FROM SCRATCH CLUB

A friend of mine just came back from a trip to Spain raving about the people, architecture, sunshine and food.  It reminded me that I wanted to try making paella.  Classic paella is made with chicken, chorizo and shrimp but I am allergic to shrimp and don’t eat anything smarter than my dog, including pigs. […]

This year we decided to try cooking on our temporary outdoor fireplace while we boiled our sap into maple syrup.  Cast iron is perfect for cooking on coals.  Being pack rats, we just happen to have a vintage cast iron twelve-inch three-legged Dutch oven that someone gave us a couple of years ago because he […]

We make maple syrup by tapping neighborhood trees every year and boiling the sap down in our driveway on a make-shift cinder block fireplace.  This year our syruping partner Lin suggested that we try using the fire to cook while we sat around all day drinking rum and watching the sap boil; a kind of […]

I am going to a party tonight to which I foolishly volunteered to bring a “snack.”  Since it is my busy season at work and I have spent the last two weekends partying hard, I have not gone to the grocery store in three weeks. So this morning I looked around my kitchen and thought, […]

I have a very large and scary birthday coming up in two weeks.  Last fall I pledged to lose twenty pounds to confront it and, while I did manage to lose 8 pounds, I am  painfully aware that I fell short of my goal.  I think I will drown my sorrows in birthday cake. I […]

While the debate about gun control rages around us, we are quietly getting ready for the zombie apocalypse by planning our garden instead of amassing weapons.  I am not a survivalist, but I do like the idea of being able to eat a nutritionally balanced diet out of our garden in case there is a […]

I am not a real fan of cookies. I mean sometimes I will eat one but I am usually disappointed and think they are not worth the calories.  So when people bring Christmas cookies to my house, I let my husband, sons and granddaughter polish them off without regret.  There is one kind of Christmas […]

  ‘Tis the season to give gifts, even small ones. I give a fair number of edible gifts to friends, but most of them take weeks or months to prepare. For example, we make around 3 gallons of maple syrup every spring and only use one gallon or so a year ourselves. We give the […]

We have been wandering in the desert of home wheat production for three years now.  We could see the mountaintop, but were not sure we could get there.  Although it is not that hard to grow wheat, harvesting, threshing and milling all present real technical problems to overcome for home growers. We learned how to scythe, then […]

Christina asked each of us to do a post about what we actually eat, as opposed to the virtuous front we sometimes project as From Scratch Club.  I think I lie to myself about what I eat sometimes, so I decided to do a brutally honest photo diary. I meant to do it for a […]

This is the week before Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year.  As in most celebrations, there is food associated with the holiday.  Apples and honey are the traditional fare of the New Year, so it is de rigueur to eat honey cake, a heavy quick bread that can be eaten with a meat meal since […]

When I was in Brooklyn earlier this summer I had fresh silken tofu made by a Japanese restaurant.  It was creamy and delicious and I thought, “You can make tofu?”  It had never occurred to me.  I had to try it. I poked around on the web and found a couple of different recipes for […]

We have been growing wheat for three or four years in our community sharecropping plots.   Wheat is not hard to grow and not all that hard to harvest although there are some pitfalls.  The hard part is removing the teeny wheat berries from the inedible straw and glumes that surround them, which is called threshing.  […]

A few years ago I went to Rockport, Massachusetts with some women friends for a get-away-from-your-regular-life-for-50-hours-at-the-beach vacationette.  The four of us drove in one car, stayed in a cheapish funky place right on the beach and had a wonderful time.  We went out to restaurants for every single meal, drank cocktails and went for long […]

As the community share cropping season gets going, we are planting and scheming and trying to improve the gardens compared to last year.  We already worked out our crop rotations during the winter, so now we are concentrating on weeding, feeding and cover cropping.  Cover crops are incredibly important for soil improvement, fertility and stabilization […]