Thank you so, so much to everyone who bought a T-shirt. We sold 91 shirts and raised $853.87 (!), all of which I’ve just now donated to Seed Life Skills. If you’d like to make a further tax-deductible donation, I’m sure they’d love for you to click that link and pitch in a few bucks if you can.

Enjoy your shirts and have a wonderful summer of canning and preserving!

The fruits in our area are just starting to ripen—blueberries and black raspberries, mostly—and I hope to get to a farm up near Pittsburgh in the next few days to procure some. My daughter’s younger cousin is visiting from New York; when he wanted a PB&J sandwich the other day I went down to the cellar to pick out a jar and realized to my dismay that the only preserves I have left from last year are the oddballs that aren’t particularly kid friendly (plum mostarda, amba, strawberries with lots of spicy ginger, blackberry and cracked coriander jam . . . ), so I think my first order of canning business should be stocking up on the basics. What will you be canning this summer? Anything new to you?

Generation CAN

LJK

Posted on June 5, 2016

There’s an amazing thing going on in the little college town of Athens, Georgia, where we used to live. This fall, Seed Life Skills, a nonprofit organization working to develop a modern, highly relevant Home Ec curriculum that can be replicated in schools across the country, will launch its pilot classroom program. Headed up by Hugh Acheson and Almeta Tulloss, the organization’s mission is to empower youth to be “sustainable stewards of food and financial resources.” Kids will learn to cook healthful meals using whole foods and solid kitchen techniques; they’ll learn to grow and preserve produce; they’ll learn how to minimize consumer waste and make the most of a budget; they’ll learn to mend their own clothes; they’ll learn to compare cell phone contracts and navigate a health insurance statement—all skills that will give them a lifelong confidence in the kitchen and beyond.

I think this new (old) vision for school Home Ec classes should be fully supported by public school systems everywhere, and it seems to me that Seed Life Skills is doing the hard work of showing exactly how it can be done. I want to help them out a bit, so I’ve set up a T-shirt campaign on Teespring; if enough people order a shirt—there are several styles available—they’ll be printed and shipped, and I’ll donate the profits from the sale of the shirts (minus taxes) to Seed Life Skills.

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My friend Jake Genen was kind enough to work up a super-cool design (doesn’t it look a little like those World War I and II “Waste not, want not!” and victory garden posters—without the flag-draped maidens and “unsweetened” pickled Kaisers?).

These shirts are soft and comfy, and they’d probably look great underneath a linen-and-leather apron at your next tomato-canning party, or over a long-sleeved waffle-knit for apple picking in the fall. If nothing else, treating yourself—and/or friends!—to a sweet new tee would be a fun way to celebrate the start of the summer canning season while also supporting a very worthwhile public good.

You can order shirts from now until June 15; if enough are ordered they’ll be printed and shipped directly from Teespring soon afterward.

Categories: Uncategorized

Updated and Expaaaaanded

LJK

Posted on June 1, 2016

I just wanted to let you all know real quick that the new edition of Canning for a New Generation will be released on July 5 (!) and is currently available to preorder (B&N; Powell’s). Here’s the new cover, featuring another gorgeous photograph by Rinne Allen and a surprisingly thick spine (it’s a brick of a book):

There are about fifty new recipes and lots of new photographs, and the general canning instructions and some of the older recipes have been updated and clarified a bit. If you have gift-giving in your future, this would be the edition to order!

I hope late spring–early meteorological summer is treating you all well. For my part I’ve been mostly holed up working on the slow cooker book, which is due all too soon—there’s so much I want to cram into it! On the one hand it’s a great project for this time of year, because even when you have three or four slow cookers bubbling away in the kitchen at once it doesn’t heat up the house at all. On the other hand I wish I’d saved more of the lighter, vegetarian dishes for summer testing, because when it’s ninety degrees in the shade and the cicadas are deafening (we’re at peak Brood V emergence right now in northern West Virginia, or at least I hope it’s peak) and all you want for supper is a bowl of cereal and a tall glass of iced tea, big pots of hot chilis and gumbos and tagines and bourguignons, no matter how delicious, can become a bit of a burden. Next time I start work on a book I’ll think more carefully about my schedule and what daily life will be like in the midst of it. In the meantime I’m filling up the extra freezer with both family-size and single-serving portions. I just hope I can find them when I go digging for them in a few months among the bags of frozen U-pick summer fruits.

Categories: Uncategorized

Slow Cooker Redux, and a Very Green Soup

LJK

Posted on January 22, 2016

Happy New Year! (If you’re on the Eastern Seaboard reading this, skip to the recipe at the end and hurry up and run out for kale if there’s time before the snowstorm hits—it’d be a great soup to dip into throughout the long, cold weekend.)

