Tweet 91 year old cook and great grandmother, Clara, recounts her childhood during the Great Depression as she prepares meals from the era. Learn how to make simple yet delicious dishes while listening to stories from the Depression.  These recipes and tips are just as relevant today, as we deal with layoffs, slow economy, and [...]

Tweet 91 year old cook and great grandmother, Clara, recounts her childhood during the Great Depression as she prepares meals from the era. Learn how to make simple yet delicious dishes while listening to stories from the Depression. In this episode Clara makes Egg Drop Soup and remembers a story about her brother. From the [...]

Chicken, Swiss cheese, mushrooms, bread crumbs. This is great served over rice with a green salad or green beans.

TweetI’ve started a new collection of cookbooks. The Beautiful Cookbooks truly are beautiful, as well as informative. These are oversized coffeetable books about various regions in the world. So far, I have the American, Texas, Asia, and Provence cookbooks. Each of these cookbooks has historic information about the region, including its people, culture and food. [...]

Food is, of course, the most basic of our needs beyond water and air (and toilet paper!). Isn’t it funny how we take these simple things for granted? You breathe in and out, you pull on the roll, you turn on the tap, you pop a Lean Cuisine into the microwave, or answer, “Yes”, to “Fries with that?” Easy, automatic, instant. But of course, it’s not. All of these things, with the exception of air, require a complicated combination of infrastructure and workforce to get to us. We only think about it when the system breaks down (imagine a toilet paper factory worker’s strike!), or when we pay our bills.

Tweet Unless you work from home, transportation is a necessity. But it need not be expensive. You don’t need three cars. You probably don’t even need two cars. And you could likely get by with no car at all, especially in the city. If you live in a larger city, you probably have a bus [...]

TweetThis is a thought-provoking book about how our diet affects our daily life from emotional, physical and spiritual perspectives. I found a lot of myself in Annemarie. She was Dutch but lived in South America for most of her childhood and adolescence. Then she moved to America. She was married to a middle eastern man [...]

TweetWhen you think of kitchen gadgets, you probably don’t think about scissors. But they are a helpful tool! Most of us probably use scissors to open packaged foods, onion bags, mixes, etc. But you can also use scissors to easily snip herbs, chives, and green onions into small pieces. You can quickly trim greens, grapes, [...]

TweetI’ve seen that there is a “The New Laurel’s Kitchen” now, but I’m not familiar with it. This is for the original. Having spent time with a vegetarian family (we were provided food, but no meat, and I had to cook), I got a lot of recipes, ideas, and advice from this book. It’s more [...]

TweetProbably most of you reading this have never heard of a groat (huh? Is that some kind of exotic goat? or just a typo?). But I was recently introduced to groats and the concept of hand-rolling them into oatmeal. It seems like a lot of work, but it doesn’t take long, requires no electricity, and [...]