Writing fiction — the magic’s all tied up in the details

Despite the thirty-six fast-moving and unrelated balls I have in the air right now, I’m thinking about my novel again. The characters keep whispering bits and pieces to me as I build bamboo trellises and snake cotton string through ferny leaves to support the tomato plants. Lucy tells me more about her uncomfortably strong feelings [...]

Chard tart with feta and happy blunders

This is a fairly straightforward recipe, but there’s one important step and that’s the step I skipped. When you roll out the dough, you’re going for a nice, even 15 inch circle. Easy enough, right? Except the recipe says to roll it out in between two sheets of wax paper so you can then lift [...]

Roasted Red Peppers for the Freezer

I woke up Saturday morning to the cold and thought to myself, I think we’ll go out to the farm and pick peppers, tomatoes and beans. Then I’ll have to go buy a small freezer. Roasted red peppers, oh my. I lay in bed with the sun streaming past the window (the bedroom window faces [...]

I Got Your Macho Gazpacho Right Here

I haven’t eaten a single local peach this summer. I’m just saying. Geeze-oh-man, the weather alarmists are way off base for our zip-pity-do-dah the past two days. It’s been hot, muggy, still (except for yesterday when a stiff breeze blew over my 7′ tall patch of Matt’s Wild Cherry and Yellow Pear tomatoes). Usually when [...]

San Marzano Tomatoes in Ratatouille

I took a sick day today, courtesy of my skull-tingling, spine-wrangling sinus headache. I thought I would just drop the Lila Bean off at school and head back home to sleep for a while because I only got about two hours last night. But when I came in, flashes of red winked at me in [...]

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