THANKS TO ALL THE passionate cooks, gardeners, writers and eaters who played along during our Summer Fest this year, we’ve decided to keep the fun going. All fall, every Wednesday, we’ll be featuring a new ingredient from our fall gardens, and I hope you’ll be cooking, reading, writing and eating right along with us. [click to continue…]
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JUST LAST WEEK, a Twitter friend turned me on to this video of punk’s godmother Patti Smith covering a song Debbie Boone made famous, “You Light Up My Life.” At the risk of overstatement, It’s brilliant, and there’s something so tender about the juxtaposition of song and singer, not to mention Smith’s tenderness with kids in the studio audience (the performance was for a kids’ variety show) that I had to watch it over and over. [click to continue…]
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I RETURNED FROM my summer travels with just a bit of dread. Not of unopened mail or calls to be returned: I feared my garden, and rightly. [click to continue…]
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HOW CAN IT be that for years now, I’ve been missing out on the Scissor Sisters? [click to continue…]
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RETURNING READERS MAY remember last summer as the time of pie anxiety. After a cataclysmic conflict over crust, my mother and I foolishly faced off in a local pie contest and, well, let’s just say that neither of us felt like much of a winner by the end. Ever since, I seem to have been avoiding pie entirely, at least in my own kitchen. [click to continue…]
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SOMETIMES, WHAT A cook needs more than a recipe is instinct. Intuition. And this summer, my instincts have been dead on, at least when it comes to my favorite homemade condiment, pesto. This old standby has had multiple reinventions this year, and the inspiration is still coming… [click to continue…]
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I‘M OFF TO THE beach this week, which means that all I need for a good time is a book, a hat, and some tunes. (Yeah, a bathing suit, too, but that’s not a good time. That’s just a necessary torture of self-loathing and recriminations. But I digress.) I like to listen to the ocean, and the kids playing, and the sound of the breeze in the palms (oh, yeah, it’s that kind of beach, and I am in paradise) but sometimes, I want to disappear into another sonic realm. [click to continue…]
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I SWORE UP, DOWN and all around, that I would never raise another puppy. Puppies, I said glibly to friends considering getting their own, are like children, without benefit of diapers. What I should have said, instead: Be careful of the stone certainties, the pronouncements, the “I’ll nevers”–they’ll bite you in the ass, every time. [click to continue…]
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MOSTLY, I EAT summer corn with as little adornment as possible. I grill it, I boil it, add a bit of butter or extra virgin olive oil and flakey, crunchy sea salt, and–that’s it. I’m done. Toward the end of the season, when tenderness is waning, I concede to corn pudding, preferably served alongside grilled lobsters, a la Lora Zarubin. Where I live, in a rural area of the Hudson Valley, the corn (this year, in particular, it seems–maybe sister Margaret, my gardening guru, can explain why)–is so divine, sweet and crisp and exploding with juice, that anything else is gilding the lily. [click to continue…]
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A FEW YEARS back, my family made its own venture into the wilderness, moving from the urban sprawl of Los Angeles to the expansive green hills of the Hudson Valley. It’s paradise, yet the climate where we live can be wretched and unforgiving, the land hilly and full of stones. We marvel aloud at the tenacity and sheer strength of this area’s early settlers, the people who cleared all the trees, built the stone walls that still stand. We are awed by what they accomplished, and quite certain we, with our reliance on power tools, the internet, and central heating, would not have a prayer of replicating their achievements. [click to continue…]
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THEY WANT TO BE IN PICTURES: From my Country Living story.
First time here? Here's the idea: The Sister Project is a network of blogs about the many facets of the word sister, and the concept of sisterhood. A sisterhood of sister blogs, you could say. Whatever sister means to you, from identical twin to sister-in-law (or in friendship or in feminism), we’ll make room to listen in about it or express it on TSP. Like the slogan up top on our homepage says, “Don’t you have something to say to your sister?” We've got galleries of art and literature by and about sisters, and a Sisterpedia of sisterly trivia...but now we're getting ahead of ourselves. The quick study: Learn more about TSP, and how to find your way around. And oh—a giant, sisterly welcome.