I didn’t think it would take quite this long to finalize things, but I can now officially announce that I’m going to be writing a new book this year! It’ll be a book of meals based around the slow cooker, tentatively titled Coming Home to Dinner: A Modern Slow Cooker Handbook (8-hour main dishes + quick fresh sides). Back in 2004, I wrote a little book of slow cooker recipes that I think is now out of print. Those old recipes, most of them, are great, but I’ve learned a lot in the last decade or so—about using spices, about taking advantage of fresh ingredients . . . but mostly about making actual meals for an actual family. The new book will be much, much more useful on an everyday basis.

I want this book to be an intuitive guide to putting together satisfying, delicious full meals with as little futzing around as possible. The main part of each meal will be made in a slow cooker and will be true eight-hour recipes: you load the cooker in the morning, leave it for at least eight hours (no four-hour or six-hour recipes here, because who goes to work for only four hours, and no tending the pot mid-cycle), and quickly finish up the meal in the evening, incorporating super-simple sides and toppings and accompaniments to make the meal pop.

All the slow cooker recipe instructions will be written in two clear parts headed morning and evening, so you can skim a recipe and see immediately how much prep is needed to get the meal going and how much you’ll need to do at the last minute to get dinner on the table. Each meal will also have a one- or two-sentence at-a-glance plan, so you’ll be able to easily pick recipes that fit your schedule, because I know that sometimes mornings are especially hectic and sometimes the evenings are. I’m thinking there will be about 100 full meals in the book (main slow cooker dishes plus sides), and of course there’ll be tons of lovely photographs.

There will also be a section of weekend-cooking recipes and ideas for make-ahead meal elements: how to cook large batches of dried beans and whole grains to keep on hand in the fridge or freezer, for example, and special ingredients that are best prepared in the slow cooker but that aren’t actual meals in themselves—real homemade ghee, confit, stocks and sauces, and even a super-simple one-ingredient cheese. It’s going to be a big book, in other words, and I think it could become the honest-to-god workhorse cookbook in many of your kitchens.

And when I finish this project, which is due to the publisher this summer (yikes), I won’t be able to tell myself that this is the last cookbook I’ll ever write, as I always do when I wrap up a manuscript—cookbook writing is fun, but all-consuming. I can tell myself that it’ll be the second-to-last book, because my amazing publisher has offered me a two-book deal, which means I’ll be diving in to the next book right away. The second book’s topic is to be determined (ideas, anyone?).

I’m going to be sharing a bit of the recipe-development and writing process here and on Instagram as I work in the next six months, so please check back occasionally. As a small preview, I want to share a kind of weirdly tasty kale soup recipe I was messing around with the other day. To be honest, I wasn’t sure about it, because sometimes my tastes don’t align quite flush with my family’s—this soup incorporates an entire bunch of kale. But then I put it on the table for supper (with a couple other options just in case), and my nine-year-old daughter kept ladling serving after serving for herself and practically licked her bowl clean. Either she hadn’t eaten in days or that was good soup. It’s the kind of simple recipe that will lend itself well to experimentation: Use the following almost-not-a-recipe as a baseline and start adding different spices, different greens; try a combination of russet and sweet potatoes; add some caramelized onions or a few cloves of roasted garlic; get creative with garnishes.

Kale, Potato, and Almond Soup

THE PLAN: Load the cooker in the morning. In the evening, add spinach and lemon juice and puree it.

Almost all of the slow cooker recipes in the new book will be made in a 3 1/2- to 5-quart cooker, because I’ve found this to be the most useful size for my purposes. Some of the recipes will make large-ish batches so if your family isn’t huge you’ll likely have leftovers (and I’ll definitely be including details about how to use those leftovers in interesting ways); some of the recipes will make smaller quantities just right for one meal for a family of, say, four. I’ll also include some tips for increasing the batch size for larger cookers. If you’re running out to buy a slow cooker right now because you’re so excited about this book, I’d recommend either the basic Rival Crock-Pot 4-quart oval, or the fancier Cuisinart 3 1/2-quart programmable oval (which has an extra-low “simmer” setting that could be useful if your workdays are especially long). For quite a lot of the recipes, including this one, an immersion (stick) blender will come in handy too.

3 russet potatoes, cut into chunks
1 cup (140 g) almonds
1 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt, or more to taste
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1 bunch (10 ounces/280 g) kale
2 big handfuls of baby spinach
2 teaspoons fresh lemon juice
1 tablespoon olive oil

MORNING: Put the potatoes, 1/2 cup (70 g) of the almonds, the salt, pepper, and 6 cups (1.4 L) water in the slow cooker. Wash the kale, then gather back into a bunch and cut the leaves crosswise into 1 1/2-inch (4-cm) lengths. Add to the cooker, packing it down so it fits. Cover and cook on low for 8 hours.

EVENING: Add the spinach and lemon juice to the cooker and use an immersion blender (or a standing blender) to puree the soup until it’s as smooth as possible—this could take a few minutes. Taste and season with more salt if needed. Cover and keep warm in the cooker.

