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April, 2010:

Tool Repair: Garden Fork

It’s spring (except if you are in the Southern Hemisphere, in which case, it’s fall, but this will probably be useful for you folks too). And you want to work in the garden and go to wherever you store your garden tools (Well, let’s hope they got stored and not left to be covered with snow over the winter – don’t laugh; I just heard a tale from a coworker last week who relayed that she’d somehow left a garden rake out in the lawn over the winter and did not remember until her husband ran the mower over it). And what you find is that you’d put away a tool, thinking at the time, “I’ve GOT to fix this,” and you forgot and now you need it. (more…)

On Vinegar

(Ha – you thought I was going to go with a photo of bottles of vinegar or something, right? Fooled you. Photo courtesy of Casch52)
Housekeeping:
Vinegar comes from the Old French, “vin aigre”, meaning ‘sour wine’. Vinegar has the taste and the pH that it does because of the action of acetal bacteria which turns whatever carbohydrate there is in the liquid (and you can make vinegar out of the most amazing stuff out there – the list is almost endless and includes coconut milk and water, malt, any fruit known, and so on)in acetic acid. In the US, household vinegars are sold at 5% strength. This discussion is not about vinegar as a cooking ingredient. (more…)

Pulled BBQ Beef

Aunt Toby believes that one of the problems with cooking in these United States is that we get stuck in a rut. We cook something because Mom and Dad cooked it or because we are familiar with it. Frankly, there are meat cuts out there that 99% of American’s have never eaten; never experienced in the kitchen, and frankly are scared to death of. (more…)

8 Eggs, 2 Desserts


For a lot of folks out there (not the least are the chicken farmers), right now, there’s a whole lotta egg action going on. And it’s the same at Chez Siberia as well. With three dozen eggs staring me in the face in the fridge and guests coming for dinner, Aunt Toby needed to come up with something that was going to use up a lot of eggs. Although I was aiming for a dozen, I managed to get through eight and created two desserts, one of which you can eat right away and one which you can eat over a period of time or you can put the two together or what have you: (more…)

On Your Mark, Get Set….

In our last episode, One Year Later, one of the items I noted was that the soil temperatures were pretty chilly. It was March 27th, 5 days ago. Between the freak storm and the very chilly temperatures, even the soil in the bed under the glass was only 40.3 degrees F. As you can see from the photo at the top, in the past five days, between the sun on the glass and the steadily warming trend (today’s high was in the high 70s!), the soil has warmed up mightily. So, when I got home from work, I decided to take advantage and sow some seeds to get plants started under the glass. (more…)

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