What can you do living gluten-free when it comes to holidays. A lot, actually. I’ll share my stunning success at Thanksgiving Stuffing shortly, but there’s a more dire topic at hand: Jelly Donuts! Even if you don’t celebrate the festival of lights, you probably know that Chanukah is a celebration surrounded by a puddle of oil—symbolic oil and cooking oil. Symbolically, historically, there was only enough clean oil left...

Welcome to the final part of A Christmas Carol brought to you by the podcast CraftLit: A Podcast for Crafters Who Love Books. In the previous episode I promised to link to a webpage with lots of A.C.C. and Dickensian information. This is the compendium of useful links. In this episode I point you towards the CraftLit episodes that cover A Tale of Two Cities, and two other books: Amazon.com Widgets Here are the various file formats you can use...

This holiday season a group of us are planning a Dickens of a Christmas blog hop:

* April of 21st Century Housewife
* Ken of Ken Albala’s Food Rant and many, many books about food which you should check out
* Heather of Mama O Knits too Much, CraftLit and the upcoming pattern book What Would Madame Defarge Knit?
* Margo of Hat Shadows, a professional milliner for film, theater, opera and ballet. She teaches hatmaking courses so check out her blog!
* Diana of A Little Bit of Spain in Iowa
* Annette of Sustainable Eats
* Sarah of XX , a print journalist, food blogger and author of an upcoming book about the home canning revolution?

There will be recipes for the traditional foods Dickens wrote of in A Christmas Carol, or recipes that would have been found in Victorian England around the holidays. There will be a professional reading of the story available as a podcast. There will be giveaways, themed knitting patterns and quite possibly hats! There may be smoking bishop and suet cooked in organs. And there will certainly be much making of merry.

2010 Harvest Tally. Gaze in awe at the extraordinary tally here. This comes by way of a friend of mine from middle school in Tucson, Arizona. I seem to recall commiserating sitting behind her in our 8th grade English class as we suffered sat through endless 80 word spelling tests and sentence diagramming instruction. Okay, the diagramming was kind of cool. But I wasn’t about to admit that back then. Regardless. I would like to tell you...

So here we are, nine years out from–for better or worse–the most exciting thing to have happened to me, ever. And I wanted to talk a bit this year about the “exciting” thing. The word exciting has come to take on a positive meaning. The original meaning of “excite” was slightly different. Let’s check with our friend, the Oxford English Dictionary. (ksat)  [a. Fr. exciter (= Pr. and Sp. excitar), ad. L....