A mystic is someone who wants to understand the universe, but is too lazy to study physics. ~ Anonymous I recently stumbled across that quote and thought, well, that’s true for me. I’m much more interested in soul than science, even though I ultimately don’t think it matters very much. It’s like the ouroboros —…
Do you find it difficult to ask for help when you need it? Do you say, “Oh, it doesn’t matter that I have a 101° fever and have to drive to the doctor’s office. If I have to pull over and throw up along the way, well, I’ll deal with it.” I was such a…
Now that I’ve had to give up refined sugar, honey seems like nothing less than a miracle. I’ve been thinking of all those beautiful bees, working so hard to make it. They deserve our big respect. Here’s one of the first things I’ve decided about my new diet situation: No crappy honey. No squeezie-bear bottles…
I’ve been surprised by many things in the past few weeks. For one thing, I am surprised by the number of people diagnosed with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) who think it’s good to post pictures of their distressed colon on the Internet for the whole world to see. That will not be happening here. Mostly…
In the three years since I started writing about jam and preserves, this is the longest I’ve gone without posting anything here — three months. I’m mostly taking a winter’s rest from preserving, though this past week I did make a batch of lingonberry mandarin marmalade using the last of our wild lingonberries from Alaska…
If you met a feijoa on the street, how would you say hello? You could greet it in Spanish (fay-ho-ah), Brazilian (Fay-zhwa), or as they do down under in Australia and New Zealand (fee-joe-ah). Or you could chuck all that and simply call it a pineapple guava. It will answer to any of these names…
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….
A couple of weeks ago I got an urgent phone message from my mother. She said, “Call me back as soon as possible so we can talk about grapes.” (At this time of year it can be like a hotline for abandoned fruit around here, with people calling or emailing to say, “I have way…
There are some foodie words I can’t say with a straight face. “Foodie” is one of them. Terroir is another. Honestly, I can’t even pronounce it well. (Follow this link and mouse over the word to hear it.) Partly, I feel like a kid at the dinner table, trying out a grown-up word that I…
I’ve been thinking about wild blackberry jam. There’s nothing at all wrong with a basic approach: combining blackberries with sugar and lemon juice and cooking the mixture until it sets. You don’t need to add pectin, you can keep the volume of sugar relatively low, and you’ll get a fine result. (You can find some…
This giveaway is now closed — but the recipe for honeyed apricots (below) is great! The first person to cook an apricot sure did stumble on something great. I don’t know how you feel about it, but most apricots eaten out of hand don’t knock me out — not the way that the perfectly sweet…