll chew through everything in sight. Seriously, this guy and his ilk…
Today is International Beer Day, so I thought I’d tell you a little story about a great beer and a nice guy. The beer is Dacker. It’s a full-bodied, goes-down-easy ale, first brewed in the Adirondacks in 1885. We happened upon it in 2007, when it was recommended to us by a server at the…