- mesclun
- cherry zebra tomatoes!
- blueberries (best of the year)
- green bell peppers
- [farmgirl organics] tomatillos
- cucumber
- zucchino
- cabbage
- onions
- [green acres] basil
- green beans
- beets&greens
- carrots
- cantaloupe (not pictured)
To make the [abstinence-only] point, Mr. Love grabbed a tape dispenser and snapped off two fresh pieces. He slapped them to his filing cabinet and the floor; they trapped dirt, lint, a small metal bolt. “Now when it comes time for them to get married, the marriage pulls apart so easily,” he said, trying to unite the grimy strips. “Why? Because they gave the stickiness away.”
My flash isn’t digital-ttl capable, so I have to shoot all my flash shots manually (a useful exercise anyway, I suppose). Here by accident I had it on “high”, ISO 500, 1/125 f/5 (40mm). I especially like how the wood spatula handle floats against all the white.
Perhaps less interesting than the picture: this is two chinese preparations of choy. On the left, japanese bekana or tokyo choy is cooked with water chestnuts and cubed frozen (spongy) tofu, in oyster sauce (or, as Scott prefers, “brown” sauce) with scallion, ginger, and garlic. On the right is bok choy with carrots in a gingery miso sauce with honey. Both were delicious last night and for lunch today.
I have mentioned to people carrots of colors other than orange, and they tend to register complete astonishment. It turns out we can blame the Dutch in the 16th century for favoring patriotic Orange carrots.
Here are two, which I'd call red and purple. The red has just a thin layer of bright pigment (so you'd never want to peel these!) and the purple one goes about halfway into the root.
This dish tamales de acelgas, wrapped in swiss chard, called out to me from the chapter on tamales in my primary mexican cookbook, Diana Kennedy’s Art of Mexican Cooking. The pork filling combines sweet, sour, salty, spicy, and umami in a marvelous balance that is definitely Mexican, but as she notes, hints of the middle east (raisins! almonds!) but I would say also of southeast asia (one can imagine adding lemongrass, some ginger and lime; switching the pasillas for bird chiles, and passing it off as Malaysian).
I had made the filling before, but we were impatient, and ended up filling masa balls and deep frying them (yum). This time, however, I blanched the swiss chard, spread it with the mixed dough (fresh masa, btw, from a Pilsen tortilla factory), and carefully rolled up the leaves around it and set them in the steamer for a very long time. I am certain that I spread it too thick and made them too large, but I only had 10 large leaves. Nevertheless, the tamales are marvelous – especially for lunch the next day(s) – but the filling is so good on its own, and so easy, in the future I will probably just make a pile of tortillas and serve it as tacos.
Spotlight, and metadata search in general (cf. WinFS, the iTunes library, iTunes for PDFs, the iPhoto library; even bibdesk) is still supposed to (read: hasn’t yet but just around the corner!) change the way we store, organize, and interact with our data. And certainly there is a place for metadata search. But files still have to be stored on disks, and regardless of how complicated you make your symlink structure, distinct servers remain distinct. File systems are not going away. They remain “familiar” according to MacFuse developer Amit Singh. His port of FUSE (Filesystems in USEr space) takes the familiarity of a folders-and-files to its extreme.
It has a sheerly practical side too though. It's really nice to mount ssh volumes of remote servers as if they are local. And, for people who have to deal with Windows hardware like external drives, it offers what Tiger left out, NTFS-3g read/write support. Here is Singh’s tech demo video, showing some other cool stuff, like a Picasa file system. (There is one for flickr as well.) The "albums and photos" is a direct analog of "folders and files" and there’s no reason we shouldn't be able to access it like any other volume. I have not yet tested the iPod file system – all filesystems are just plugins for the underlying kernel plugin – but it should be the easiest way to copy stuff from an iPod. Right now I'm mainly using it to work on various remote servers. As nice as cyberduck is, sshfs is the way things should be – and now, at last, are.
On global warming: “I can tell you, our grandchildren will laugh at those who predicted global warming. We’ll be in global cooling by then, if the Lord hasn’t returned. I don't believe a moment of it. The whole thing is created to destroy America’s free enterprise system and our economic stability.”
“These phones are aimed at classy users we haven’t been addressing,” said Motorola’s chief executive, Edward J. Zander, who has been guiding the company through a turbulent yearlong downturn….The phones were introduced at a dance studio in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, and recorded video demonstrations included the singer Fergie, the soccer star David Beckham and the race car driver Danica Patrick.
I read about this a while ago, and finally found some cool pictures of it… the entire city has banned advertising in public space. From onthecommons:
As Brazilian journalist Robert Pompeu de Toledo wrote, the ad ban is “a rare victory of the public interest over private, of order over disorder, aesthetics over ugliness, of cleanliness over trash. For once in life, all that is accustomed to coming out on top in Brazil has lost.”
