Saturday Tweets: The Weather, Moletakers and More Cats

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Saturday Linkages

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Food52 Genius Recipes: 100 Recipes That Will Change the Way You Cook. Genius recipes surprise us and make us rethink the way we cook. They might involve an unexpectedly simple technique, debunk a kitchen myth, or apply a familiar ingredient in a new way. They’re handed down by luminaries of the food world and become their legacies. And, once we’ve folded them into our repertoires, they make us feel pretty genius too. In this collection are 100 of the smartest and most remarkable ones.

City Mapper, an Alternative to Uber/Lyft

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Transportation
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Queasy about the exploitation of gig economy employees? I am, and this is why I’ve yet to step into an Uber or Lyft. Apparently the City of London agrees with me having, this week, pulled Uber’s license.

My ride sharing alternative, when I don’t feel like driving or riding my bike, is a handy and free public transit app called City Mapper. City Mapper works in 39 cities worldwide. Enter a starting and ending point in City Mapper and the app offers you a number of transit options along with estimated travel time.

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Once you choose a transit option it shows you a map and helps you navigate to the nearest transit stop. When you’re on a bus or train it will buzz your phone to notify you when to get off (good for the transit dozing types, I suppose).

City Mapper runs on iPhones, Androids and on the web. It also suggests bike sharing options (though I haven’t tested this feature) and will even help you hail an Uber if that floats your transit boat.

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ScandiKitchen: Fika and Hygge: Comforting cakes and bakes from Scandinavia with love. “Fika” is a Swedish word meaning to meet up for a cup of coffee or tea over something delicious. It is also the word for the delicious treats themselves. Swedes traditionally stop twice a day for fika: taking a much-needed break from the daily grind. People fika with family, colleagues, friends, children, and even go on fika dates. “Hygge” (pronounced hue-guh) is a word that originated in Norway but is now mainly used in Denmark. It means “a sublime state of cosiness you feel when you are with loved ones and nothing else matters”. Hygge can be enhanced by the addition of a log fire, a good movie, a cup of something warm, and a sweet treat…hence the ideal combination of the two terms.

110 A Report from the 2017 National Heirloom Expo

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Food, Gardening, Permaculture, Podcasts, Vegetable Gardening

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On the podcast this week are three interviews I recorded at the 7th annual National Heirloom Expo in Santa Rosa, California in the first week of September 2017. The organizers of the expo, Baker Creek Seeds, hold a press conference in the midst of the fair and that gave me the chance to talk to some really interesting folks including:

If you’d like to leave a question for the Root Simple Podcast please call (213) 537-2591 or send an email to [email protected]. You can subscribe to our podcast in the iTunes store and on Stitcher. The theme music is by Dr. Frankenstein. Additional music by Rho. A downloadable version of this podcast is here.

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Six Seasons: A New Way with Vegetables. Joshua McFadden, chef and owner of renowned trattoria Ava Gene’s in Portland, Oregon, is a vegetable whisperer. After years racking up culinary cred at New York City restaurants like Lupa, Momofuku, and Blue Hill, he managed the trailblazing Four Season Farm in coastal Maine, where he developed an appreciation for every part of the plant and learned to coax the best from vegetables at each stage of their lives.

How to Fix a Termite Damaged Hardwood Floor

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Design
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We knew we had a severe termite problem when they made their way through the middle of our living room floor. To address the problem we had the house tented and filled with a recitation of my lesser ideas. Believe me, those termites quickly left and ran down Sunset Boulevard! When it came to fixing the floor the pest control person suggested wood putty. Ugh.

Thankfully, when I installed our floor fifteen years ago I saved some scraps for such a contingency. So here’s how to fix a hole in a wood floor without resorting to wood putty:

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1. First, carefully remove the damaged piece. You could do this with a circular saw but I used a chisel and mallet to avoid the risk of damaging the adjoining, undamaged flooring. Living in the hipster capital of the West Coast I, naturally, used a bespoke mallet I made myself. Be careful to avoid banging your chisel into a nail (this is why I used a cheap chisel rather than, say, a bespoke hand hammered one). I chiseled down the center of the damaged piece of wood and then carefully explored the edge of the wood where you’ll find nails. Once I removed most of the wood I used a small crowbar to remove the rest.

2. Next, use your chisel remove the tongue on the adjoining strip of flooring. This will make it easier to put in the replacement piece. You’ll be left with a hole in the floor that looks like this:

IMG_34243. Now place your new strip of wood next to where the damaged piece used to be. Carefully mark where you need to cut the piece. For the sake of accuracy, I’m fond of a striking knife rather than a pencil. You could also use a razor blade. You’ve probably heard the adage, “measure twice, cut once.” But this repair is a perfect example of why it’s actually best not to measure things with a ruler but instead to hold the piece to be cut up to what it needs to fit into. And for this repair, since we need a precise fit, I cut the new piece a little bit long and filed it down.

IMG_34324. You also need to remove the tongue on the replacement piece. I did this with a chisel.

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5. Once you have a good fit you can nail the new piece down with finishing nails. You will need to use a small amount of putty to hide the nails.

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If I had a larger section of floor to repair I’d rent a floor nailer which places the nails at an angle through the tongue and groove. This tools hides the nail holes and keeps the flooring snug.

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If I were installing a new floor I would highly recommend renting a pneumatic flooring nailer. Our small living room and hallway required 1,000 nails and my arm hurt for a week after using a manual nailer.

And, at the risk of ascending the saddle of my very high horse, let me use this moment to express my disdain for laminate flooring. The interwebs are full of propaganda about how laminate flooring is, “better than it used to be.” The facts are still the same: laminate flooring doesn’t look like real wood and it can’t be sanded. It’s yet another disposable item to clog our landfills along with its laminate brethren, i.e. crap from Ikea. Go ahead and eat the meatballs but please pass on the laminates.

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The Organic Gardener’s Handbook: A Users Manual for the Organic Vegetable Garden covers every aspect of creating, managing and working in the organic vegetable garden. There are chapters on climate, site selection, soil science, fertility, bed preparation, composting, cover crops, planning, raising seedlings, direct sowing, watering, harvesting, weeding, pests, seed saving, harvesting, storage, season extension, greenhouses and more! It covers both the art and science of gardening with sufficient depth to have been used as a textbook in college horticulture classes, yet it explains everything in an easily understood and even entertaining manner. Whether you are a complete novice, or a veteran gardener, you will want to keep this book out in the garden shed with your tools. It is intended to be used in conjunction with its companion book, The New Vegetable Growers Handbook, which covers the cultivation of individual crops.

Saturday Tweets: Plywood and Mean Cats

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Saturday Linkages
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Being the Change: Live Well and Spark a Climate Revolution. Alarmed by drastic changes now occurring in the Earth’s climate systems, the author, a climate scientist and suburban father of two, embarked on a journey to change his life and the world. He began by bicycling, growing food, meditating, and making other simple, fulfilling changes. Ultimately, he slashed his climate impact to under a tenth of the US average and became happier in the process.