Blueberry Raspberry Jam
A low-sugar blueberry raspberry jam made with wild Alaskan blueberries and Pomona’s Pectin for a nice natural set.
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Apricot Apple Honey Butter
The accidental result of a cooler mix-up on our coastal California trip, this honey-sweetened apricot apple butter was a welcome addition to breakfast.
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Postcards From Holland
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….
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Hearth-Made Yogurt
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…
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Spruce Tip Jelly
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…
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Return of the Porcupine
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….
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Cauliflower Pie in the Sky
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…
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Because It’s October
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…
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Superlatives
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…
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You’ll Have to Ask Spike
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…
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Drink This Beer
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…
