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Monthly Archives: March 2010

Stilton

Note to myself: Those glass plates don’t photograph very well. I need to go to some junk shops and find some photogenic dishes. Blue cheese and garlic are the best of friends. Though I love a good Roquefort, I prefer a good Stilton. I suspect this is because the Roquefort (sheep’s milk) is richer than […]

Le Cordon Bleu in Paris

Serving English cooking. The photo is about 10 years old. If you saw Julie and Julia, in which Meryl Streep plays Julia Child, you saw the film version of what Le Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris was like in the 1940s. It’s been 10 years since I was in Paris, but I came across […]

A virtual supper for James-Michael

Cabbage in sweet and sour sauce A friend in California has been asking for my recipe for cabbage in red sweet and sour sauce. Rather than typing something into an email, I thought I’d take some photos and blog it. James-Michael used to frequently request this dish back in San Francisco. For years, we never […]

Sourdough starter: no harm in trying

I bought the crock at a junk shop in Madison for 99 cents. I’m sure I would have experimented with sourdough years ago, were it not for the fact that, while I was working, I didn’t have much time for baking. Plus, I lived in San Francisco for 17 years. Baking sourdough bread at home […]

Farm subsidies

Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine Did you know that the federal government provides billions of dollars in subsidies to millionaire and industrial growers for producting animal feed? And that fruit and vegetable farmers get only 1 percent of these subsidies? That’s one reason the Big Mac is so cheap — government subsidies pay part of […]

The awful 14th century

Pieter Bruegel, the Triumph of Death I have written previously about the dark and miserable era that followed the fall of Rome, starting in the 5th Century. Here’s another: Europe in the 14th Century. In 1978, the historian Barbara Tuchman, who won a Pulitzer for her history of World War I, published a book that […]

Family dairies, R.I.P.

Small, family-run dairy operations used to be very common all across North Carolina’s Piedmont and the nearby Blue Ridge Mountains. They are gone. I doubt that very many of them survived much later than the 1950s. Like all small family farms, the dairy farms had to deal with competition from the larger, more industrialized operations. […]

We're brown while California is green

After I moved to California, it seemed odd to me how the green seasons are almost reversed. In California (except for the mountains), the rainy and relatively warm winters bring the greenest season in March. Then, because it doesn’t rain from April to September, summers are brown. Here it’s almost the opposite. It rains during […]

Scrounging for signs of spring

Can you espy the bluebird? The landscape is still brown and gray and wintry, but given the warmer temperatures for the past few days, and because the birds are singing, spring is surely just around the corner. This time of year, if it’s not raining, I take a walk around the yard every day to […]

I found the right chairs

For months, I’ve been looking for the right dining chairs. The chairs I’ve liked best are Amish chairs. They have the mass and the no-nonsense lines that work best with Gothic revival and with the heavy, solid cherry tables my brother built for me. I was put off by the price of the Amish chairs, […]