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Monthly Archives: January 2019

Pumpkin-leek tarte with barley crust

Wednesday, January 30, 2019

I posted a few days ago about a dessert pumpkin pie with a barley crust. But with more than twenty little pumpkins stored under the stairs that need to be used before spring is over, dessert pies wouldn’t be very healthy, with no one but me to eat them. So here is a quiche-like vegetable […]

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A vegan Scotch broth

Tuesday, January 29, 2019

I wrote about Scotch broth here five years ago, and I mentioned that the best soup I’ve ever had was a Scotch broth. It was in Edinburgh, on my first trip to Scotland in the mid-1980s. Though it was a vegetable soup, I might not have known at the time that the stock was based […]

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A chicken story with a happy ending

Tuesday, January 29, 2019

One of many feathers found at the scene I was sitting at the computer upstairs when I heard the chickens screaming. I dashed to the side porch, slipped on my shoes without tying them, grabbed a broom, and ran toward the orchard yelling. The battle was happening on the far upper end of the orchard, […]

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Barley crust = pumpkin pie fit for a monastery

Wednesday, January 23, 2019

Pumpkin pie with barley-flour crust I have written before about my experiments with home-ground barley flour: When is it a good substitute for wheat, and when is it not? Barley flour makes a very good pie crust. It’s good, I would say, but not perfect. Made with the usual amount of oil, the barley-flour crust […]

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It’s inevitable

Friday, January 18, 2019

The March cover story of The Atlantic probably marks a turning point in the long process of bringing Donald Trump to justice. The Atlantic is a centrist publication that often speaks for Washington’s centrist think-tank establishment. This article makes it official: the centrist Washington establishment is done with Trump. They now understand what he has […]

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Linux

Thursday, January 17, 2019

Recently someone gave me a 10-year-old (or so) laptop that had been written off as dead. It was sold with Windows Vista, and it would no longer boot. I installed Ubuntu Linux on it and found that it works great. Bottom line: Free laptop. I’m a Mac loyalist and a conscientious objector to anything from […]

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Weather emergencies

Tuesday, January 15, 2019

Ice storm on the ridge During the weekend, an ice storm turned out to be considerably worse than was forecast. Around sunrise on Sunday morning, the lights starting dimming, then flickered, then went out. Power failures are common here, but somehow I knew that this one would last longer than usual. In bucking myself up […]

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Where the squirrels live

Sunday, January 6, 2019

Shot with a 200mm lens from an upstairs window. Click here for high-resolution version. From my upstairs office window, during the winter, I can see deep into the woods, up to the top of the next ridge, and down to the little rocky stream below the house. I also can watch the squirrels going about […]

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