Last summer’s porch herbs One of the ways I use the summer garden bounty all year is by drying herbs in the microwave and storing them for later use. Because herb plants often produce prodigious amounts, giving them away can make for some nice—and easy—homemade gifts. Whether you have a few leftover sprigs or a […]
2022
- Sunday, August 7 Drying Herbs in the Microwave (Food Preservation, Gardening, Kitchen DIY)
- Sunday, March 13 Garden 2022: New Beginnings (Food Preservation, Gardening, Kitchen DIY)Garden March 13, 2022 I am not a fan of New Year’s as a holiday, nor am I someone who makes New Year’s resolutions. I do, however, feel new beginnings throughout the year. Having worked in an academic setting almost my whole professional life, Labor Day and September feel like a fresh start to me; […]
- Monday, April 19 Garden Update: Early Spring Edition (Food Preservation, Gardening, Kitchen DIY)April 18 You wouldn’t think there would much to report on the garden front in mid-April from upstate New York. We had several 70° days followed by snow showers a few days later; typical for this time of year. Much of what’s happening is under grow lights in my kitchen but there are some inroads […]
- Wednesday, April 14 Recipes: Early Spring Dinner (Food Preservation, Gardening, Kitchen DIY, Recipes)As spring begins to unfold (not only have I started the garden but my whole neighborhood is filling with blooms) so, too, is the expanding availability of the COVID vaccine. As a dual celebration, we had a small dinner party at my mother’s with some of her friends and my brother, none of whom had […]
- Monday, April 5 The Garden Begins (Food Preservation, Gardening, Kitchen DIY)April 5, 2021 It’s been months since I last posted, and even then I was behind, trying to catch up on the whole summer garden season. I never did, and also didn’t get beyond the garden to talk about other projects I had going on through the summer and fall. I anticipated a long unpleasant […]
- Wednesday, October 14 Garden 2020 Update, Part II (Food Preservation, Gardening, Kitchen DIY, Recipes)May 22 Here we go with the next installment of this year’s backyard garden. If you missed the first part, you can catch up here. Onward to the tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant! Tomatoes went in early, because they were getting so big under the grow lights that I felt that they would have been stressed […]
- Sunday, October 4 Garden 2020 Update, Part I (Food Preservation, Gardening, Kitchen DIY)May Garden I’ve been wanting to write a garden update for months and have started a post several times, but there was something about sitting at my computer at home more than I already did, working remotely from mid-March until August, that made me itchy. The restrictions and disruptions of the pandemic certainly impacted my […]
- Monday, April 20 Needlework: One Stitch at a Time (Craft, Needlepoint, Needlework)As any follower of this blog knows, my primary craft is knitting. There are always several projects on needles. I never go anywhere without a portable project—usually socks—just in case. Packing clothes for a trip takes less time than deciding what yarn is going with me. And yet, other crafts sometimes exert a strong pull. […]
- Monday, April 13 Spring 2020: Starting the Garden (Food Preservation, Gardening, Philosophy)April 12, 2020 These are strange days, indeed. All of us are grappling with our own version of quarantine. I think it’s the uncertainty about how this continues to unfold that creates a good deal of anxiety; if you know what’s coming, you can make mental adjustments and anticipate a plan of action but this […]
- Sunday, January 5 Garden Update: 2019 Wrap-Up (Food Preservation, Gardening)It may be that I’m in a tiny minority that doesn’t look at January 1 as the beginning of a new year. Perhaps because I’ve followed an academic calendar for almost the entirety of my working life, I find more resonance in September when classes start or, as a gardener, when the first seeds or […]
- Sunday, October 20 Knitting: Rhinebeck! (Craft, Knitting)Every year on the third full weekend in October, Rhinebeck, New York hosts the New York State Sheep and Wool Festival. Among the fiber cognoscenti, it is simply referred to as Rhinebeck and it is an amazing weekend for fiber enthusiasts at the Dutchess County Fairgrounds. I hadn’t gone in a few years, but the […]
- Sunday, October 13 Knitting: Project Catch-Up (Craft, Knitting)Despite having grad classes sucking up an enormous amount of time over the past year, I have managed to keep knitting projects going as a sanity-saver. Even if it’s just a few minutes a day, I try to carve out some time to pick up my needles. I find the rhythm of knitting and the […]
- Sunday, June 30 Recipes: Peas, Please or An Early Summer Dinner (Gardening, Kitchen DIY, Recipes)We’re in the first flush of produce from the garden and, because of a cool, damp spring, I’m getting a bumper crop of peas. It’s one of my favorite vegetables to grow because they’re so delicious right from the garden but do not benefit from the passage time, so having them right outside the door […]
- Saturday, May 25 Garden Update: May Edition (Food Preservation, Gardening, Kitchen DIY)As always in spring, so much has changed in my backyard vegetable garden over the last month (see April’s update here, if only to see what the garden looked like only last month). It’s stayed fairly cool for this time of year and we’ve been getting a lot of rain: 3.5” in my garden rain […]
- Sunday, April 14 Garden Update:Unlocking the Garden (Gardening)April 13 It has felt like spring has been a long time in coming, partly because my garden lives in the northeastern US and partly because I’ve been taking graduate classes in data analytics, which has consumed virtually every scrap of time outside of work. We got snow on March 23, but my seeds were […]
