Last night, someone came into our garden and stole all the ripe tomatoes, except for a few that they left smashed on the ground. And right now I’m too angry to work on the post I was going to write. Sometimes I catch people helping themselves to a tomato or two, and […]
A good icon set can be a designer’s best friend. Whether you’re selling cereal or designing an app interface, those tiny glyphs can instantly tell your audience what something is, what it does, and why they should try it. Now, food producers and marketers have a free set of icons for concepts like “locally […]
The bad news is that I’m probably going to need a root canal. The good news is that after my dentist appointment, I stopped by Monterey Market and found these beautiful eggplants. Aren’t they lovely? Around here, this variety is mostly called “graffiti eggplant,” though I’ve seen them referred to as “zebra” […]
My compost pile smells very bad right now. The kind of bad that gets people wondering if there are bodies buried under the flower beds. (There are not.) I am deeply ashamed of this situation. Not just for the olfactory nuisance, but because it reinforces peoples’ fears about composting. Part of my […]
This week, our neighborhood crop swap temporarily became a community flour mill, grinding wheat grown in one member’s back yard. The wheat had already been threshed and winnowed — the process of removing the inedible seed casings from the wheat berries. Threshing sounded like the most tedious part of the process, and […]
Lentil soup does not sound like a summertime dish. Unless it’s this Mark Bittman version, made with tart rhubarb and spiced with cardamom, cloves, garlic, and fresh ginger. Wait, you’re probably saying — rhubarb? The stuff that you usually make strawberry-rhubarb pies out of? Why would you put something capable of creating such deliciousness into lentil soup […]