Coarsely chop the remaining 1/2 cup (70 g) almonds and cook them in a sauté pan with the oil over medium-high heat, stirring, until they’re lightly browned, 1 to 2 minutes. Serve the soup, topping each serving with almonds.

TO ACCOMPANY: Fried Bread

Baguette
Olive oil
Kosher salt

EVENING: Cut the bread into 2-inch (5-cm) lengths, then split each piece horizontally. Add a little oil to a sauté pan (the one you cooked the almonds in) and place over medium-high heat. When the oil shimmers, add the bread pieces, cut side down, and fry until golden, 1 to 2 minutes. Sprinkle with salt and serve.

Categories: cookbooks, recipe, slow cooker, vegan, vegetarian

Home

LJK

Posted on October 29, 2015

That, dear readers, is a northern West Virginia sky, and this picture was taken from the backyard of our house. Yep, we moved halfway across the country again, but we think we’ve found a good place to spend some time here in Morgantown. I lived not too many hours east of here, in northern Virginia, during middle school and high school, and in some ways this feels like coming home, especially after two and a half years in the Great Plains–Midwest overlap. The steepness of everything here, the denseness of it, the hardscrabble way of it—everyday life is a little harder here than it was in Lincoln, Nebraska, but the payoffs are huge. We’re within minutes of hiking trails like this one, which winds through a virgin hemlock forest along a rushing stream:

There are apple orchards full of Winesap trees. Ramps and pawpaws, elderberry blossoms and wild blackberries. Good neighbors who grow amazing produce, and smart people doing important work in this small old college town on the Monongahela River, which runs north to our beloved Pittsburgh, only about an hour away. An easy day’s drive gets us to family in New York; this is the closest my daughter has ever lived to a grandparent. It’s not where I’d ever have expected to make a home, but we feel like we belong here.

I have a bit of cookbook-y news: The revised and expanded canning and preserving book is in the final stages of production and should be heading out to the printer shortly—it’ll be released next summer. And I have another book in the works (even though every time I finish a cookbook I swear it’ll be the last one I write); I’m excited to share more details about the new project with you soon. And, oh, my goodness, you guys are very much due for some good blog recipes. Those will be here shortly too. Thanks for sticking with Pie and Beer through the Great Lost WordPress Password Hiatus of 2014–15.

In the meantime, I’d be interested in hearing about your own experiences with moving, or staying in one place and putting down roots. I moved a lot as a kid (almost as much as my daughter has), and I think that while I never had a place that I knew would always be home to me, I did a good job of making communities around myself in each new place. I might even be getting better at it now, or at least it feels like it’s getting easier.

Categories: Uncategorized

A Few Summer-Camp Lunchboxes

LJK

Posted on July 16, 2014

It’s been a while since I’ve posted a few of the kiddo’s lunches, so I thought I’d throw the last five up here now. (Actually I forgot to take a picture of yesterday’s.) Most of them make use of leftovers and things from the freezer. The one up top is fried rice with a bit of leftover roast pork, eggs from our neighbors, and vegetables, with figs. I made a full pan of the rice and had the extra for my own breakfast. Below are some more from the last week. (Click through for captions, if you’d like more details.)

I think that often the most interesting lunches I make are those that happen when we have very little ready-to-eat food in the house and I’m forced to scrounge (e.g., shredded wheat?). Sometimes food comes back home, but I think in these particular lunches the only item that wasn’t eaten was the plain cucumber. What do you like to put in your kids’ or your own boxed or bagged lunches? Do you plan ahead? Do you have a favorite type of container? Do your kids have favorites they ask for, or do they just eat what you give them?

Desperation lunch: hard-cooked egg (with a paper of salt and pepper for sprinkling), lentils and edamame from the freezer with some leftover bean salad, nectarine with a little lime juice and a pinch of sugar (it was quite underripe), the last shredded wheat from the box.

Tamagoyaki (rolled omelet), leftover grilled corn, bean salad, dried apricots.

Small burrito (black beans from the freezer, a little leftover beef, cheese, lettuce), grapes, cucumber sticks.

Whole-wheat and regular pasta salad, figs, cheddar.

Categories: lunches

We Have a Winner

LJK

Posted on April 21, 2014

Good morning! I hope you all had a lovely weekend. It was warm and bright and of course windy here in Nebraska until the thunder and rain moved in on Sunday evening. We’d switched glass for screen in the storm door to the front porch, and I think when the sky darkened and the damp smell of rain was evident it became, finally, spring.

Before the rain, we did a random, highly scientific drawing to determine the winner of the book giveaway. My daughter wrote numbers on slips of paper and chose one out of her Easter basket. The thirty-eighth commenter is the winner of the V-, WG-, and CFANG books! Claire Blome, I’ll send you an email to get your address so I can ship these out to you this week. Congratulations! And thank you to everyone who commented. It was truly a pleasure hearing from you, and I hope you’ll come back again soon.