The tale of the worm bin celery

...e its mild domestic origins. It didn’t grow fat, moist stalks which can be used to scoop up peanut butter. It grew stringy, dark green stalks which tasted powerfully of celery. It made excellent stock, and chopped into fine pieces, it was good in soup, too. Since I don’t eat much raw celery, this suited me fine. All winter long I used this plant as the basis of my cold-weather cooking–chopped onions, carrots and celery in the bottom of every pot....

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Maintaining a Worm Bin

...tter how long you rest one side of the bin, there will always be a few confused worms living in the finished castings. If you bag them up with the castings, they’ll die. So you have to sort out your feelings and responsibilities vis-a-vis the worms. I won’t blame anyone for letting the strays perish (they had warning, after all) but I have guilt, so I do my best to sort them out. However, hypocrite that I am, as I do so, I entertain myself by tryi...

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Filter Fail: How to Cure Internet Addiction

...oing, Twitter, LinkedIn and Root Simple (of course). Not to mention , This used to be called “information overload,” but I prefer the phrase “filter fail” that Douglas Rushkoff introduces in his book Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now (Rushokoff borrows this idea from the writer Clay Shirky). The problem is not that there’s too much information out there. The problem is that we’ve failed to screen out what is irrelevant. It happens to me e...

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Delicious Cauliflower

...And we all have a lonely can of tomato paste on the shelf that needs to be used, don’t we? We’ve been eating it hippie style, over brown rice, but it would be more elegant over an herbed pilaf, or it could be used as a side dish. I suspect it would be good cold, too, but we’ve never had leftovers. Cauliflower in Tomato Sauce (Kharnabit Emforakeh) 1 large head of cauliflower 6-8 tablespoons of oil 2 cloves of garlic, crushed 3 green/spring onions,...

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New Project: Making Bitters

...various aromatic substances tinctured in alcohol. These flavorings can be used to concoct fancy artisanal cocktails. True bitters are made with sharp, bitter herbs, like wormwood and dandelion–their original purpose was to stimulate digestion, and you’ll find them used often in appertifs. But the definition has widened to include all sorts of aromatic flavors, from resinous flavors, like pine, to sweet, mellow flavors like vanilla, to floral note...

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