Low Mileage Food

One of our favorite meals around here is tacos.  We eat tacos up to as often as once a week (and would probably eat them more, but Jeff’s mom isn’t as enamored with them as we are.)  Last night’s tacos were our Dark Days meal for the week:
- Rocking F Farm beef (Climax), organic [...]

There’s a variety of beliefs in my family, all the way from the ardently religious to the not so much.  Christmas is, of course, an important religious for many in my family, but it’s also a huge family and cultural and food day for the rest of us.
Christmas is my dad’s family’s holiday (growing up, [...]

… first of many.
The stairs to the basement in our house were “paneled” in this cheap, crappy, particleboard paneling that was already ripping off when we moved into the house.  We took a look at it and said “Oh, hey.  We could put shelves in the studs for pantry space.”
So Jeff started working on that [...]

Our first garden project was building a compost bin, since we’re I’m too cheap to buy one (there are some pickle barrel ones locally that look nice, but are pricey), but too finicky to just want to have a pile of compost sitting out in the back yard. 
The materials:

2 rolls of hardware cloth, half [...]

We just got our first snow of the year.  (I say first as if we’re going to get more.  Winter in North Carolina is unpredictable.  Some years we get no winter weather at all.  Some years, we get quite a bit.  This may be all we get this year.  But 3 to 4 inches [...]

There was no week 3. There were some local ingredients in some meals, but there was no getting it together enough to fix an entirely local meal.
Last night, though, I roasted some chicken drumsticks from Rocking F Farm over some local potatoes and served them up with some local lettuce (we have hot house [...]

I fail at pictures for this entry. The batteries were dead on the camera, so I took pictures with my phone, which are moderate sucky but okay if I edit them in Gimp.
However, every time I try to email myself the pictures, my phone reboots itself.
So, imagine, if you will, two local [...]

So we’re participating in the third annual Dark Days Challenge, dedicated to local eating during the winter. Our good food habits have been slipping a bit lately, and I wanted to work on being mindful of them. This seemed a good way to get started.
My mother-out-law made dinner (I am seriously lucky) Thursday [...]

As Joyce mentioned in her last post, we bought a house! 3br, 1ba, on an acre of land just outside of Greensboro. We’re in love with it. It is a bit of a fixer-upper, not because the house is old but because the previous owners started a number of improvements and only [...]

I don’t know if we’ll start blogging regularly again – Jeff keeps making noises about it – but I’ve signed us up for the Dark Days Challenge, so posts will start appearing about that. Also, Jeff’s mom moved in with us last year – did we ever mention that? – and we bought a [...]

Our take last week and this week looked pretty similar. This week, we came home with eggs, cucumbers, peaches, cheese, lettuce (one head of red and one head of green), some gorgeous ground beef, bulk pork sausage, a beautiful chunk of cube steak, yellow squash, and some of the first tomatoes of the season [...]

A short video I spotted over at Boing Boing TV.
I’ve long held that technology, properly applied, can improve the lives of everyone. In this video, Doug Fine says a couple of things near the end that sums up my point of view nicely, namely that we don’t have to give up everything to be [...]

An appalling article from the New York Times in which a small farmer talks about expanding his operation to meet the demand for local food, only to be penalized for doing so.
Snippet from the article:
Last year, knowing that my own 100 acres wouldn’t be enough to meet demand, I rented 25 acres on two nearby [...]

Need Less

The Non-Electric Life

Distributed Proofreaders

What’s your real age?

Grow a Tea Garden

enchiladas, corn
This week brought us enchiladas and more corn (I feel a categorical imperative to eat as much corn as possible while it is in season.) The enchiladas featured locally milled flour, our local-enough cheese, and local ground beef. The sauce was constructed with tomatoes and [...]

The Dope on Hemp

Shift Happens

62 Little Known Uses Of Vinegar

Smashing the Clock

I have some good news: The place I’ve been working under contract since January made me an offer of employment last week. I accepted. I sign on the dotted line Monday. I can’t tell you how excited I am. This is just about my dream position, and I can’t believe [...]

Strawberries!
Jeff got some of the first berries of the season a few weeks ago when I was in Seattle, but the last two weeks, we’d been running slow, and by the time we got to the market, all the berries were sold out. But, we got moving about an hour ahead of normal this [...]