Cooking Bread in a Dutch Oven and Alternative Steaming Techniques

February 12, 2013

...expand gracefully during baking. Jim Lahey’s popular no-knead bread recipe uses a dutch oven to emulate steam injection. The Dutch oven method seals in the moisture contained in the dough during the first half hour of baking. It works great and I cook all my bread this way. That being said it can be tricky to plop a loaf of wet, sticky dough into a 475º F Dutch oven without either burning yourself or messing up the dough. I’ll note that even when...

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Nasturtium Powder

Mr. Homegrown

January 29, 2013

Food, Food Preservation, Foraging

20 Comments

...a kind of massive monocrop in our yard. We’re always trying to figure out uses for it. Of course it does well in salads, both the greens and the flowers, and we’ve made capers of the pods. Also, the flowers make a particularly beautiful pesto. But this year, inspired by the culinary experiments of forager Pascal Baudar and his partner Mia Wasilevich (friend them in Facebook if you want a daily dose of foraging greatness) I decided to make a nastu...

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Garden Design Trends: Interplanting and Plant Communities

Mr. Homegrown

January 23, 2013

Garden Design, Gardening

4 Comments

...nature’s diversity, but in a somewhat more compressed form. The example he uses is the striking garden at Arthritis Research UK. You can see a video of that garden here. Rosalind Creasy has demonstrated, this same interplanting strategy can be used with edible and medicinal plants. Another related design strategy are gardens inspired by wild plant communities. The example Rainer cites is the Daily Telegraph garden seen in the picture above. You ca...

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Food Storage as Art

Mr. Homegrown

January 7, 2013

Design, Food, Food Preservation

....com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=mG9xYVyAnuc Artist Jihyun Ryou’s work uses food storage techniques from the pre-refrigerator era in a way that’s both useful and beautiful. Her goal is to, “Try to bring your food in front of your eyes” to counteract that tendency we all have to make our refrigerators unintentional composters. The techniques she demonstrates include: Evaporation Sand, both to keep vegetables vertical and to decrease humidity Us...

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Notes on Mark Bittman’s “Behind the Scenes of What We Eat”

Mrs. Homegrown

November 20, 2012

Events, Reviews, Thoughtstylings

3 Comments

...od. Here’s a few of his recommendations for policy change: Transparency in labeling, in agriculture practice Regulation of damaging foods: basically make it harder to eat poorly and easier to eat well, for instance: Make it illegal to sell soda to kids Tax the crap out of soda Subsidize real food Encourage small family farms De-subsidize companies that make non-foods (junk food) But as we’re always saying around here, real change starts at home. I...

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