- Sunday, January 20 I Think Sew (Craft, Sewing)In the olden days of high school, I used to make many of my clothes, when it was often less expensive to sew your own out of good-quality fabric than to buy something similar in a store . This was before the advent of $5 shirts that fall apart in no time and head to […]
- Friday, January 4 Amaryllis by Morning (Gardening)What does George Strait have to do with amaryllis care? Not a darn thing, except that whenever I’m thinking about them, the song Amarillo by Morning starts playing in my head (and if that fiddle doesn’t kill you, there’s something amiss). My brain is a Rolodex of song lyrics. It’s rather an affliction. Papilio Butterfly […]
- Friday, December 28 Recipes: A Festive Christmas Eve Dinner (Kitchen DIY, Recipes)Christmas Eve has long been the most magical part of the holiday season for me. (I can’t say always; I was the kid who was up at 3 a.m. on Christmas morning, pacing and watching the clock until the stroke of 7, when I could rouse the rest of the family). For the past few […]
- Thursday, December 13 Socks. It’s a Thing. (Craft, Knitting)Socks. Turns out handknit socks are a thing, and I didn’t even know it for the longest time. My stepfather had two pairs of handknit socks that he had for decades, carefully hand washing them and laying them flat to dry. He loved those socks and announced it unreservedly. When he was in failing health, […]
- Saturday, December 1 Garden Update: Wrap Up (Food Preservation, Gardening, Kitchen DIY)October garden After a first semester of grad school, one in which statistics absorbed most of my time outside work, I have some catching up to do with this blog. I thought I’d begin with the garden, which is now most definitely done, although I’m still in green tomatoes that continue to ripen indoors and […]
- Sunday, August 19 Kitchen DIY: Cucumber-palooza! (Food Preservation, Gardening, Kitchen DIY, Recipes)When life give you cucumbers, make pickles! We’ve had a weirdly rainy August, which I should have expected since I invested time and money in putting in a drip watering system. Sigh. That said, I think all that rain (9 inches since August 1st in my unofficial garden rain gauge) has meant a bumper crop […]
- Sunday, July 29 Recipe: Sauerkraut (Kitchen DIY, Recipes)Last year, I knew I was going to increase the size of my summer vegetable garden and began to look at ways of preserving food. I knew generally about canning and freezing, but also became intrigued by one of the oldest forms of food preservation: fermenting. It’s a hot topic now, what with probiotics and […]
- Sunday, July 15 Garden Update: Salad Days (Gardening)When we were last in the garden together, it was June 9 so high time for an update. I wasn’t all that optimistic a month ago as the seedlings that had struggled (see Starting the Garden, June 9, 2018 ) continued to be listless for a long time, then BLAMMO; the garden really took off. […]
- Sunday, July 8 Knitting: Joan’s Sweater (Craft, Knitting)I just finished making a sweater, but it is not my project; it’s Joan’s. I met Joan some months back, coming to her home once a week to do some housecleaning for her. We chatted while I cleaned, which was really why I was there; I am a hospice volunteer. I admired the beautiful quilts […]
- Sunday, July 1 Transforming the Room of Shame (Craft)My thermometer reads 95°. I spent three hours out in the garden very early this morning to beat the heat and have gratefully retreated into air-conditioned comfort. Since outside and kitchen work feels like a physical impossibility, I have been happily at work in my craft room, formerly the Room of Shame. As I’ve mentioned, […]
- Wednesday, June 27 Recipe: Beet Surrender (Recipes)https://youtu.be/MHP0UxBuuGQ I was a latecomer to beets. They just always seemed too sweet and the texture was too slippery. I wanted to like them, not least of all because they look so pretty on a plate. Some years ago, I bravely decided to give this salad a try, from one of my favorite cookbooks, Vegetarian […]
- Sunday, June 24 Recipe: Strawberry-Rhubarb Pie (Recipes)Among one of nature’s most wonderful harmonic convergences, there is rhubarb and strawberries coming into season at the same time. It’s not true every spring but it is this year. Rhubarb has been available at my local farmers’ market and co-op for a few weeks and this week, the first local strawberries arrived. When that […]
- Friday, June 15 Kitchen DIY: Chive-Blossom Vinegar (Kitchen DIY)I have become a vinegar addict. For most of my cooking life, I knew that a squeeze of lemon would perk up a dish and help bring other flavors and seasoning into sharper focus without really knowing why. When a recipe called for lemon juice or vinegar, I always reached for the lemon. I can’t […]
- Saturday, June 9 Starting the Garden: Wind in Sails (Gardening)https://youtu.be/gTxXBhyXG_c The boys have it right; it sure has been a long, cold winter, certainly here in upstate NY. Somewhere around the end of January I start getting itchy, looking through the pile of seed catalogues that arrive in the mail. (My poor mail carrier; first the holiday catalogues in December and then, with no […]
- Saturday, June 2 The Making of an Urban Vegetable Garden (Gardening)Summer 2017 A few words about my vegetable garden. I rent an apartment in an old row house (circa 1870), three apartments on three floors. When I moved in, a quarter of the back yard was dug up for a garden and my downstairs neighbor, who has lived in the building for 20 years or […]
- Monday, May 28 The Beginning (Philosophy)Whoo boy, another blog. Why add another to the sea of them already out there? When I left my personal Facebook account some time ago, there were voices among family and friends that said they would miss seeing my projects (which was mostly what I was posting anyway). Not surprisingly, as I continued my hobbies […]