Lots of leaves, not much cabbage head (the winter has been warm, and the garden didn't get watered over the holidays). We're eating the tender leaves (not the older, tougher ones). We like them (sliced thin) with potatoes (also sliced thin and sauteed or steamed), carrots (also from the garden), sliced sausage (low-fat kielbasa), plenty of garlic, a spoonful of balsamic vinegar, tumbled together in the skillet with beef broth or what-have-you. A hearty winter supper, with hot bread.
More garden stuff. I've been spading the beds (we now have five raised beds (one 4x16, four 4x8), adding compost and manure (donated by our pair of cows--not milk cows, mowing machines). Planted spinach, more carrots (never too many carrots), radishes for Bill, two rows of edible pod peas, two rows of fava beans.
If you're in the Austin area: I'll be speaking at the Austin Herb Society's Herb Seminar on February 21. Details here. The topic: Shaker herbs--that's Shaker, as in the religious group that grew and marketed herbs in the nineteenth century, and collected and recorded a great deal of information about American wild-gathered medicinal plants. (I say this because somebody emailed me the other day, wondering what kind of herbs you shook out of a shaker.) China's new mystery, Wormwood (out in April), takes place in a fictional Shaker village in Kentucky.
More book stuff: I'm on Twitter now (at the urging of book promotion guru Dani Greer), @susanalbert. I don't have time for a lot of social networking (if I did it all, I'd never have time to write!). But with the book tour coming up, it seems like a reasonable thing to do. I really need to get back to Goodreads, though--had a lot of fun over there last spring. Three books coming out this year (Wormwood, The Tale of Applebeck Orchard, Alone Together: A Memoir of Marriage and Place), so I need to put on my book promotion hat and get my act together.
Reading note: When we comprehend our actions over time, we see what we do in terms of a story. . . As we move forward from yesterday to today to tomorrow, we move through tensions building to climaxes, climaxes giving way to denouements, and tensions building again as we continue to move and change. Human time is a storied affair.--Dan P. McAdams