Red Lentil Dal with Mustard Seeds as Pseudo Soup

Onion cutting had always been a painful, eyeball drenching task for me, until I discovered this failsafe method: ski goggles. A matchstick in the teeth worked partially, but the issue is the chemical irritant onions release when their cell wall is breached. Basically onions are the vegetable equivalent of a skunk. But don a pair […]

Cabin Fever Pumpkin Swirl Cake

Winter in Minnesota reminds me of the evil oogly stare of Kaa in Jungle Book. But instead of a boa constrictor’s body, it is a scarf and mad bomber hat and down jacket that strangles me. Snow flurries induce the dizzying trance that has me zombie-walking to and from my car, never outside, never free, […]

Moon and Stars Bread

People often ask me with abject incredulity, You really make all your own bread? How do you have time? There are ways, my friends. And this is one of them: Make one batch of bread dough to use all week. There are two main advantages to this: 1) it is more efficient to make dough […]

Molasses Gingersnaps and Genderbread

As we approach the longest night of the year, I’ve been having the sensation that the sky has subsumed control over my eyelids. Dawn is my coffee and twilight my curtain. So, I only have like eight solid hours of viable consciousness to work with until well into January. Cookies do seem to help make […]

Wasabi Steak for a Warm Winter Coat

Time to eat a couple of meals to put on a winter layer. The chickens have so many lessons to offer us. Over the last couple of weeks they have been packing it away to prepare for these frozen months. Yesterday, before it had fallen, you could see the snow looming up there. The sky was […]