Stylish, and Luscious food from thin air, not really but read on :). . . . .

Rainbow heirloom varieties of tomatoes

I made a delicious and simple dinner with next to nothing spent on groceries. I only had to buy lettuce, goat cheese, and walnuts at the store, maybe 10-15 dollars spent total.
If you have any meat in the freezer for a roast, like pork or beef  ( you can use chicken too ) you have your foundation ready.

Beef roast with onions after cooking

If you have Mark Bittman's " How to cook everything " you can follow his recipe for pan gravy after you have roasted your meat. I saved the fats from the pan and moved the meat to a covered glass dish on the stove. I had some potatoes boiling during the last half of roasting. I used these delicious little organic " French fingerling" potatoes that I planted this summer. I also love the small size "Russian banana" potatoes for this too.

If you have a bottle of almost finished red wine sitting around making your table top look glamorous you can use this, ( or white wine ).  I used my last cup of wine from a very good four dollar a bottle wine for the gravy. When I removed the roast from  it's liquids I added the red wine and started to to simmer it slowly on very low heat for as long as it took to reduce the fluid to it's original amount ( pre-wine added ) then added a cup of water ( or chicken stock ) and reduced this again the same way.

                                           a butter pat melting into the stock of wine and vinegar

I have discovered that I love to cook with red wine even though I don't like drinking it. There is something so seductively glamorous about the scent of red wine undulating around you as you are cooking. I love the relaxing feeling I get when I cook with it, I turn on NPR or classical music and get into my groove.

So next I added, a quarter teaspoon of salt ( or to taste ), a quarter cup of vinegar ( again to taste ) and a tablespoon of butter and reduced briefly again while the butter melted in thoroughly.Then I finished up the other prep for the salad and plates. I like this sauce more on the tart side so that the vinegar flavor is almost equal to the red wine, but you can also make it with less vinegar or wine so it's more subtle and buttery like a Coq au Vin flavor. Gravy is wonderfully easy and flexible that way.

I put aside the potatoes and covered them on the stovetop to keep warm while I prepared the salad. This salad is so easy too. I didn't do well in the garden this year with lettuce so I bought some, and some soft, mild goat cheese. I realized that I had forgotten the raspberry vinaigrette so I found the pot of strawberry preserves that I had and put about a quarter of a cup of it into a glass bowl and doused it with a liberal dash of vinegar and a little olive oil drizzle. Then I whisked it to make homemade vinaigrette. It worked fairly well. It's not quite as good as the store bottles but a more talented cook than I could probably figure out what to add so that it would be really good.

Style Musings. . . . Brett Favre's big game with the Vikings

Living here in Wisconsin now, I have had to listen to all of the bluster about the Packers and Brett Favre. It gets pretty intense, at least among those who care  about football. I'm not typically one of them but my husband is.  I have also learned that people from Wisconsin call Minnesotans "mud ducks" and my husband is constantly teasing me and trying to get me all riled up by making duck noises and insulting Minnesota and the Vikings. I tell him that I couldn't care less and if he's looking for a fight that I will disappoint him. As stoic as I am about all this I can't pretend that it's not a little thrilling that Brett has defected to the Purple Menace, and I have watched my husband go through the various stages of grieving, Rage, Denial, Acceptance, and now an eerie calm . . . . I finally piped in and played devils advocate.  I think if I were Brett Favre I would do the same thing. Who wouldn't want to see if you could beat your old team?  I think sports should be taken less seriously anyway, I thought they were supposed to be fun, right :) ?

I say Brett Favre has style, style is having the confidence to P.O. half the country and look good doing it!

JANE has entered the jungle. . . .

This is a picture of the southern field this afternoon, so stunning!

Hello to everyone, reading my first post on my first blog!

I named my blog Jane of the Jungle in light of the wildness of the times we are living in!

Women ( and men ) need to feel good about themselves and to enjoy life. Especially when times are tough and things look dark. Self esteem and self-confidence are important to enjoying life. They are also both precious treasures. The good news is that both these attributes are free. One of the best things about my experience this year is the self confidence I have developed, because of personal circumstance and the passage of time. I feel that I have been waiting to feel this way since I was a young girl, and now I feel like celebrating. I also feel like sharing this great feeling and the things I have learned with other women and hearing their experiences and personal thoughts on style, self esteem and confidence .

I want this blog to become a platform for living with style, whether it's cooking, fashion, gardening, work or anything else, let's do it in style! I can't wait to hear your thoughts.

Do you have any tips for keeping up style in a down economy?

One I have always loved is to make my own clothes and jewelry.

" Style, is loving yourself till' everyone else does too "

~Prince

I love this song from Prince's album Emancipation.

I lived in Minneapolis , MN most of my life. Recently I married and moved to the country in rural Wisconsin. I live on my husbands family farmstead and it has been an amazing learning experience. I have learned how to live off the land , how to make something from nothing, I have learned alot from animals too by living so closely with them which is something I always wanted to be able to do. Living in the country is an enchanting and seductive experience. Now when I take trips to see relatives in the cities I feel that something is missing. I actually feel like I have been separated from a friend. I think that the subtleties of pheasants squawking, deer meandering and the peaceful quiet of wind through trees and crickets chirping becomes as comforting as a mothers heartbeat to an infant

Tonight I am loving that my husband stoked up our wood furnace and the house is getting cozy, as the outdoors gets cooler. The skies have been gorgeous with those typical blue gray, heavy rain clouds and the sun peeks through and lights up the fields. I was feeling bummed about the end of summer but now I have a delicious cozy feeling.