Cedar Writes

Author: cedarlili

  • Ham and Egg Sandwich

    Ham and Egg Sandwich

    —

    by

    cedarlili
    in ,

    I have a confession. Although I do love to cook, I hate to cook just for me. Which means that on days when the kids are at school, and Dad’s at work, I don’t eat a whole lot, and what I do is better not mentioned. Since Dad’s home for the next couple of weeks…

  • Slow Food With Juliet

    —

    by

    cedarlili
    in ,

    Juliet, my eleven-year old daughter, bought a huge parsnip at the winter farmer’s market with her own money. She came back to me brandishing this white war club and hollering, “Look how big it is! It was only two dollars. I love parsnips, can we make soup?” It came home with us, went in the…

  • Cooking with Cast Iron

    —

    by

    cedarlili
    in

    I’ve been cooking with cast iron all my life, as my mother and grandmother, and great-grandmother before me all did. I know they did, I learned to cook in their kitchens by watching them, and then cooking at home. Now that I’m grown up, Dad and I have amassed quite the collection here on the…

  • December Greenhouse

    —

    by

    cedarlili
    in ,

    “tis the season to renovate the greenhouse and prepare it for next season’s crops. We haven’t done anything with it for a month or so since we finally had a hard enough frost to freeze it. But even with the waning daylight hours and cold weather over the last couple of days, it was nice…

  • Six Loaves

    —

    by

    cedarlili
    in

      I have been making bread since I was a girl, I can remember making it when I was nine or ten, and I can remember watching my mother make this particular recipe when I was even smaller. She would make a huge batch of bread, perfuming the whole house with the smell of baking,…

  • Run, Chicken, Run!

    —

    by

    cedarlili
    in

    After putting up the coop, we needed a run for the chickens and ducks to stretch their legs in. We wanted to enclose the area the length of the greenhouse, and incidentally this meant we wouldn’t need to fence that side. Yep, we’re lazy farmers. We built the run and then covered it with bird…

  • Three-Hour Coop

    —

    by

    cedarlili
    in

    Dad and I were talking about the chicken coop that we really needed to build yesterday while we were out running around. Suddenly it dawned on me. We had all the materials we needed to build the coop and the run, and it wouldn’t take much work, either. I had run across a portable structure…

  • Summer is Dead – Long live Fall!

    —

    by

    cedarlili
    in

    We are bringing in what harvest we have, preparing for the first Frost, which technically could come any day now in New Hampshire. September first is the first day of Fall for me, whatever the actual date may be. Because we lost the tomatoes in the greenhouse to blight, Dad has pulled them out and…

  • Blackberries

    —

    by

    cedarlili
    in

    As we were picking berries yesterday, I realized we have about three species of blackberries, possibly more. One is properly called a Dewberry, and I was calling it brambleberry. We picked all three happily yesterday, the final weigh-in was about 5 pounds of blackberries. We also harvested late blueberries and chokecherries, but someone asked about…

  • Time Travelers

    —

    by

    cedarlili
    in

    My father and I went to the 1750s this weekend, getting away from the hurry and scurry of the twenty-first centry for a time. He does this several times a year, I much more rarely. We traveled to Charlestown, NH, where the living history museum called the Fort at No. 4 is located. It was…

  • Snacking Around the World

    —

    by

    cedarlili
    in

    Salsa Spanish for sauce, salsa has become american for “awesome chopped tomato-and-other-things dip”. My salsa recipe is very basic, but you can dress yours up. Salsa doesn’t need to be spicy, and the salsa I made for the summer reading program had no jalapenos in it at all. Tomatoes Onion Jalapeno Cilantro Salt Chop all…

  • New Arrivals

    —

    by

    cedarlili
    in

    The chicks arrived safely this morning about 7 am. There are 35 of them. Everyone looks lively and there were none DIB. Beaks dipped in sugar water, feed, parked under the heat lamp. As you can see, some stayed there and basked, while others scooted around the brooder scratching and pecking. There are cobwebs in…