Figuring out first-hand food
It was six or seven years ago that I read Complications, Atul Gawande’s collection of essays. Gawande is a practicing surgeon who writes about medicine and public health, and one of the collection’s essays, “Education of a Knife,” is about the problem of teaching surgical procedures to newly minted doctors. Every would-be surgeon has to [...]
I don’t often post recipes. In part, this is because I believe there are already too many recipes in the world that need good homes. And, in part, it is because I am a slapdash cook who never measures anything. And, in one more part, it is because I am not a particularly imaginative cook. [...]
Today our broody hen, Queenie, successfully hatched a turkey poult. She’s got four more eggs to go (one broke), and we have yet to see whether she can teach them life’s basics, like eating, drinking, and avoiding being crushed by a well-meaning but clumsy mother surrogate. But we have a poult. We have a poult.
Let me just say one thing. It was Kevin’s idea. We’ve got four overwintered collard plants that are ready for their Little Shop of Horrors audition. Every day, they send up seed heads in what I am trying to make a vain effort to reproduce. To that end, every day I go out there with [...]
Those of you who have even a passing familiarity with what we do here know that I am a crappy gardener. I have grown bitter collards, anaemic snow peas, wormy cabbages, and, perhaps most notably, watery giant squash – and that’s just above the ground! Look below, and you’ll find I hold the world’s record [...]
It was probably twenty years ago, when I lived on the west coast, that I had some reason to be on the campus of San Francisco State University. I don’t remember why I was there, but I remember running into a protest of some sort, put on by a group of students wearing t-shirts with [...]
What is it with cross-species amity? I’m a sucker for all those pictures of two different kinds of animals playing together, or napping together, or otherwise cohabiting peacefully. I love it when horses make friends with goats, when a gorilla takes care of a human, even when dogs and cats live happily in the same [...]
So far, our bees have been nothing but heartbreak. Two years ago, we got our first two hives, neither of which survived that first winter. Last year, we were on the receiving ends of two hives that had been removed from houses, but we got them late in the season. Despite heroic measures and expert [...]
I know I’m not the only one who has trouble thinning seedlings. In fact, I struggle with the whole philosophy of planting more seeds than you need just so you can snip the life out of two-thirds of them just as the little proto-plants stretch their legs. Is there a reason we can’t simply figure [...]
The miracle of composting is that it turns garbage and poop into fertilizer, but there’s just no getting around the fact that, before it’s fertilizer, it’s garbage and poop. Forget that at your peril. Yesterday, Kevin and I forgot it. Because we’re thisclose to getting pigs this spring, we went to visit a local pig [...]
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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