These days I mostly try not to write. My life is so full of work and family and weeding. But every now and then, my brain starts to itch and the only way to scratch that itch is writing. This is where you will find my most recent scratchings.
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Step 1: Eat More Vegetables
A few weeks ago I wrote about the changes we need to make to move towards more sustainable home lives, and how so many of those changes are built on the slow integration of deceptively simple habits like eating more vegetables (The Incredible Power of Habit). Even if you don’t yet have the time or the space to grow your own, you can start right now learning how to eat the vegetables that you will grow in your someday garden. It sounds easy. Of course, if you had a garden, you would eat like Alice Waters, right? Doesn’t the ability…
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Princess in Pink
My Girl has always been fairly balanced, gender-wise. If I hadn’t had a second baby– a very boy boy whose first words were, respectively, ‘ball’ and ‘truck’– I would have smugly thought that kids just respond to the gender influences around them. My Girl liked fancy dresses and dolls, but no more than anything else. Her pretend play usually centered around some kind of animal family– walruses on an ice flow, baby birds hatching out of their egg. From the comfort of my own situation, I advised my dear friend with a princess-obsessed daughter to just roll with it, allow…
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Mastering Sprouted Wheat Bread
Have you ever had sprouted wheat bread? It’s known most commonly as that biblical quoting stuff they sell in the freezer at your local health food store– Ezekiel bread. I have always loved the stuff, it’s the only packaged bread that remotely interests me. It’s supposed to be much more nutritious than bread made from plain flour, and I do believe that’s true, but my real draw is taste and texture– Ezekiel bread has a rich, fresh wheat flavor and nubby texture that I just adore. The only problem (apart from the price) is that, like any real bread, it…
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Book Review: The Essential Urban Farmer
I love Novella Carpenter. Her first book Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer is one of my top favorite non-fiction books. She is sharp, funny and bracingly honest. When I saw she had a new ‘how-to’ book out, I could barely contain myself. Novella wrote The Essential Urban Farmer with Willow Rosenthal. It is a fat, sturdy volume covering everything from soil building to killing rabbits. There are no color photographs, this book is not coffee table material. Instead there are lots of no-nonsense line drawing, diagrams and building plans; lists and tables. This book would be perfect…
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Leftover Easter Eggs to Savory Breakfast Pockets!
I know you have a glut of crudely dyed eggs in your fridge. I know you’re wondering how you are going to get them all eaten before they go bad. Here’s one idea. I did this with the ones that got cracked during the dying process. Considering we have a 4yo and a 2yo, there were quite a few. First make a batch of butter pie dough, here’s my recipe. The key to flaky, whole wheat, all butter crust is keep it cold (cold! cold! cold! cold!) The butter should feel solid and only slightly yielding while you are working…
calamity jane 