Warning: This Blog is Based in a Mediterranean Climate

...all as do deserts. But like deserts, we have to be frugal when it comes to water. All the rain we get comes at one time. Between the late spring and early fall there is no rain at all. Those of us who live here ought to concentrate on plants adapted to long dry periods. And because of our climate I have a house rule at Root Simple about not talking about the weather on our blog. Why? Because it’s really, really boring. Nothing ever happens. Most o...

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How to Cook Perfect Scrambled Eggs

...enty: 20 Techniques 100 Recipes A Cook’s Manifesto . I can’t say that I read the rest of the book, but the double boiler egg method sure works well. You melt some butter in a double boiler first to help keep the eggs from sticking. You can also use a pan held over (but not in) a pot of boiling water if you don’t have a double boiler (and I don’t have a double boiler). It takes longer to cook eggs this way, of course, but you get nice soft and fluf...

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Bird Netting as a Cabbage Leaf Caterpillar Barrier

...s can’t lay eggs through it. The best way to do this is by planting arches of wire or tubing over your garden bed, and stretching the cover material over those arches– like a covered wagon. Netting has advantages over row cover: you can see and water through it and it’s more readily available. I’m curious what you, our dear readers, think of the idea? Mrs. Homegrown chimes in: I’ll add that in the past readers have said they use tulle material as...

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Thomas Pynchon on Pizza

...harma product. Its sauce was all but crunchy with fistfuls of herbs only marginally Italian and more appropriate in a cough remedy, the rennetless cheese reminded customers variously of bottled hollandaise or joint compound, and the options were all vegetables rigorously organic, whose high water content saturated, long before it baked through, a stone-ground twelve-grain crust with the lightness and digestibility of a manhole cover. Pynchon being...

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