Sunday, March 04, 2007

More yada yada.


I'm doing a little housecleaning on my blogs today, and I added a new blog, too. It's called Nose in a Book, and it will become my new book journal, as the old-style (paper) book journal I started for 2007 is already showing signs of not being sufficient to hold all the books I read in a year. Besides, blogging about books will be more fun.

I have another blog, called Fresh Sweet Corn, that I started last summer when I thought I was going to be cooking lots and becoming a foodie blogger. Well, there are lots of foodie bloggers out there who are far, far, far more qualified than I...and yet, I still harbor the idea that my kitchen will suddenly become so alluring that I'll start concocting wonderful yummy things and writing about them all.

Well, a girl can dream. In the meantime, I am going to try to start updating that blog more often, which will mean cooking more often, so do check it out on occasion, if you'd like.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

Chopping heads off chickens and other life skills.


Simply Recipes is one of my very favorite blogs--easy to look at, well-written, entertaining--and oh yes, excellent recipes to boot! Elise, the blog creator, was interviewed on her local NPR station the other day. Here's the link to her post about it, and from there, you can navigate to the broadcast and find her spot. It's about 1/3 of the way through.

It was so fun to hear her voice and find out a little bit about her, and she mentioned something that I think about a lot: how our parents and grandparents carry around so much knowledge and experience with them that we younger folk often don't pay attention to until at some point in our lives we wish to have it.

I commented on her blog that I have a very vivid memory of my grandpa and my dad butchering chickens in my grandparents' yard, and then wandering down to the basement and watching my grandma and my mom plucking the birds and taking out their guts and whatnot. I remember being amazed when they opened one of the birds, and there was an egg intact inside of her. Talk about fresh!

Anyway, I would have no clue, none, about how to butcher a bird. No desire, either. I get yicked out handling grocery store chicken with the skin still on it.

But there are other skills, less gross skills, that I just never got passed along to me. I guess because by the time the 70s and 80s rolled around, they weren't skills that people needed to get through life. But how convenient it would be to be able to sew, or crochet, or make yeast bread, or...any of the other myriads of things I don't know how to do. Seems like the older folks in my family know at least a million things that I don't.

Of course, I can blog. But that doesn't seem like a good skill trade-off!

iPot.


Isn't this the darlingest thing ever?

It's got a mesh insert so you can brew tea, but you can pull it out so the pot can go in the microwave to heat the water.

Here's where you can get one of your own. It's awfully hard to pick a color, though! I picked Sunflower.