I am not a real fan of cookies. I mean sometimes I will eat one but I am usually disappointed and think they are not worth the calories. So when people bring Christmas cookies to my house, I let my husband, sons and granddaughter polish them off without regret. There is one kind of Christmas…
Author: Dianna
{edible gifts} Two Gifts in Under 20 Minutes
‘Tis the season to give gifts, even small ones. I give a fair number of edible gifts to friends, but most of them take weeks or months to prepare. For example, we make around 3 gallons of maple syrup every spring and only use one gallon or so a year ourselves. We give the…
{home wheat production} Crackers From Scratch
We have been wandering in the desert of home wheat production for three years now. We could see the mountaintop, but were not sure we could get there. Although it is not that hard to grow wheat, harvesting, threshing and milling all present real technical problems to overcome for home growers. We learned how to scythe, then…
{pulling back the curtain} What Dianna Really Eats
Christina asked each of us to do a post about what we actually eat, as opposed to the virtuous front we sometimes project as From Scratch Club. I think I lie to myself about what I eat sometimes, so I decided to do a brutally honest photo diary. I meant to do it for a…
A Change of Seasons: My Mother’s Apple Strudel
This is the week before Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. As in most celebrations, there is food associated with the holiday. Apples and honey are the traditional fare of the New Year, so it is de rigueur to eat honey cake, a heavy quick bread that can be eaten with a meat meal since…
{weekend project} Making Tofu From Scratch
When I was in Brooklyn earlier this summer I had fresh silken tofu made by a Japanese restaurant. It was creamy and delicious and I thought, “You can make tofu?” It had never occurred to me. I had to try it. I poked around on the web and found a couple of different recipes for…
{communty sharecropping} A Homemade Wheat Thresher
We have been growing wheat for three or four years in our community sharecropping plots. Wheat is not hard to grow and not all that hard to harvest although there are some pitfalls. The hard part is removing the teeny wheat berries from the inedible straw and glumes that surround them, which is called threshing. …
{food policy} Sustainable Sea Food
A few years ago I went to Rockport, Massachusetts with some women friends for a get-away-from-your-regular-life-for-50-hours-at-the-beach vacationette. The four of us drove in one car, stayed in a cheapish funky place right on the beach and had a wonderful time. We went out to restaurants for every single meal, drank cocktails and went for long…
{gardening} Cover Crops 101
As the community share cropping season gets going, we are planting and scheming and trying to improve the gardens compared to last year. We already worked out our crop rotations during the winter, so now we are concentrating on weeding, feeding and cover cropping. Cover crops are incredibly important for soil improvement, fertility and stabilization…
{Brown Bag Blues} homemade seitan to the rescue
There are the blues when you have no money. There are the blues when the political party you can’t stand wins the election. There are the blues when your children grow up and leave you behind. I’ve had all those blues. But right now, I have the brown bag blues (with apologies to Gil Scott…
{avant gardening} Hügelkultur
I spent three years of my childhood in Germany when my father was stationed there in the army. I have very distinct memories of the allotment gardens people cultivated at the edge of town in little individual rented plots of land, each with its own immaculate garden hut for sitting and enjoying the summer days…
{diy exercise} Of Dog Trotting and Stand Up Desks
I have a very scary birthday coming up next year. When I think about my birthday, I am reminded of the Frederick Nietzche quote, “And when you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.” The only good things about this birthday are that I am not dead yet and that it…
{recipe} Flourless Carrot Cake for Passover
As I said around this time last year, Passover is my favorite holiday. It is like Thanksgiving on steroids; Thanksgiving with four thousand years worth of family recipes and stories and traditions and ritual mandates. It also has challenging food restrictions thrown in. The basic idea behind the food restrictions associated with Passover is that…
{photo diary} A Temporary Fireplace for Making Maple Syrup
My last post about syruping included a few photos of the cinder block fireplace we built in 2011 for boiling down the sap that we collect from maple trees in our neighborhood. When we built our current fireplace a week later, I took more extensive photos. We changed our fireplace a little this year; we…
{how to} A Temporary Fireplace for Making Maple Syrup
Editor’s Note: Its that time of year again- Maple Sap running! You can do it- go outside & tap your neighborhood maple trees (with permission from your neighbors of course!) Dianna is back with another (helpful) installment in her How To Maple Syrup Series. If you weren’t with us last year this time, Dianna cranked…
