These days it’s all green this and renewable that, solar houses and electric cars and trains that run on cow farts. Well, look, my woodshop runs on solar energy, too. My daughter drew this diagram to show you all how it works: Read on

In researching historical baking I’ve ignored some old standards — very old standards, I mean, not like oatmeal cookies — and now that I have a lull in the research I’m picking them off. This month it’s jumbles, or jumbals, if you prefer the old spelling, which were formerly like nothing that goes by that name today. Read on

Most of my Great-Uncle William’s diary is filled with references to poetry, classical literature, and his own history, which makes it difficult to post individual entries. I’m fond of this one, though, and it’s timely, and not nearly so obscure as most. Forgive me if I don’t footnote; it would spoil it, I think.

Another mild day, of which to my taste there have been far too many this winter, for they tempt the mind to wander. The sharp cold of a decent winter day hones the mind, but the promise of spring invites imagination, and a surfeit of imagination is not always, even for a poet (especially for a failed poet) a happy thing. If the feet, too, wander, as mine did, not stopping at my office after teaching this afternoon but continuing on northward to the town’s end and beyond, they may kick an unmoored stone into some dark pool of memory better left still but which the undisciplined mind is only too glad to stir. Had only my mind wandered I would have passed a useless but not unpleasant afternoon staring out the window of my office. Only the feet would have led me onward past the tree, which I had countless times passed on similar walks, but whose bare bones silhouetted in winter’s sinking light now became in a careless moment the old oak on my grandfather’s farm: not the stately companion in the yard that welcomed guests and shielded the parlor from the midday sun but the gnarled ancient by the pond in whose shade the cows lounged and my own assigned work languished. There, too, my feet and my mind once wandered. Read on

An article in today’s New York Times examines yet another case of Americans taking a fundamentally sound idea — mindful eating — and driving it to extremes. Having just concluded a draft of my book with an epilogue in which I urged not only mindful eating but (especially) mindful cooking, it pains me to say this, but, seriously, people: lighten up. Read on

Tomorrow is Candlemas: the midpoint of winter, halfway between the solstice and the equinox, in cultures unspoiled by scientifically rational astronomy the first day of spring, and in much of Western Europe traditionally the day to break ground for the first of the year’s crops. Pagans had astronomy plenty to mark the day, often (plausibly, to celebrate the returning of the light) with fire. The Catholic Church, as it so often did, co-opted the festival for its own purposes, using the day to celebrate the purification of Mary forty days after giving birth to Jesus, the light of the world. And so Catholics brought their candles to the church to have them blessed, whereupon the candles became talismans that could be lit during storms or times of trouble, as an old English poem observed: Read on