April Bloomfield’s first book, A Girl and Her Pig, was a big deal in the food world when it came out a couple of years ago. I heard plenty about it, but because I was vegetarian at the time, I mentally added it to the stack of meat-centric books that just weren’t for me and …

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” ― George Orwell, 1984   Reading: Tom Kizzia’s “Moving to Mars”, a fascinating piece on NASA’s ongoing isolation studies in attempt to prepare for the psychosocial challenges of long term isolation that would be part of any mission to Mars. I’ve always …

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what makes a cookbook great. Deb just wrote about what makes a recipe great, and, as usual, she articulates with aplomb thoughts that have rattled around aimlessly in my brain. But my favorite cookbooks are more than collections of great recipes. They give me entree into the mind …

We’re in the middle of a good old fashioned spring thunder storm. The kind where the rain pelts the windows, the sky stays relentlessly gray, and the day is punctuated with loud claps of thunder. This is the first heavy rain we’ve had since we got our new dog, and, amazingly, she is not currently …

I wanted to get as far as my proto-dream-house, my crypto-dream-house, that crooked box set up on pilings, shingled green, a sort of artichoke of a house, but greener (boiled with bicarbonate of soda?), protected from spring tides by a palisade of–are they railroad ties? (Many things about this place are dubious.) I’d like to …

For a number of years in my late twenties and early thirties, Dan and I and a group of friends took turns hosting fortnightly dinner parties where we cooked a meal and played board games and enjoyed each other’s company. (We also passed around an infamous set of poorly made, tangled chimes that had originally …