My daughter Charlotte started feeling sick Friday. As I left for the grocery store to fill up on supplies for my sourdough bread boot camp workshop, she asked me to bring her back sorbet, or sherbet or some other frozen dessert other than ice cream to soothe her throat. I said I would look. In […]
Lemon Curd
If you glance at my Instagram feed at the moment, you can easily surmise that lemons have come back in season here in Northern California. So far, I’ve started a few jars of preserved lemons, made fermented lemonade, started lemon extract, and last night—at 2am—made the lemon curd in this post. And took the pictures. […]
Lemon Extract
I feel as though have a part-time job at the moment finding uses for the lemons that our tree rains down upon us. If I had more than one lemon tree as prolific as this one, I would lose my mind. Or I would list the location of my trees on Falling Fruit, a site […]
The Church of Zero Waste
I was raised in a devout Catholic household, although we kids could skip mass if we felt sick enough to warrant a trip to the ER. I attended Catholic school from kindergarten all the way through the end of high school (I did love my kilt). We knelt around the living room regularly to say […]
A Zero-Waste Kit That Costs Zero Dollars
My daughter Mary Katherine rarely writes posts on the blog she started as a teenager, The Plastic-Free Chef. She did however write one a couple of weeks ago on how, as a busy, cash-strapped student, she finds the zero-waste lifestyle inaccessible. I’m simply too poor. We need more solutions to deal with waste that don’t […]
Zero-Waste Menu No 7
I’ve come up with the seventh and last menu in my zero-waste menu series. When we first went plastic-free, menus would have helped us a lot. Figuring out what to eat presented the biggest challenge of our new lifestyle. I’ll write a roundup of all the menus soon. Until then, if you’d like to peek […]
Freestyle Cooking: Stir Fry
Before cooking dinner, if we home cooks first examined the inventories of our pantries and refrigerators and used what we found there to make a meal, we would slash food waste in the home. Our great-grandmothers did this. Today, many of us choose what to eat based on our whims—or our picky eaters’ demands! Let’s […]
Good Food from Fresh Ingredients: Roasted Squash
In my recipe index, you’ll find foods that most people buy processed and packaged today: crackers, bread, broths, nut milk, hummus, ginger beer, yogurt, ketchup, vinegar, tahini, pickles, pickled peppers, pasta—those difficult-to-find foods for anyone trying to reduce their plastic footprint. I also include many recipes for ingredients that would otherwise go to waste—scrap vinegar […]
Good Thing I Have a Day Job
In addition to offering cooking workshops—this Saturday’s has sold out!—I’ve come up with some new business endeavors. You will understand the title of this post as you read about them. Community Cutlery Collection I stumbled across an article from the CBC about Philippa von Zeigenweidt, a woman who started a cutlery collection that she lends out in […]
Go Plastic-Free in 2018 (or Close to It)
If you’ve arrived at this blog, you’re probably aware of the plastic pollution problem so I won’t spend time discussing it. You can read recent news on that here, here and here. Instead, I’ll discuss changes we can make in our own lives. Individual choices may not seem like much in the face of this disaster but […]
Quick and Easy Peanut Sauce
This post is not at all festive—I’m writing it on the evening of December 23rd while listening to Christmas music. However, if you are about to eat piles of sugary treats like I am (my mom has stuffed her freezer with homemade cookies, brownies, tarts, dream squares, date squares…), you can balance some of that […]