The article also refers to a project called Delete! in Vienna, which covered ads and signage all in the same color wrapping.
New gelateria to open in Manhattan. (And why I make my own gelato… ain't none of that shit in St Louis, though of course a couple blocks away from us in Chicago is Canady le Chocolatier, who is an artisan in every way.)The company’s whole way of being was on display. Five workers were slicing spring strawberries for sorbet, made only with San Bernardo mineral water from Piedmont. Mr. Martinetti was surrounded by boxes of high-grade Ecuadorean and Venezuelan chocolate, hazelnut paste from Piedmont and Madagascar vanilla.
Into a huge steel vat, workers had just poured several cases of $30-a-bottle Spanish sherry for one flavor, Málaga, otherwise made of milk, organic eggs and sugar. (Raisins would be added later.) Mr. Martinetti dunked a lowly plastic cup into the vat and poked his nose in as if it were a glass of his family’s Barolo.
I don't know – I actually disagree some about "retraining" because don't we actually need more farmers of smaller size, producing more diverse crops in more places?
If anything the human cogs in the monsanto / cargill / adm machine should be retrained in managing sustainable farm ecosystems (on their own). So we should create systematic incentives for consumers to want high quality local, sustainable, seasonal food; for distributors to make it available to consumers; and for producers themselves to disperse so as to reduce, if not strictly minimize, distance from field to table for most of what we eat.
For me as a consumer, the only incentive I need is sublime fresh food. Fresh green zebra, black cherokee, and brandywine tomatoes in august keep me from buying tomatoes the rest of the year. Two caveats: I know I am an anomaly in that level of zealotry (or devotion to tomatoes), and I do feel somewhat hypocritical with respect to geographic-heritage foods like Parmigiano-Reggiano.
But I think Pollan shares my problem: not eveyone is, shall we say, enraptured by food as I am (and I would venture he is). I hope you read his last article in the nytm. It feels like he, though much more knowledgable and eloquent than I, still quickly reaches the point of, "Doesn't the food just speak to you??" — if it doesn't, then where do we start to change the food system? It's very frustrating.
There's still a market, senseless to some of us, for out-of season shit from far away; for factory farmed meats (truly don't get how anyone could shop at a grocery store after having anything fresh – the time from slaughter is at least several more days, not to mention the other problems); for any and all the products of preservatives and new!improved! marketing.
In his photo-heavy book Helvetica, designer Lars Müller praises the titular typeface for its “understated self-assurance” – describing it as if it were an especially pleasing glass of shiraz.
Uncle Ben is a rare survivor in the once-crowded world of racist spokescharacters. Most of his contemporaries were fired a long time ago. … Today, no company would be dumb enough to build a brand around a black servant, but the ones now in supermarkets have been grandfathered in, rendered innocuous by the passage of time, image overhauls, and judicious wardrobe adjustments. But it's worth remembering what these spokescharacters truly are: a final, living vestige of Jim Crow America.
The issue also features the "upside-down tomato garden," the "remote controlled robotic hammerhead shark," the "pop-up hot dog cooker," the "million-germ-eliminating travel toothbrush sanitizer," the "window-mounted cat porch," the "world's smallest indoor remote control helicopter," the "Turbo-Groomer® COBALT" nose-hair trimmer, the "Sudoku glass tabletop set," the "Solar-powered mole repeller," (what, no handcrank in case of nuclear winter?), the "versatile mock rock in five sizes." (For those unaware of the purpose of a "mock rock"—since real ones are not in short supply—they are designed to "hide problem areas in your yard or garden.")
A legislative staff employee who would lose his job if he were quoted here by name said, "By the time those lobbyists were done talking, it sounded like ODF (Open Document Format, the free and open format used by OpenOffice.org and other free software) was proprietary and the Microsoft format was the open and free one."
Sorry, but the time we chose (4/30 at 4:30) won't work for me. I've got out-of-town company, and I'm taking my first Pilates class at that time.
“What I’m about to propose is a do-it-yourself method that has a lot to offer to just about anybody who loves wine, or wants to learn about it. In fact, if you’ll join in with me, we will take this home wine class together and be the better for it. Let me explain.”
to this I would add, go to good free tastings at the same wine shop. People ask how I know lots of interesting wine, or how I can manage to pair pretty well (or at least thoughtfully, rather than randomly) with food— and for me a good deal of the experience has been at free or inexpensive tastings of some truly great wines that I certainly can't afford. It's also taught me a lot about those overpriced (though sometimes not) bottles.
Some of the mysteries of easter explained: As it turns out, chicks have little to do with Jesus and a lot to do with spring.
New! Peep surgery!