river cottage

I got this cookbook for Christmas, and have been slowly perusing it...I just have to say that it is unlike ANY cookbook I have ever seen. Actually, the recipes part of the cookbook is the least exciting thing about the book, although I would guess that the recipes are also very good (I haven't made anything yet, but I have made a couple excellent dishes from the River Cottage website)...what is truly remarkable is that this book is almost a guide to the production of food. There are not only sections on how to buy produce and meat, but also how to grow vegetables, choose varieties for flavor, freeze vegetables, choose a breed of pig or cow to raise, dry-cure your own bacon, bottle-rear orphan lambs, kill a chicken, smoke fish, and forage for wild greens. And much more too, of course.

Jenn from Fat Rooster Farm has the flu, so I'm not heading out there to work today...which is unfortunate because I am out of perfect Fat Rooster eggs. Actually, I bought a half-dozen of local though mass-produced eggs last week in case I ran out of FR eggs before Thursday came along, and this morning I ate the last of the FR eggs and one of the mass-produced eggs. I just have to say that when I cracked the eggs into the bowl to scramble them, the difference was shocking. The FR egg had a large orange yolk and a firm white, and the mass-produced egg had a tiny pale yellow yolk and a runny white...I guess I'll have to head out to FR this weekend or Monday to get my fix. And we'll use those mass-produced eggs for some lemon squares that Adam promised to make me this weekend.

We got about 5 inches of snow overnight, and it looks like good snow too...not the wet snow we got yesterday. This means that I will probably head out cross-country skiing for the first time in weeks. I'm really happy about that!