My favorite recipe is from Tassajara….but it’s the fermented grains that make it a whole food…..You can buy them, or just soak the wheat berries overnight, dry, then mill. The sponge is created with gentle stirring and kneading, creating a wet mixture, ready for rising. Add the rest of the rye and wheat flours, oats,…
Pacific Northwest Ballet’s The Season’s Canon
Courtesy: PNB, PNB dancers Twyla Tharp’s Sweet Fields is a beautiful rendering of 18th- and 19th-century American hymns and Shaker songs to free-wheeling, almost-ethereal phrases. Dancers move in loose, open shirts and pants or mid-calf length skirts performing breathy trios. Dylan Wald has come to be identified with Jessica Lang’s The Calling, and I’ve seen…
The easiest cheese…Feta
On many small farms, practical wisdom encourages an entrepreneurial spirit, wanting to do more than the minimum required. Farmers understand the need to balance the restrictions of food safety rules (like the sixty-day minimum aging requirement for raw milk cheeses) with their other aims, like producing the highest flavor. Rules talk needs to be tempered…
Spring lambs
It’s another lambing season and we’re fortunate that our first ewe, Lily, lambed just in time for Easter. Here I am, holding her 10-pounder, Josefina. They’re both a handful. Josefina is an E Friesen-Tunis-Finn cross. Beautiful wool, creamy milk.
How to cook a wolf….
I think a lot about my mother when I’m in the kitchen, and whenever I’m exploring the larger world of food. I’m reminded of her when I read works by people like food writer and gastronome extraordinaire M. F. K. Fisher, with whom I share my no-nonsense approach to cooking. I love this quote from…
Venice 1558
1 Venice A Death and a Beginning (excerpt) 1558 No one heard Bianca as she moved on her stocking feet to the sickroom where her mother lay dying. She’d practiced walking through her aunts’ palace like a cat, softly, silently. Cats had a good sense of smell, too, and of chemical changes in the air, maybe…
PNB’s Swan Lake
Lucien Postlewaite and Leta Biasucci. Photo credit: Angela Sterling Pacific Northwest Ballet’s Swan Lake is a gift of great drama, beauty, and technical feats. It demands production element excellence, and an ultimate A-game on the part of all the dancers. Highlights for me were Lucien Postlewaite’s supreme cool and clarity, ballon that soars, joyful largesse. The…
Glorious vegetables
Here’s a few favorites of mine—carrots and broccoli. FoodWISE, it helps to harvest at the peak of maturity—roots having been fed with nourishing manures and/or composts, maybe even with a celestial connection as in biodynamic practice. Understanding when and why and how our food arrives on our table really matters in the case of vegetables—…
Mangroves—women protecting, conserving, growing
Women conservation groups are powerful in Kenya—one, in particular, in Kwale county near Mombasa dedicates itself to mangrove conservation by establishing nurseries and planting seedlings. The women have received some money and some attention. But beyond the initial donations, they’re pretty much on their own—volunteering. Only about 30 women of the 300+ participate, but they…
WISE Foods on Kenya’s coastal small plots—vegetables, fruits, traditional fats
Our WISE acronym—whole, informed, sustainable, experienced—applies also to coastal travel; in these few months in Kenya, I’m reporting on the availability of vegetables, fruits, and traditional fats. The coconut water, coconut cream, and rice are heated over a coral frame fire with small pieces of wood. The rather large amount of coconut rice (shown right)…