Something for Nothing – Wild Mustard Greens

...hite mustard’ of commerce . . . The pungency of mustard develops when cold water is added to the ground-up seed – an enzyme (myrosin) acts on a glycoside (sinigrin) to produce a sulphur compound. The reaction takes 10 – 15 minutes. Mixing with hot water or vinegar, or adding salt, inhibits the enzyme and produces a mild bitter mustard.” And speaking of urban foraging, we’ve been inspired by our visitor from Chicago, Nancy Klehm. Hear an interview...

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Moldy Grapes!

...e is to weight them down somehow. In this case, I had a baggy full of salt water (salt water so that if it leaked, it wouldn’t dilute the brine) sitting at the top of the jar. But I didn’t pay attention to the jar during the fermentation, and a couple of the rolls popped up at the sides and mold set in––a kind of fluffy, spider-webby black mold that crept from the exposed bundles up the sides of the jar. The lesson to be learned here is to pay som...

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Dookie in the Tomatoes

...rrives at a centralized packing facility where it is loaded into a massive water bath by underpaid workers to mingle with thousands of other tomatoes. The water bath acts as our second salmonella Petri dish along the tomato’s path to our table. Alternately, a blade used to automatically slice tomatoes gets infected with salmonella, thereby spreading the bug to all the other pre-sliced tomatoes headed to the food assemblers (a more accurate term th...

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Growing Watermelons

...adds a little more to the shade and water retention effort. 4. Irrigating watermelons. Watermelons have large root systems and if you use drip irrigation make sure that the emitters extend in a ring around the roots. Putting an emitter at the stem of the plant, as we did, does not adequately water the roots. We’ll get into the topic of drip irrigation in detail later this year. 5. It ain’t easy picking the world’s largest watermelon. See for your...

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Saturday Linkages: Holiday Edition

...ors Superbugs, Consumer Reports Finds http://huff.to/JKYa1W Why LA’s local water strategy is like ‘Superman 3’ http://www.scpr.org/news/2013/12/13/40922/with-water-from-the-delta-uncertain-la-looks-to-ex/ … Bike helmets and safety: a case study in difficult epidemiology – Boing Boing http://boingboing.net/2013/12/15/bike-helmets-and-safety-a-cas.html … Avoid Antibacterial Soaps, Say Consumer Advocates http://on.natgeo.com/18Pptyh Arizona Food and...

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