Author: christinestaffa

My life's journey has taken me from the streets of New York, up the Hudson Valley, to a little goat farm under Vermont's highest mountain.

Looks Deceive

Mohair

I’m really not gonna have enough mohair to fill out my 18-box display this year. I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel today with Beatrice’s fall shearing. The pictures above are from enough of a distance to make it all look so snowy-white. But the one in the foreground has a lot of dirty bits. The one in the background is almost all infested with debris. I may get one good pound of these two together.

I guess I cheat and put the same color in two different boxes here and there. Or put in some of last year’s product, of which I’ve already picked the prime out of, so that’s scraping bottom of the barrel too. Maybe one box will be “multi-color” and I’ll throw in a bit of every color. People can already make their own bag mixing every color. But a multi-color box might be eye catching and I bet people go for it.

Bechdel Testing

“[T]his melancholy feeling of forever-deferred clarity and calm… is often confusingly yoked to a kind of determination, the idea that with just a bit more effort, just the right tweaks this way or that, a sense of integration – …”bliss” or “oneness” or “transcendence” – will arrive. The cyclical nature of these two feelings – in which a person feels alternately broken and fixed, in a loop that never ends – constitutes the American religion of ‘self-improvement’.”

From a NYRB review of Alison Bechdel’s Secret to Superhuman Strength, which I did not think I wanted to read, as it has been billed as being all about Bechdel’s extreme commitment to physical fitness, and I cannot relate at all to people who want to work out all the time. But the review makes me think I might try it.

I Heart Kale

How I duz it:

Wash the kale

Rip it off the stems into bite-size pieces

Put in a big pot

Add 1/4 cup water

Add 1 T olive oil

Add 1/4 t Better than Boullion chicken

Put on stove on high

Dissolve the Better than Boullion

When the water gets going, turn it to low

Use tongs and smush and stir the leaves which will wilt as they make contact with the pot bottom

When all are wilted, remove from heat

Add 1 T vinegar (balsamic or apple cider)

Munch munch munch munch munch munch munch munch munch munch munch munch munch munch munch munch munch munch munch munch

I like it hot

I like it cold

I like it in the pot

It never gets old

Life blessing #542: I like something so healthy

It’s (Not) My Place in the 9 to 5 World

Back on the Healthy Wagon

Turkey loaf from an Oprah cookbook. Farmer’s market taters. My first zucchini!

How did I make this great dinner? Well, it helped that I declined a 6 PM meeting that I didn’t really need to be part of. This past weekend being so awesome has really convinced me to Step Away more. We had some serious issues to work through last week, but I’m tired of needing to act like our hair is on fire at all times. I want a 9-5 job.

Book Corner 2022.34

Buttermilk Graffiti

by Edward Lee

Chef Edward Lee travels the country, eats food, and apparently wastes food, as the humongous amounts of food he reports ordering at restaurants cannot possibly be eaten by him. I just can’t believe he eats all that. And he doesn’t bring a traveling companion save in one chapter.

He visits New Orleans, Clarksdale, Montgomery, Indiana, and lots of other places. The chapters generally provide some introduction, some talk about the logistics of travel, interviews with chefs, and eating, and conclusion.

The most memorable was his chapter of visiting Detroit, a city with a large Muslim population, during Ramadan. He decides to try the sunup-to-sundown fasting. Yet he sticks to his plan of visiting restaurants and talking to chefs and ordering a ton of food – and photographing it and talking about it – just not eating it. I was intrigued why someone would torture himself that way. When sundown is moments away, and he orders a big meal at a restaurant that he can actually eat immediately, a fellow faster frowns at him. He tells him he should break his fast with something humble; the fast is about showing solidarity with the poor, so it would be more fitting to order something humble. Besides (here it comes) all that heavy food you just ordered would just make you sick if you ate it right away.

I wasn’t particularly grabbed by any other chapters. Lee seems likeable enough. I couldn’t help comparing it to EAT A PEACH by David Chang, another Korean chef memoirist. But unlike Chang, Lee is not into writing about his restaurants, or even himself, very much. They are very different books.