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About

We are a family of two people, two cats, and three chinchillas, living in a metro area in Pennsylvania.

Kara is an academic teaching at a small college.  Karen is a high school English teacher.  We met in college and have been in each other's lives ever since, getting married nearly 8 years ago.



We try to cook with a weekly plan, prepping meals with snacks and lunch for the week made in advance.  Because we're committed to ethical meat (and moving toward ethical dairy as much as possible), we tend to be "semi-vegetarian."  We are low-to-no soy household due to allergies. 

While we strive for healthy foods, especially heart-healthy choices, we adore all that bad-for-you stuff that one should avoid, including a deep and abiding addiction to chocolate chip cookies.

We love to cook for friends and think dietary restrictions are a fun chance to try new recipes. 

Our kitchen is fairly small - the homestead is a townhome - but well-supplied.  You should expect stuff made with the slow cooker, the pressure cooker, the standing mixer, and more.  

Freddie (aka Queen Freddie Purrcury) is by far the most popular member of the house.  (Follow her on Instagram at feministfreddie.)  Her brother Alexander, usually just called Xander, completes the free-range part of the family.
a black and white kitten sitting in a chair, her face visible over the edge of the dining room table
Freddie waits at the table.
an all-gray cat sitting in a white laundry basket
Xander thinks he's helpful around the house.

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Popular Posts

Kicking Coffee Up A Notch

On cold brew coffee I like coffee.  Not as much as Kara likes coffee, but I like it a lot.  I especially like iced coffee, year-round.  But I hate brewing hot coffee then diluting it with enough ice to get it cold (I prefer to use milk or a milk substitute to dilute my coffee).  So I bought a cold brew concentrate.  And that was fine, but I knew there had to be a better way. At some grocery stores and at one particular well-known coffee shop, you can find "kits" to make cold brew coffee.  Some places, especially that coffee shop, even offer cold brew coffee "machines."  Not being made of money and having a brain in my head, I decided I could do it much, much cheaper.  I remembered making "sun tea" with my mom, and figured I could do coffee almost the same way. The first time I DIYed my cold brew, I tried to make satchels using coffee filters and twine.  It didn't work great.  The grounds escaped and were a pain to try to get out ...

Ethical eating: reducing food waste

One of our goals as part of our attempt to eat more ethically is to reduce the amount of stuff we throw away.  This includes packaging - a goal that matches up nicely with the scratch and home cooking approach! - as well as, of course, food itself. But it also involves management of our pantry staples. Pantry. Note: I love boxes. Meal prepping helps with this in theory, because you know what you will need to have on hand to make the meals you intend to make. That means that we can - theoretically - check for items in the pantry before we head out to get groceries.  I keep talking about all of this "in theory" because, well, let's be honest - there are some staples that I need to have on hand regardless of whether I intend to use them in the next week.  And sometimes I am making a meal plan in the car on our way somewhere, or over text message while one of us is at work, which means I'm not right on hand to check out the pantry's contents.  (What the phot...

An Ode to Lunch Prep

School years and semesters are now well under way for folks whose work is most pressing on that September-to-June cycle.  And where have we been?  Well, getting said year under way, of course. Despite the fact that I'm on research leave, we are diligent about our meal planning and about using weekends to do some advance work for the week.  (This means that doing the prep has taken precedence over blogging about it over the past two busy weekends - sorry, friends.) If you've been around food blogs for any length of time, you've seen ten thousand people praising meal prep and telling you it's the secret to your new healthy lifestyle.  I wish this was the moment when I said "but they're wrong!" or "do it like this!" but... meal prep, especially lunch prep, is crucial to our family's ability to eat well and resist the siren calls of ordering a pizza or grabbing something processed. However.  Karen and I can manage most of the prep in about ...