Why is My Squash Bitter?

...of the Cucurbitaceae family, one of the most difficult vegetables to save seeds from. Cucurbitaceae have both male and female flowers and lots of wild, inedible relatives. Cross pollination is what Cucurbitaceae want to do. If you want to save seed and you take the precaution of taping up the flowers, bumblebees and solitary bees can chew their way through the tape to get at the pollen. In short it’s really easy to breed a freak Frankensquash or...

Read…

2014, a Year in Comments: Plant Thievery, Loquats, Breakfast Cerial and the Apocalypse

...s, after all, evolve ingenious ways of, for instance, getting birds to eat seeds and poop them out over the landscape. Appealing to our lesser instincts could be yet another devious genetic strategy on the part of team plant. 2. Loquat Season is Here. Second to ways to avoid traffic, one of the great questions of life in Los Angeles is what to do with all those damn loquats. As the loquat is not frost tolerant, this is not a question for folks in...

Read…

Josey Baker’s Awesome Adventure Bread (gluten free!)

...uten, he’d make something entirely different. It works. It’s made of nuts, seeds and oats, moistened with oil and water and held together with chia and psyillium husks… [Psyllium what? We’d never used psyllium seed husks before, but they are apparently used in gluten free baking to help bind ingredients–like chia, they are mucilaginous. We found them in the dietary supplement section of Whole Foods, for what it’s worth. Be sure to get the husks, n...

Read…

Help! Small birds are eating us out of house and home!

...r type of feeder, which is enclosed in a fine mesh, and meant to hold tiny seeds, like thistle seeds. This sort of feeder attracts small, seed-eating song birds, like finches, but doesn’t feed the mice and rats and squirrels.* What could possibly go wrong? We installed the feeder about a month ago, and were delighted to see house finches and tiny lesser goldfinches come to visit. (So were our indoor kitties, I might add!) And then more lesser gold...

Read…

A new spice sensation in the Root Simple kitchen

Last night, while looking for something to spice up some roasted pumpkin seeds, I made a happy discovery: Korean red pepper flakes + ground sumac (plus lots of salt) = delicious! These two geographically unrelated spices share shelf space in our cupboard, but I’ve never thought about combining them before, perhaps because they come from different food families, so to speak. So many wasted years! Now they’re going on nuts, seeds, popcorn…maybe as...

Read…