About Me

I love food and kitchens, too. Growing up in northern Minnesota, I cooked first in order to get warm. In the tiny kitchen of a big old house, I baked, mostly – breads that took time (and heat) to rise, cookies to crisp,

cakes to frost with all sorts of thimble gizmos that required lots of time in hot water to clean. The

kitchen was comfort at its most basic. My mom gave me full rein to do whatever I wanted, provided I cleaned everything up afterward. Deal! Given that constraint, I looked for ways as I cooked and baked to make the cleaning-up part easy. I remember best how great it felt to make people happy simply with food that I’d prepared.

And I’ve always loved the nonhuman natural world, which naturally means cultivating an ecological sensibility and paying attention to how we treat animals. All of them.

I live in the South now and have for a couple of decades. Getting warm is not a problem but the kitchen is still comfort. It’s where I go at the end of a workday to relax into the satisfaction of making dinner. It’s where I go when I want to be busy with something but am not sure what. It’s where I go when people come over in order to offer a little something to share. (We usually stay there.) Feeding people remains one of my greatest pleasures. To call it “entertaining” in my case is an overstatement. As one of my friends put it recently, mine is more of a “c’mon the hell over” approach.

Which brings us to the “pretty good” part of this blog.

About “Pretty Good”

We’re not going for perfect here, folks. When it comes down to the home kitchen, pretty good is plenty (favorite word #1) good enough (favorite word #2). That said, there are two sides to the “pretty good” part. One is general quality. Think about it. Pretty good breakfast crepes are super delish and pretty good braised meat of any tough-cut sort is downright amazing. Right? Besides, I’m so far from perfect that I couldn’t carry off lying about it for even a single post.

The other side of “pretty good” is less concrete. Call it the “pretty good” of a moral or ethical kind. It’s the choosing and making of food, general kitchen operations with an eye to minimizing harm. We’re not out to save the world, here. Rather, we’re aiming for a basic decency and respect for the fact that we’re all in this together and that it matters. So, while you won’t find diatribes or pedantry, I hope you’ll find some helpful hints and inspiration, maybe some ah-hah ideas for easing your planetary footprint without getting all weird about. Okay, maybe a little weird every now and then.

In General, Categories and the Pure Deliciousness of It All

There are five main categories: food, drink, the garden (an extension of the kitchen), shopping, and cleaning up. Food is self-explanatory, the garden, too; drink includes both non- and alcoholic. There are a few posts with strategies for shopping and cleaning up – again, with an eye toward eco-friendliness and ease. You can search posts in a category by perusing the “In General” box.

What we are going for, then, is the pure deliciousness of it all. Delicious on the tongue; good for body, mind, and heart; the pleasure of company; and the capital D deliciousness of this marvelous, wonderful world that we have the good fortune to savor and privilege to sustain. To you. Cheers! ~

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