Worth Doing From Scratch: Corn Tortillas

June 3, 2014

...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 takes forever. Keep a bag of masa harina around and you’ll be ready for any tortilla eme...

Read…

Making Tofu From Scratch at the Institute of Domestic Technology

Mr. Homegrown

June 9, 2014

Food, Food Preservation

6 Comments

...s were ground up in a blender and the slurry was boiled in a pot with some water. The mixture was poured through a cloth to produce soy milk. The cloth was gathered up and squeezed to get out every drop of milk. Nguyen showed us three different ways to create blocks of tofu with everything from a simple colander to a plastic tofu kit, to a beautiful Japanese wooden tofu form. The next step was to coagulate the soy milk using nigari crystals (avail...

Read…

Is Purslane the New Kale?

Mr. Homegrown

June 27, 2014

Food, Foraging, Gardening, Vegetable Gardening

29 Comments

...in unappetizing locations: usually the gutter (I think it needs a bit more water than what falls naturally from the sky here). You can eat the whole plant: stems and leaves. It has a salty and slightly lemony flavor reminiscent of New Zealand spinach. There’s always a huge bin of it at Super King, our local Armenian supermarket. In Armenia it’s gathered in the wild and used either raw in salads or lightly sauteed. There’s even a World Cup tie-in....

Read…

Dramm’s Breaker Nozzle: My Favorite Watering Implement

Mr. Homegrown

October 17, 2013

Gardening, Vegetable Gardening

12 Comments

...me most at the demo was Dramm’s simplest products, the Heavy-Duty Aluminum Water Breaker Nozzle combined with their Aluminum Shut-Off Valve . The breaker nozzle provides a gentle shower, much like a Haws Watering Can and would be appropriate to use on seedlings and vegetables. The shut-off valve is extremely durable. Neither item has plastic parts. They are sold separately. While a lot more expensive than those plastic watering wands at the big bo...

Read…

Kevin West’s Saving the Season

Mr. Homegrown

October 1, 2013

Food, Food Preservation, Reviews

8 Comments

...e Canning, Pickling, and Preserving blows all those other books out of the water bath. Full disclosure here: I’ve tasted a lot of West’s jams. I teach a bread making class at the Institute of Domestic Technology. After my bread demo West does a jam making session and I stick around to watch and, hopefully, filtch an extra jar. Those West jams are coveted items around the Root Simple household. What makes Saving the Season different from other pres...

Read…