Is it warm where you are, friends? Are you working in your yard as much as your fucked-up back will allow which maybe isn’t much but you can’t let the wild grape vine win? When you come inside, do you struggle with your competing urges to pour a stiff drink and to do that pouring-Gatorade-over-your-head… Continue reading Salted Lemonade Gin & Tonic

One thing I’m hoping to get out of this cooking project of mine is some new go-to recipes and techniques that I can rely on and work into my normal cooking routine. I have some things that I do over and over and a very very few foods that I’ve made enough times in enough different… Continue reading 85 Ways to Roast a Chicken

This is not a recipe blog. Probably because I love to cook from recipes, but I never think of the stuff I just make up as having a recipe? But two other things that are true about me are that I’m terrible at taking notes when I’m improvising food-wise and that lately I seem to… Continue reading Car Emergency Cooking

It’s been an off couple of weeks as far as cooking goes. I was having so much fun with my specific cooking goals — let’s make cheese! let’s make butter! let’s live entirely on dairy products, that seems reasonable! — that the fridge was starting to get a little too full of non-dairy things I… Continue reading You Know It’s Bad When You Happily Clean Out the Fridge

So, you know this hypothesis that’s out there that says eating cooked food is what changed our evolutionary path and aimed us towards becoming the creatures we are today? I’m paraphrasing and far outside my area of expertise*, but it has to do with the fact that humans have a very high brain size:body size… Continue reading The Day My Brain Got Big

Hey, remember a couple weeks ago when I made ricotta and then used the whey to make bread? Well. It happened again. It was kind of an accident. I bought milk on Monday and didn’t notice it was only dated sell by Wednesday until Wednesday. And sure, yes, it was still unopened and should have been fine… Continue reading Cheesy From Now On

  Bread was the first thing I ever made from scratch that felt kind of fancy to me. I had been doing virtually all of my own cooking since my early teens or thereabouts, and my youthful fondness for Cooking Light magazine had given me a good range of basic kitchen skills and exposed me to a… Continue reading Back to Bread

The last place we lived in New Hampshire was tiny. Tiny tiny tiny. And it had an apartment-sized range. Also tiny. Teeny teeny tiny. I spent our two years there drastically scaling down how and what I cooked. When we moved to Iowa, our new house had a range with a broken oven but a… Continue reading I Guess We Can Call It A Resolution

Hey, so I realized I had a bunch of food-adjacent posts at my knitting blog and figured they might like to hang out here. You can now read my adventures in jam and spice (and a bit of yarn managed to sneak through, and also I’m not saying there isn’t still some sass in there)… Continue reading Retroactive Blog Things

When I got laid off in 2013, we had a big apartment that we loved and were making good progress on our debt. Things were still tough, but we’d done a lot of hard work and things were generally looking up for us. The layoff was welcome in some ways — I hated 97% of… Continue reading Relax, Reclaim, Refrigerator Pickles