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Currant Affair
What you see in the photo here are what are referred to as black currants, one of the members of the ribes family (which also includes red and white currants and gooseberries), which are a woody...
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It’s that time of the year: Tomatoes
I used to have a coworker who’d literally leave bags of produce from his garden on your desk. Leaving a big display with a polite sign in the break room was definitely not his style; he could not...
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Stalking the Wild Spaghetti Squash
Shhhhhhhh. We’ve now encountered the elusive spaghetti squash in her native habitat. If you look carefully, you can see her crouching here, under the large spiny leaves toward the back. Quiet now; we...
View ArticleTimely suggestions
OK, folks, sometimes it is good to, as they say in the classical music biz, ‘recapitulate the theme’ before we go on to the ‘variations.’ In your Aunty’s case this weekend, it hit me (literally; the...
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We interrupt this raincoat for a tomato
For folks who have arrived, hoping that this is actually ‘The Further Adventures of a Zip-out Lining,” my apologies. Other things have gotten in the way, so you get this, a humble review of how to save...
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Fall Gardening: Evaluating how things went
This week was, to certain extent, the ‘last hurrah’ for the garden here at Chez Siberia. We had several ‘killing frosts’ here – this is the sort of frost where basically it coats all the grass in...
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Liquor Gifts: What to do?
If you are the sort of person/couple/fam that receives liquor gifts at the holidays or gets ‘regifted’ liquor from family or friends, then this post is…for..you. Here is a way to create an even better...
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Kiddie Food
We all have connections with food that we ate when we were young (shoot, Proust wrote a 900+ page novel based on his scent memory of what is actually a rather small vanilla cookie). Whether it’s some...
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Field of dreams — with water
Either we have the biggest gophers on earth at Chez Siberia, or this is a project gone mad, right? One of the reasons (rationalizations might be a better word) for buying Chez Siberia in the first...
View ArticleLast Minute Holiday Meal: Ayyyyyyy!
Wednesday morning. Your old Aunty was sent an IM this morning (and for anyone outside these here Semi-United States today is the day before what is probably the biggest non-religious family get...
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Go Straight to January
As is my wont, your Aunty is going to completely skip over the rest of the holiday season and land squarely on January 1, 2014 . Feet first. I figure that you have the rest of this month firmly set up...
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Theme and Variations on a Brownie
Some folks like their brownies chewy. Some folks like their brownies fudgy. Some people like them cakey and others claim that if they’re cakey then they are not brownies. Then there is the PN crowd...
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More from left-over liquor-land: Orange Extract
At this time of the year, you might find yourself with a box of oranges as a gift (or, as part of a fund-raiser). Now, you can certainly eat them and toss the orange rinds. No one would fault you for...
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Sometimes you just want a plain cookie
Having come through the Holiday Season(tm) here at Chez Siberia (where, for the last couple of weeks, thanks to Polar Vortex – now there’s a name that needs to be registered – it’s been more Siberian...
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Bits and Pieces
Sigh. It’s been one of those weeks (and weekends), my little wombats. So you get odds and ends, bits and pieces, random thoughts, and whatever I’ve cleaned out of the fridge. Lucky you. If you are from...
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Everything you NEVER wanted to know about ‘magic cookie bars’
When I started thinking about this post, all I figured on discussing was the fact that the socalled ‘magic cookie bar’, which is almost a staple at school and church bake sales and Christmas cookie...
View ArticleLive blogging a snowstorm
With the best will in the world, there is not much Aunt Toby can do this morning about the weather in the eastern US. I’m frankly hunkered down in a motel room near an airport, lighting candles and...
View ArticleStarting this year’s garden
So, there you are, with the pile of seed catalogs (or the URLs of home gardener seed companies and your computer) and feeling overwhelmed. You’d like to have a garden this year. You’d like to grow more...
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Last-minute dinner
Sometimes, everything in the day just conspires to prevent you from being super organized and you come home at 5 p.m. to nothing taken out for dinner. This is one of those lessons in having things on...
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Pip, Pip … and all those sorts of disasters
Never, ever let it be said that your dear old Aunty cannot snatch disaster from the jaws of victory. Given enough distractions, 50-odd years of cooking muscle memory can go flying right out the...
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