State park trail entry point.

Journey Home

Tales from the pilgrimage.

cooking

  • Summer Reorganizing

    The last leg of my summer reorganization is about scheduling time so I get the most important things done. I don’t want to be a slave to a to-do list, yet there are things I want to accomplish in life. Importantly, these are my book A Working Life, reducing the number of possessions, and helping… Read more

  • A Rustic Soup

    It began with the first wave of tomato harvest. Because of the rain, a number of themburst their seams. I only knew to cut off the bad spots and store them in a stainless steel mixing bowl with a dinner plate as a lid. I put the bowl in the refrigerator overnight. Read more

  • Sometimes things come together in a positive manner. Read more

  • Midsummer is a time to make garden soup. I cleared the kitchen counter and searched the refrigerator for ingredients, then lined everything up in a neat pile to the right of cutting board. I already made vegetable broth from turnip greens, so I got the large pitcher from the door of the refrigerator, along with… Read more

  • Harvest Chopped Salad

    Using a large language model chatbot for cooking strips away a layer of emotional attachment to food, leaving chemistry and physics behind. Sometimes a cook wants that. In the chat box, I listed all the fresh garden vegetables in the kitchen with a question of what to make with them. Within seconds, the machine responded:… Read more

  • Vegetable Broth 2026

    My spring ritual of replenishing the shelf of vegetable broth is comforting. I enjoy lining up the quart jars on the shelf, and being able to take one from to make rice or soup. The annual process results in never running out. This year I changed the varieties of greens and the amount and mixture… Read more

  • Using Up Collards

    In early Spring I inventoried frozen leafy green vegetables. A lot remained from last year. That prompted me to use some of the collards, so I came up with a collards and white bean dish that was satisfying and used up two quart bags. Here is how I made it. Unnamed Collards and White Beans… Read more

  • AI Peanut Butter Cookies

    Suddenly there were three open jars of peanut butter in the house. I had to do something with them, and had been fancying a peanut butter cookie the way Mother used to make them. It started simply enough. I typed “Recipe for vegan peanut butter cookies” in the artificial intelligence chat box. It returned this… Read more

  • Trip to the County Seat

    I’m from the government and I’m here to help. Now that I on-boarded with the county auditor to be a poll worker, I can truthfully say that. Ronald Reagan made a joke about those nine words, yet voting is no laughing matter. On-boarding consisted of driving to the county administration building, locating the appropriate area,… Read more

  • Using Apple Butter

    Although 2025 was an “on year” for apples — all five trees bore fruit — I skipped making apple butter because there were more than three dozen pints in the pantry. I need more uses for the thick, sweet, and tasty condiment than spreading on toasted bread and muffins, dolloping on applesauce cake, and spooning… Read more