Saturday Tweets: Waffles, Shipwrecks and Soil Erosion

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Go Outfitters Apex Camping Shelter/Hammock Tarp, Slate Gray

The Week in Pictures

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Thoughtstylings
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porchview

Both Kelly and I came down with colds this week. It takes superhuman effort on my part to string words together into sentences when I’m feeling well. With a cold I run an even greater risk of committing grave grammatical and punctuation errors. So rather than write, I decided to shuffle out of the house yesterday and take a few pictures. Above is the view from our front porch.

mallow

The Malva parviflora is back which means that we’ve had some rain this year. I take this as a hopeful sign even though we’re not out of the drought in Southern California.

little library

Our neighbor Jennie Cook (a guest on episode 50 of our podcast) put up a Little Free Library in her parkway a few years ago. It’s been a huge success. I’ve gotten rid of and acquired quite a few books and sometimes I just stroll down to look at what oddball things have shown up.

cactus

One street over a neighbor has a huge stand of this common cactus that I, sadly, don’t know the name of (if you do, please leave a comment).

succulents

A relative sent Kelly a get well bouquet of succulents that now lives on our front steps.

Once I stop swigging DayQuil, Root Simple will be back with our regularly scheduled programming.

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Wild Drinks & Cocktails: Handcrafted Squashes, Shrubs, Switchels, Tonics, and Infusions to Mix at Home

Three California Natives that Double as Culinary Herbs

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Gardening
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In my perfect world we Southern Californians would cast off our topiaried Home Depot shrubbery in favor of California natives and a few carefully chosen Mediterranean plants. No more petunias, leaf blowers or fake lawns either. Imagine if all our residential, government and commercial spaces had climate appropriate landscaping? Native insects, birds and other critters would explode in population. It would be a paradise.

It would also be a huge culinary resource. Grow these plants in your garden and you can dodge the controversies of foraging in the wild. Towards that end, I thought I’d look at three easy to grow California natives that look great in a garden and double as culinary herbs.

White sage (Salvia apiana)
If you can grow this one you should. Like most California natives, when used as a culinary herb, it’s much stronger tasting than its cultivated cousins. You need to use it sparingly when cooking with it. Our neighbor has one that made it through our multi-year drought without a drop of water. When you grow it in a garden it’s best to prune it back every year to prevent it from getting rangy looking. You can use the cuttings as smudge sticks or dry them for use in the kitchen. White sage is over-harvested in the wild for the crystal shop smudge stick market which is another reason you should grow this one in your garden.

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Black sage (Salvia melifera)
Our black sage plant has become a giant blob that threatens to take over the backyard. The Chumash people made a tea out of it that functioned as a pain reliever. Like white sage, you can use it in cooking (again, sparingly because of the strong taste).

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California sagebrush (Artemisia californica)
When I imagine of the scent of our local mountains it’s this plant that I think of most. It was the Cahuilla people’s DayQuil. Using it as a culinary herb brings the taste of California to your food. Bees love it too.

You can make a tea with all of these plants and you can dry them for use as a spice herbs. And a reminder that if you’re in a hurry you can dry herbs in a microwave by putting the leaves in one layer between two paper towels. Microwave for one minute and let the leaves cool. If they aren’t brittle, microwave for another minute.

Pascal Baudar (a guest on episode 89 of the Root Simple Podcast) has a phenomenal spice herb blend that uses all three of these herbs combined with some garlic salt. I made a batch last week and have already used it on salmon and popcorn. You can find that recipe on page 158 of his amazing book The New Wildcrafted Cuisine: Exploring the Exotic Gastronomy of Local Terroir. I also strongly suggest taking one of Pascal’s classes.

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ParaCord Spool Tool (High Visibility Orange)- Holds Up To 100′ of Parachute Cord

Saturday Tweets: Squirrels and Other Stuff

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Aquaponic Gardening: A Step-By-Step Guide to Raising Vegetables and Fish Together

On the Vulnerabilities of Combination Locks

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Fitness, Preparedness, Thoughtstylings
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Back in December, just a few days after Kelly came home from the hospital, I went to the gym for a badly needed workout. I put my wallet and car keys in a small set of lockers located on the weight room floor. Those lockers (pictured above) have a built-in combo lock where you can set the combo yourself. Unfortunately something went wrong. When I went back to retrieve my belongings the combo I had set did not work. I asked a staff member to find the master key to open the locker. He informed me that the boss had it and that he wouldn’t be back until after the holidays. I panicked. How would I get by without my keys, credit card and driver’s license? Then I remembered an idle afternoon back in the summer when I attempted to learn how to crack combo locks.

The efforts of that afternoon paid off. After around five minutes of practice on the other lockers I figured out how to open the lock and I manged to retrieve my belongings.

Combo locks all work the same way. The internal mechanism has three or four wheels that must align to open the lock. More expensive combo locks have false gates to make them harder to crack. The cheap built-in locks at the gym had no false gates. Opening the lock was as easy as turning the numbers until I felt a subtle resistance. The process reminded me of playing a musical instrument. All it takes is a little finger dexterity and practice.

Should you find yourself in a similar situation, you’ve got a couple of options for opening a combo lock:

  • With a shim:

  • With some math:

Both the shim and the “math” methods take practice. I have not been able to open the lock I’ve been practicing on with either of these techniques. Of course, the easiest method is just to pry open a locker with a screwdriver or crowbar. And many locks can also be defeated by drilling them.

Lastly, let’s say you have an open combo lock but have forgotten the combo. You can figure it out by peering into the opening:

In addition to adding a James Bond villain skill to your mental toolkit, consider this post as a warning. Don’t leave valuables in a gym locker. I could have easily opened the other lockers, pulled out wallets, copied down credit card numbers and put the wallets back. My fellow gym goers would not have known anything was wrong until their credit card bills arrived.

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5pcs Credit Card Hardware Multitools for Training Practice Lock Statue of Liberty Card