Choosing the Perfect Tortilla Press

...you do is get masa harina (a limed corn flour), mix it roughly 50/50 with water and let the dough rest for a half hour to an hour. Next, you roll the masa into little 2 inch balls and press them between a plastic bag inserted into the tortilla press. The last step is to heat them on the stove for one minute on each side. Making your own masa from scratch is much harder (I tried it once for tamales and found that it’s a job best outsourced). But y...

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Our new front yard: history

...ads are big and surprisingly heavy. Imagine a tree made up of interlocking watermelons and you’ll have some idea. Watermelons covered with lethal spines, that is. And gloves do not stop prickly pear spines. Gloves merely collect the spines, and then your gloves are ruined forever. We put off pruning it one year too many, and suddenly, this year, we realized we couldn’t harvest any of the fruit, because it was all growing too high to reach. So the...

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When it’s time to remove a tree

...you a message. If you can’t help them by simple means–like jiggering their water or applying compost– then let them go. Stop fighting the inevitable just because you have a preconceived idea that your perfect yard has to have a peach tree or roses or whatever. Or worse, that you paid good money for a plant and you’re not going to let it die. Release the stunted and the disease-prone and the perpetually wilted. They were not meant to grow there. If...

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Worth Doing From Scratch: Corn Tortillas

...works great but my Mexicano friends in the know suggested a wooden press. Making masa from scratch is a huge amount of work and I’ve done just fine with supermarket masa harina. As I like to measure dry ingredients by weight I’ve figured out that for enough tortillas for four people you need to mix 250 grams of flour with 300 grams of water. Cook as many tortillas at once as you can. I can do three at a time on our stove. Cooking one at a time ta...

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

...’s foolproof. If you have bread baking anxieties, just leave those behind. Making this “bread” is easier than making cookies. In texture, Adventure Bread could belong to that camp of dense Nordic/Germanic breads, like Vollkornbrot, but its nutty nature sets it apart. The only thing I don’t love about it is the pumpkin seeds–I don’t like their slippery texture so much in this context. Next time I may switch those out. I’m going camping this weekend...

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