Solar Oven Triumph: Fluffy Egg Strata

...then mix all the rest of the ingredients: the milk, the melted butter, the herbs, the salt n’ pepper. Pour the egg mix over the bread. Let it soak in. The bread might float a bit before it takes enough water aboard to sink. You should have pretty good coverage of the bread. A little poking above the eggs is fine. The bread needs time to soak so it really breaks down. The magical thing about strata is that the bread and egg and cheese meld into one...

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Home cooking advice?

...talian and Middle Eastern cuisines and cooking traditions, but these broad labels are enough for now.) I am neither Italian nor Middle Eastern–my native regional dish would be a steak with a corncob on the side–but I live in a Mediterranean climate, and the vegetables and herbs and fruits used in these cuisines thrive in my yard, and are easy to buy locally. This food just makes sense here. And we like it. If I limit my choices like this, my pantr...

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Saturday Tweets: From Zines to Hedgehogs

...t back: https://t.co/Qolk4BE0zh — Root Simple (@rootsimple) May 7, 2018 10 herbs you probably haven’t heard of but should grow | Alys Fowler https://t.co/5ZDthQa7H2 pic.twitter.com/yOTRrsvH6V — Guardian gardening (@guardiangardens) May 6, 2018 ‘I had to guard an empty room’: the rise of the pointless job https://t.co/q8RhMn391u — Root Simple (@rootsimple) May 6, 2018 Humility in science communication https://t.co/NAPo2gyqXP via @2020science — Root...

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Anagallis monellii : A New Favorite

...planted Anagallis monellii “Blue Pimpernel” in a bed of mixed flowers and herbs. This plant is neither edible or medicinal, but we hoped the bees would like its many blue flowers. Anagallis monellii is a Mediterranean native, so it is well suited to the California climate, and it follows that it does not need much water. It is perennial in zones 9 to 11 (that’s us), but can be grown as an annual elsewhere. If you see Anagallis monellii without bl...

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Supper for a buck?

...I’m not going to try to do the math and add up the costs of the onion and herbs and olive oil I add to the beans. And I surely don’t have the patience to figure out the cost of the salad from our garden (do I have to figure in the mortgage?), but I do know that around this time of year I could forage a salad for free from the spring weeds. But for the sake of a sensationalist headline, I’m ballparking our supper for two at about a dollar. It may...

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