With the exception of breads, there are very few breakfast recipes on this blog. The simple reason is that I don’t eat breakfast. Yes, I know, it’s a bad habit but the fact is that I cannot stomach to eat anything early in the morning. My breakfast consists of a large mug of coffee with lots of hot frothed milk, basically an oversized cappuccino. Other people’s breakfast then becomes my lunch. Continue reading
Canning & Preserving
As American as apple pie?
In the past few months I have thought a lot about the expression, “as American as apple pie.” Whether I was tossing and turning in bed during many sleepless nights, driving past homes with the American flag and an occasional Confederate flag, whether I was standing at the stove until late at night canning and preserving the harvest from my garden, or angrily digging up the soil and pulling weeds until I almost dropped in an attempt to vent and get away from too much news intake – it all seemed to be boiling down to one question: What is American? Continue reading
Canning season restart
With the days getting shorter, my motivation and energy for any canning or preserving is also shrinking. And frankly and thankfully, there is no real need for it. The freezer and the basement shelves are well stocked.
And I finally found time to get on my bike again. Yet coming back from a ride, I spotted a large bush full of ripe autumn olives, aka autumn berries, along our driveway. That was the end of the short break. The canner and pressure cooker, which had already been stored away, came back down. Continue reading
Basil to last
This has not been a good year for crops in the Cucurbitaceae family. The squash vine borer wiped out all my zucchini and summer squash plants so for the first time since I started my garden in 2004, I did not have a single zucchini or summer squash. The cucumbers yielded barely enough to make a salad a couple of times, and now the Red Kuri squash plants are one by one succumbing to the squash vine borer as well. Continue reading