Swing the axe In the hour before daylight Note the sparks That attend to the blade — Jeffrey Foucault, Dishes If I look over the top of my laptop screen, through raindrop-pebbled window panes, grass fronds feather sideways and tree branches flail against a backdrop of slate cloud curtains nestled among mountain layers. Copper leaves scud down the street and cold presses through double-paned windows. It’s only October, but we’ve already woken to snow several times, once dee

If you keep driving: beyond the outskirts, past the horses and hay bales, to the far side of split rail fences and civilization. If you keep going far enough, you enter God’s country. That phrase means different things to different people, I’m sure, but the land I speak of is this: Wide open spaces unmarred by structure and untrammeled by man. Where braided gravel bars and river corridors wend their way through a sponge of alpine tundra then tumble down waterfalls cut deep in

An almost imperceptible shift in the light. A slant of golden, the earth’s turning reflected in sunflowers’ faces. The skies blue again after a good night’s wind and rain scrubbed the smoky haze that had descended over the mountains, stacking them like so many cardboard cutouts. Around the edges the air is cool, threaded with the promise of chill. The creek meanders along, more leisurely than lazy, having left the frenetic pace of runoff behind. A grasshopper symphony plays f

I finally returned home to Bozeman this past week after a couple of weeks on the road.  I do love traveling–experiencing new places, and old places anew–but Dorothy says it best: there’s no place like home (even when it’s snowing and blowing, in May).  Perhaps it’s because, after decades of peripatetic wandering, I find myself rooting in a place.  I long for this place, this home, when I’m away. It’s good to be back. And back in my kitchen, of course.  I hadn’t been home for

I’ve thought about starting a blog, on and off, for years now.  A couple of things really inspired me to jump in: the re-entry into the blog world of my friend Katherine; my seeming addiction to cookbooks and food-related websites and blogs (Food52, I’m talking to you); and, perhaps most of all, coming up with the name of this blog.  The name bubbled up a few months ago when I was listening to my all-time favorite singer-songwriter, Jeffrey Foucault, sing a little tune of his