Much More Veg

It takes some doing, this losing plastic, eating fresh and organic. We’ve gone up a notch lately, buying our fruit and veg from a farm that delivers us a jumble of produce each Friday. All the fruit and vegetable boxes are plastic-free. The sturdy cardboard boxes are collected each week, along with any of the…

Beautiful Bread

Do you ever get a whim to do something? I’ve had one recently: baking bread.  Without going all strict about it, I’ve decided to bake most of our bread. Ironically, we finally have a great source just down the road, something that’s been on my wish list for years. The Farmhouse Café and Bakery was…

You are Welcome

In early December, we said good bye to another house guest, our eighth since we returned from Canada the end of August. Our guests ranged from age 19 to early 70s, and represented five nations. One of the visits was planned for more than a year, with our friend’s desire to come and visit going…

Change in the Air

As autumn rolls in with colours transforming, temperature (mostly) dropping and light lessening, it feels like time to change, as if it’s the real new year. I’m marking the move from summer to autumn by writing more poetry, ordering organic vegetable boxes, getting back on my bike. Fresh, creative, and pushing me just that little…

Golden Delicious

I’m in the hot tub at the local swimming pool, soaking up to my neck in a gurgle of hot water between swimming lengths in a chilly pool. It’s making me feel great: stretching my muscles and giving me a sense of doing something right for my body. Just like bus stops, hot tubs are…

Bricks and Paper

One of those things that’s good to do when you need to bang something around a bit, making paper bricks with the nifty little brick maker ticks a lot of boxes, when you need boxes ticked. Tick away: Physical activity Using up what would otherwise be thrown in a bin Playing with water Creating something…

Barmbrack

It is while sifting through my recipe files that I miss my mother-in-law, Carmel, the most. I have inherited her stash of handwritten notes and recipes along with a tattered book or two, that are now part of the mix of newspaper clippings, pages cut from magazines, and online print outs that fill two folders…

Yo, Yogurt!

So I’ve been making my own yogurt. In Dublin I use a wide-mouth flask [thermos] and put it in my hot press [airing cupboard] overnight. (This is the type of translating I do in my head a lot when I am in Canada, trying to remember which term to use. I don’t always get it…

Home for the Holidays

Who knew it would be so much trouble to go home? What should be simple, straightforward, and just, well, a basic human right, isn’t always. As I write this, I think about the millions of displaced people who not only have no foreseeable hope of going home, don’t even have another place they can call…

Reimagining, a New Way

I like a tidy house, but I hate to throw things out. Okay, I don’t have a problem with used tissues or scraps for my compost bin but the part of my brain wired directly back to my four homesteading, pioneering grandparents looks at things and asks, “What can I do with this?” The easy…