Vagabond Kitchen: Sunsets and Sunrises
8-4-15 Sunsets and sunrises layer color lines across my memory. Summer days beach basking, evening speeds into morning faster than hummingbirds in flight. Our car and belongings are full of sand, tiny pebbles, lake water layered, collected from too many places to count. Lakes: Superior, Michigan, Manistique, Crooked and countless rivers and streams toe-dabbled along […]
Vagabond Kitchen: Bliss Remix
Memoirs and recipes from the Vagabond Kitchen experience at Bliss Fest 2015 7-27-15 I sat outside the home-tent, sun slinking, still hot, behind untidy pines. Carp fed ten feet away in the shoreline’s shallow, reedy, lily-pad laced water. Their mouths made quick “Snap!” noises as they snatched bugs from the surface. Their spotted bodies seemed […]
Vagabond Kitchen: Gus
8-3-15 My written updates from the Vagabond Kitchen — essays and recipes detailed and recorded—have been sporadic. I’ve paced around my notebooks, taking food pictures and writing down ingredients. I’ve finished an 800+ page novel and begun another lengthy fictional diversion. This is the essay I’ve been avoiding—the aching loss spilled in ink, then typed […]
The Vagabond Kitchen: Last Year’s Seeds
6-10-15 We ate our first outside meal by the lake last night. Keith, the kind of dear friend who helps you say, “Yes” to the next adventure, brought lemony tabbouleh and we roasted gourmet hotdogs as the sun dipped its round face below the tree line. I picked arugula for a salad in the garden […]
The Vagabond Kitchen: Last Week of Moving Meals
Foraging Forest and Freezer
We were cleaning out the refrigerator and freezer in preparation to move. The last Rock River Farms chicken rested in the freezer’s meat drawer. I stared at it anxiously. Should I cook the last chicken before moving, or save it for a summer meal? Cold freezer air undulated around my feet as I surveyed the […]
The Vagabond Kitchen: New Homes and Peach Bread Toast
6-9-15 The mist on the lake rose in spectral tendrils. A dazzle of sparkling sunlight stretched like a glittering crown across a pale brow. Exhaustion tugged at me from one direction and excitement from another. This was the beginning of a new chapter in my life. My partner, Orson and I packed our belongings into […]
The Vagabond Kitchen: Introduction
Figuring It All Out
In the two years since I stepped away from my old life and into a world full of new choices, it feels like every inane and sage saying or bit of wisdom about “taking control of one’s own life” has circled through my mind like the maddening lyrics of the latest pop song over gas […]
Spices Improvising
It’s possible to learn cooking techniques from the oversights of others. My parents, the people who taught me about seasonal eating, food preservation, and instilled within me seeds of passion for culinary consciousness, didn’t teach me about spices. They both cooked wonderful meals, ordered bulk spices from the local food co-op (five pounds of bay […]
