Pay someone else to cook for you (gasp!)
This article originally appeared in the July 2016 “Foodie 40” issue of Buffalo Spree Magazine. Anyone who has tried to eat fresh, homecooked meals can vouch for the amount of time it takes to plan, poke through recipes, shop for ingredients, then chop, stir, and cook up a week’s worth of breakfast, lunches, snacks, and […]
Raising the raised beds
Two houses, two sets of orderly raised beds. The first house, half a duplex on a corner lot in Burlington, Vermont, had a backyard full of leaded soil. Probably a combination of peeling paint from 110-year-old siding and the trash burned by generations of the family who lived there before us (as we’re told). The […]
Geeking out about the garden
Tomatoes. Real ones. Not the tasteless, hard, orange stand-ins labeled “tomatoes” at the grocery store. Sun-warmed on the vine in the yard, with that musky green scent that is unmistakably tomato plant. If you’re thinking about growing your own this year, it’s time to start buying seeds and making garden plans; the first seedlings should […]
Root cellar: creepy stairs become cold storage
Kevin built a root cellar in the basement last weekend. Which is weird, given that we’re city folk and don’t have acres of land from which to harvest bushels of carrots to see us through the winter or anything else remotely important like that. But we built one anyway. Disclaimer #1: We are not doomsday […]
A big cook
Every week my kitchen gets taken over by what I call “a big cook.” That is, I turn on some music, pour a glass of wine, and make a whole bunch of dishes at the same time. The concept occurred to me about seven years ago when my husband and I found ourselves buying more restaurant lunches and dinners as our workdays grew longer at the advertising agency, which got expensive and unhealthy pretty quickly. I’d rush home late from work to try and make dinner and the next day’s lunches, then find myself sitting down to dinner at 10 p.m.
