domestic dilettante, humorless feminist shrew

Apparently nothing that I scheduled to post last week actually posted–whups? I’m not sure what’s up with that. They’ll get doled out over the next week or two. Today, however, I’m going to post the Great Guide to Cleveland that I end up sending out a couple times a year. Cleveland’s one of those places [...]

Forty years ago today…

Last week, two things happened. First, I ran out of deodorant (the mineral-salt spray-on kind), and second, my cousin mentioned on Facebook that his wife was making deodorant that evening. I was inspired–obviously, I should be making my own deodorant. The internet offered up a multitude of recipes, almost all of which were some combination [...]

I’ve been threatening this cheese-making post for a while, so here we go. A while back, I took it into my head to learn to make cheese, and it seemed that the easiest way to start was with mozzarella. I haven’t done any other cheeses yet, so this may or may not be true, but [...]

I was going to write a post about making cheese, but instead I was a mature, responsible grownup and finished all of our taxes–more than 24 hours before the deadline! Good job, me. The cheese post (which is coming, I swear–I’ve even got about half the pictures reformatted and all) will happen in a day [...]

Some of you may remember that last year, our backyard garden ended up looking more or less like this: Don’t get me wrong, it was a nice garden, but the yield was rather less than one might hope, especially when one has a family of vegetable lovers who’d quite happily eat nothing but garden-fresh produce [...]

We eat a lot of yogurt here. I eat it with muesli for breakfast every day, and we all eat it as a snack. Maura occasionally takes it in her lunch. The thing, though, is that I tend to like the expensive kind of yogurt–the $3.29 supermarket brand is okay, but what I really crave [...]

Time to start up the garden 2010 filter! First things first, I guess. Meatfest was a success–we assembled my fire pit, which is just like this, only woodburning. Then we roasted a truly ridiculous number of sausages (off the top of my head, I think we had Hungarian hots, chorizo, sweet Italian sausage, cheddarwurst, Serbian [...]

Yeah, so, the whole month of March somehow just disappeared! I have no idea what happened there. Actually, that’s a lie, I know exactly what happened: Maura got sick, I got sick, Maura and I got sick at the same time, Maura got sick and then I got sick, I got sick, Maura got sick [...]

Maura and I made incredible pasta for supper tonight. Mushrooms were on sale last week, and I’d bought a pound and a half of them. The initial plan was just to sautee them and eat them on toast–which, a little embarrassingly, is maybe my favorite thing to do with mushrooms–but they were starting to look [...]