How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Open Floor Plan

...ining room. And the two closets that share a wall between the two bedrooms used to be one big closet with a window. The window is visible from the outside but plugged up on the inside. I’m pretty sure that the house we live in was a kit offered by the Pacific Ready Cut company. Style #48 in the 1925 Pacific Ready-Cut catalog closely resembles our floor plan with the dining room and living room flipped and the closet in a different orientation. We...

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How to Size a Breakfast Nook Table

...side. Having set up a new wood shop I set out to make a new table top and used a base that I found in an alley. Rather than that strange hinged mechanism I just used plastic sliders on the bottom of the table to make it easy to move the table back and forth. I chose hard maple and included breadboard ends for a traditional look. Flattening the table top was an excuse to learn how to use hand planes, the bicycle of tools in that they are simple, e...

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A Question About Freezing and Canning Home Grown Vegetables

...ia. For some mysterious reason, we get canning questions on our our seldom used Google voice number (213 537-2591). A good question came in this week. The caller asked, “I’ve got a home garden and produce trickles in. Can I freeze it and then can it later?” I called back and confirmed that the question related to pressure canning vegetables. Not knowing the answer to this question, I wrote an email to chef Ernie Miller, who I had the great privile...

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On the Problem of Food Storage and Hoarding

...the utility room. Those shelves quickly filled with aspirational but never used ingredients such as tapioca flour as well as mediocre food preservation projects that I just couldn’t admit defeat on. Our kitchen’s ample built-in cabinets. When it came time for our painters to work on the utility room we decided to take down the shelves and try to live with the storage built for the original inhabitants of this house. Now I’ve noticed that when I go...

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How’s that Tomato Grafting Project Going?

...e the graft and secure it with a grafting clip. For the grafting process I used the directions in the following video from Cornell University: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08YfqCpL3po&index=66&list=FLsdjOQI8p-2mTRfVkMO6otA The next step is to put the grafted seedlings into a “healing chamber” consisting of a dark, warm and humid environment that gives the plant a chance to heal and the graft to take. You then slowly introduce light over a perio...

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