When the DH and I were first married and moved to our first (rented) house in the country, our self-sufficiency skills were pretty meager. I had done a little bit of vegetable gardening at my parents’ house, under tutelage at the level of “just buy a bag of Scotts™ Turf-Builder and throw it out there”. My mom was definitely from the ‘buy a plant and find a hole to put it in” school. (more…)
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…)
(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…)
Aunt Toby realizes that anyone looking at my postings would not exactly find a really rigid organization functioning here. The blog really functions the way most of our households do – gotta keep it flexible within certain immutable facts; gotta take advantage of things as they come along. Strike while the iron is hot and all that. (more…)
In honor of the New Year, Aunt Toby’s one year “blog-iversary”, and the fact that we had to update the software, I asked our super-duper Web Mistress (aka “Queen of the HTML”) to add a new feature to help readers find what they want more readily.
First: If you look at the top of the page, above the header, you will now see a row of tabs. Although every post we’ve ever done here will not necessarily be found under one of those tabs, those are the major topics and the most popular ones. Readers will still be able to search on a word in the search box or by tags, but we feel this will help readers find what they want in a more direct way.
Second: If Aunt Toby has any resolution about the kitchen for this year, it is to make it as useful to readers as she can. And to do that, we will be doing a survey sometime soon so that all of you who visit can tell us what you’d like to see more of; what you find especially useful (and what doesn’t work for you whatsoever). So, stay tuned for that.
Third: Earlier this month, KCE’s page views reached 30,000. That’s in less than a year. I’d like to thank everyone and anyone who stopped by, read something, commented (or not), and visited us. When we started this site, we had no idea where it was going to go, what we’d write about, or if anyone was actually going to visit. We’ve had readers from as far away as Japan, Africa, Indonesia, Australia, Norway, and South America. A lot of our readers are from the United States, Canada, and Western Europe. All of you, wherever you are – thank you so much. We want to make the kitchen an even more useful and welcoming place this year and with the survey, we hope to hear from you soon.
Many hugs and kisses from Chez Siberia (and by the way, it was minus 9 degrees F. this morning when we got up. But by the afternoon, it got to 27, which means (cue triumphant music) spring is coming). Hang in there.
Until the next time.
(Newly hatched chick courtesy of Jim Deane)
Many times, Aunt Toby is off-season for a lot of people. It’s geography, you see. Chez Siberia is in Upstate New York and usually for the rest of the US below the Mason Dixon Line, my comments about gardening, the weather, dressing warmly, etc. etc. don’t really line up with their calendars.
This year, as we are reminded by our favorite weather prognosticators winter has come to the entire country. So, today I’ve got something for everyone.
Aunt Toby figures that by this point, most of the people in the US have got whatever form of heat they use cranked up about as far as it can go (or, everyone has unearthed their sweaters, hats, mitties, and long johns and are wearing them 24/7). And it has been that way for a while (for those of us who have had the heat turned on since November, this is not news; for those folks in the South, we feel your pain, truly). The air inside your house is dry and your eyes and your lips might be feeling dry too. (more…)
Recently, Aunt Toby became aware of a movement that seems to be sweeping over the world of Blogistan and that is this business of people’s coming up with huge lists of things that they say they want to do, accomplish, take care of , etc. etc. within a certain period of time.
As the kid says in the old New Yorker cartoon from the 1920s, while poking dubiously into a plateful of something set in front of him, “I say it’s spinach and I say the hell with it.” (more…)
This is a photograph of the person who is probably responsible for 90% of her descendants’ deaths over the past 100 years. Our own version of Mrs. O’Leary (minus the cow, the fire and Chicago). This is Elizabeth Briggs-Smith, my mother’s grandmother. For her time, she was prodigious – married at least 3 times that we can document, buried all three husbands before dying herself at the age of 55 from what was referred to at the time as ‘dropsy’. We call that congestive heart failure today – and any way you slice, dice, or mince it, she died of heart disease but not before having several children. One of them was my grandmother, Rosalyn Briggs-Smith. She and my grandfather proceeded to have over a period of 20 years (20 years!!!) 9 children, 2 of whom died during the worldwide influenza epidemic of 1917-1918. My mother was born in 1919. Out of the 7 children who survived to adulthood, all were touched by heart disease, the youngest son having his first heart attack in his mid-forties. (more…)
The little den is coming together now, with some little bits and pieces to pull all the disparate colors together. The original color of the den, when Elder Daughter used it as a bedroom, was an aqua color and she got some cotton hopsacking tab top curtains to match. Pretty, a little girly perhaps but not bad. Well, of course, all that aqua paint went out the window (literally) when the DH and I wrecked out the walls to rehab the space. And when we painted the new walls, we painted them the same color as the rest of the downstairs (another hint in terms of saving money on redecorating: Find a color that you can stick with across an entire floor). So, we had ‘pecan’ walls (a nice warm beige), a futon that needed a new cover, and some aqua colored curtains that were still good and that I was loath to give or throw away. (more…)
Aunt Toby was not always the Philosopher Queen on the kitchen counter; once upon a year quite a few years ago, she was the marketing and sales rep for a family-owned employment agency. I covered three counties and was in and out of every commercial office, manufacturing plant, and machine shop. On the one hand, it was an amazing education in what made our metropolitan area economically tick – who supplied whom, who depended on whom, where people were going and so on and so forth. Your dear Auntie had many adventures during that period, including being pushed through a door by an malicious office manager(and almost falling down two flights of stairs), watching two months worth of cold calling go rapidly down the tubes as my boss’s brother monopolized the sales presentation, creeping up a rickety staircase of a dark back room of a warehouse to speak to a director of human resources (that meeting did NOT end well).
The best part of the job, (more…)
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