Auntie Pasto

The WordPress update borked my site and made my theme disappear. I’m working on fixing it, please stand by!

You ever have one of those days where you look at your garden and go “well … shoot”?  I hit “overrun with tomatoes” more than once this summer. I made over a gallon of dried tomatoes. Three quarts of roasted tomatoes. Two batches of conserva. Two gallons of tomato sauce that went into the freezer. […]

Well, no, not really. Actually, it’s a check to see if my nifty WordPress app is crossposting to Tumblr correctly. Fingers crossed, it is. If you’re a Tumblr fan, you can find me over there at http://auntiepasto.tumblr.com. Where’ve I been? Busy. With about a bajillion things. Drainage ditch did get cleared. Veggie beds did get […]

It’s going. I do about three wheelbarrows full of rocks about four times a week. That’s about two feet at a stretch.    Definite progress from last time! I’m doing chop-and-drop with the plants that have grown it over, and using them as mulch. That hillside could use a lot of mulch … heck, it […]

I spent yesterday acquiring a wheelbarrow with the help of my buddy John. Thanks, John! It’s a good thing I did. Y’see, we have this great backyard, with an enormous slope, and the nice folks who built our property installed a drainage ditch near its base. I wish I could say it was a swale, […]

It never fails to surprise me when someone asks me what a poached egg is. I’ve been eating them since I was a wee thing, and they’re easy to make. Bonus: it’s very simple to get the hardness exactly as you like.

One of the things I learned in culinary school was a very basic thing: how to hold and use a chef’s knife. I think it’s key for anyone who wants to have fun in the kitchen to master this very simple thing. Using a larger knife makes larger jobs easier. It’s much faster and neater to […]

Blech! Pretty sure I picked a bunch of my eggplants too late. It’s hard to tell with these. I’ve been growing Listada de Gandia, and mine didn’t quite turn out as advertised. More white, smaller eggplants. Thought I picked them in time, but noooope. It’s pretty bad when the taste includes a chemical burn on […]

This little bit of introspection is brought to you by the fact that I’m reading an Indian slow-cooker cookbook, and feeling a little sad. I love Indian food. I really do. It’s one of my favorite cuisines, and it’s difficult for us to go out and get it, because restaurant Indian food is pretty high-carb […]

The more we’ve been keeping a tight focus on Mark’s blood sugar, the more I’ve found that bean recipes are both tasty and good sources of filling, slow-digesting carbs. We used to rarely eat them, but now I find myself cooking them once or twice a week and trying to come up with new and […]