Nana’s bread and butter pickles
This is the recipe that launched my canning and pickling problem over ten years ago – the thin, sweet-sour slices of cucumber, onion, and pepper flecked with mustard seed that my grandma served with ham salad sandwiches and in neat little piles on the holiday relish trays. It was her mom’s recipe – my nana. […]
Hurricane Irene: Three Farms, One Town, One Storm.
One of the most difficult stories I’ve covered in the ten years I’ve been a journalist, but the resilience of farmers its a story always worth telling. This story originally appeared in Vermont’s Local Banquet in December 2011. Three Farms, One Town, One Storm
’Kraut & Lacto Pickles
Some things are just so simple they’re kind of hard to believe. Learning their secrets leaves you hanging – that’s it? Really? There has to be something missing…Of all things, finding out about the magic behind sauerkraut was like that for me. My grandma, who has a tendency to get rid of things she doesn’t […]
A big cook
Every week my kitchen gets taken over by what I call “a big cook.” That is, I turn on some music, pour a glass of wine, and make a whole bunch of dishes at the same time. The concept occurred to me about seven years ago when my husband and I found ourselves buying more restaurant lunches and dinners as our workdays grew longer at the advertising agency, which got expensive and unhealthy pretty quickly. I’d rush home late from work to try and make dinner and the next day’s lunches, then find myself sitting down to dinner at 10 p.m.
Good food ain’t cheap
Or if it is good and cheap, it ain’t easy. Or organic. Or good for you. Or from around here. That’s a giant blanket statement; let me revise. It’s exceedingly difficult to buy and prepare meals that satisfy most or all of the following important tenets: affordable, tasty, quick, healthy (which encompasses nutrition, saturated fats, […]
Come on, Irene
Two nights before hurricane/tropical storm Irene was due to hit Vermont, Kevin and I were taking it seriously, but only just a little. We had bought a battery-operated sump pump, just in case the predicted deluge flooded the basement and the winds cut power to our crappy plug-in pump. I took mental stock of the […]
Beeswax: Natural light
This story originally appeared in Vermont’s Local Banquet Magazine’s March 2011 issue as part of a larger compilation called “The Best Farm Products You Can’t Eat.” A man-made beehive sounds and looks like a buzzing filing cabinet: a rectangular box in which 10 evenly spaced, wood-framed screens made of wax or plastic are inserted like hanging folders. […]
von Trapps: A Food and Farming Legacy
I’m not going to pretend that having schnitzel with Johannes von Trapp – the youngest of the actual von Trapp children – at his family’s lodge in Vermont didn’t send me into carefully contained fits. It did. Just as much as the beer he and his son are producing on the property and the cheese […]
Taste tests: discovering new foods
Do you remember the first time you tasted something that had you instantly hooked? Or, sometimes more viscerally, the first time you tasted something that was the worst thing you ever put in your mouth? My first “holy crap, this is amazing” taste moment was raw oysters. I got a job as an oyster shucker […]
Good, old fashioned preserving
I think I know why pregnant ladies crave pickles. It’s because pickles are awesome. And there are so many different kinds, you could probably eat a different one every day for a full nine months. I took up pickling eight summers ago when my Grandma Blanchie, who is in her 90s, announced firmly that she […]
Learn it, love it, pass it on
Don’t be afraid. Cooking is a friendly auntie, inviting you into her kitchen and giving you permission to play as you will. Take her up on the offer. Short of 1) burning something to a crisp and setting off all the smoke alarms in your house; 2) ignoring common sense and sickening your guests with […]
A love-love relationship with food
I’m often asked why I get so worked up about food. Particularly by my mom and sister, who candidly suggest that I might find something else to talk about once in a while that doesn’t involve something I tasted, pickled, or plucked from my garden. Some people go so far as to use over-wrought words […]
