Archive - Jan 2010 - Staff Blog

Sometimes it's good to be told what to do.

No matter how great you are at cooking, inspiration isn't always going to be right at your fingertips. I find that mine comes and goes in waves. One day I'm incredibly inspired to cook, and all the separate pieces of a dish fall together perfectly with little or no planning. The next day, I'll look at the ingredients in the kitchen and can't see them as anything but ingredients. At those times I can barely work up the energy to Google a recipe, or look one up on Epicurious.

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For the last two years, my friend and I have been asking area businesses to put mason jars on their counters for the month of November. Our goal is to gather pennies from customers to donate to the Brandon Area Food Shelf. The great thing about collecting pennies is that for adults, they are almost meaningless.

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As promised, I am posting occasional ski tours over the winter. I have been an avid cross-country skier even longer than a runner – in fact I started running in the first place to stay in shape for skiing, feeding my delusions that I was a nordic racer. Some of my ski tours are within the confines of ski touring areas, while some are along less manicured routes. Today’s post is the former. There are two fabulous ski touring areas in the mountains above Middlebury, and the Romance Mountain route is part of one of them, the Blueberry Hill Ski Touring Center in Goshen.

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I just couldn't let the dairy thing go.

Because for all of my cheesemaking attempts, I always had that nagging knowledge at the back of my head that I wasn't actually going to make cheese. Not when there's so much good cheese available right here in Vermont.

But I've been wanting to make yogurt for a long time. This seemed like a good time to do it, because the yogurt I like recently went back up to full price at the Co-op, after having been on sale for $2.60 for months.

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Ellen Young's yellow farmhouse sits on a rise of land in Shoreham, set apart from the road by a tidy stone wall. Inside, the wood beams of the living room hold paintings, and two old wooden wheels hang from the ceiling. All of the decorations in the room have memories attached, stretching back to a time when a small dairy farm and 30 cows could easily support a family.

Ellen grew up just a few yards down the road on a dairy farm run by her parents, Ada and Joseph Burgess. Years before, in 1888, Ada's parents had come to Vermont from Canada and bought the 300-acre farm.

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With the coming of the new year, a few resolutions, or at least a few thoughts about fun running events for the new year are in order. I have been collecting information for a while on a variety of trail running events in the area, some of which are reasonable goals, and some of which…well you can be the judge as to the likelihood of even seeing the starting line.

The first category is “Challenging, but Very Doable”

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This is the last post in a four-part series of cheese posts. The first was about making mozzarella cheese, and the second was about Orb Weaver Farm in New Haven, and the third was about Twig Farm in West Cornwall.

Sometimes authenticity and simplicity just don't mix.

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Economists and peace activists have long pointed out that the true cost of oil-based energy is not adequately accounted for or paid by us consumers: the pollution it generates, the treatment for diseases it necessitates, the environmental damage that needs to be ameliorated, and the military presence we provide in order to ensure our oil supplies all have costs that are not on our utility bills. Forcing oil, coal and nuclear energy providers to internalize the costs had proven almost impossible due to their strong lobbyist presence in Washington, D.C. and in state capitols.

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