This is our fourth winter on Cape Cod, and I didn’t like any of the first three. It’s not just that my cold tolerance is decreasing as I age, the snow turns our driveway into a carnival ride, and my husband insists on winter activities centering around the possibility of falling through ice into water. [...]
We’ve got a goal, here, this year. We’re trying to get 20% of our total caloric needs from first-hand food. So, at the end of each month, I’ll be tallying up the harvest. But, before I give you January’s list, I have a confession. At the end of last year, when I added up our [...]
First, get a Fry Baby. A Fry Baby is the world’s smallest deep fryer, and we got ours at a Yankee swap hosted by our friends Tommy and Ali, for which all the guests were instructed to bring something that’s been lying around the house for ages but never used. We brought a platter we’d [...]
Buying boats is like playing leapfrog. You buy a boat, and you have to buy a truck to pull it. You buy a truck and then, one day, it occurs to you that your truck could pull a bigger boat. You want a bigger boat – you always want a bigger boat – so you [...]
The first snowfall always shatters my illusion of privacy. I go out, the morning after, to discover that it’s Grand Varmint Central out there. There are rabbits criss-crossing the driveway. There are raccoons (still!) trying to get in the chicken coop. There is the occasional wild turkey. There is a coyote, or maybe the neighbor’s [...]
Do you want the good news or the bad news? We’ll start with the good news. The good news is that our hoophouse has successfully extended our growing season. Granted, it’s gotten an assist from the warmest winter in human memory, but it still felt good to be out there in January, harvesting the parsnips [...]
Our new flock of chickens is laying on all cylinders, and we’re collecting up to ten eggs a day. I’m giving a lot of them to friends, but I don’t have all that many friends, so I still have quite a few left. There’s nothing for it but to eat them. Which raises a very [...]
If you didn’t get chickens last year, or the year before, chances are good that you’re thinking about it now. You’re investigating local livestock ordinances. You’re deciding where to build your coop. You’re checking prices and availability at Murray McMurray. And you’re studying Henderson’s Handy-Dandy Chicken Chart to figure out how to pick your breeds. Henderson’s [...]
I shot a duck. Here’s how it went down. Yesterday was the most astonishingly beautiful January day Cape Cod has ever seen. Temperatures rose into the high 50s, and there was a light breeze out of the southwest. We outfitted our oyster boat, a 17-foot Carolina Skiff, for duck hunting, by which I mean we [...]
There’s something I don’t understand. Okay, there are a lot of things I don’t understand, but I’m going to limit this discussion to one thing in particular, and it isn’t quantum mechanics. It’s why people seem to want to believe that some traits are hard-coded in our genes, while others aren’t. Usually, it’s the crappy [...]
Tamar Haspel has been writing about food and health for over a decade. She recently moved from Manhattan to Cape Cod. She’s adjusting well. [Read More …]
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