Last summer, my guy and I were traveling the Pacific Northwest for a week. We spent a couple of days photographing a lovely wedding on Lake Washington, during what could have possibly been the best weather Seattle had all season. Sunshine! Clear skies! Hot, hot, 90°F days!
But as we’d been hoping to escape our own heatwave back home, we couldn’t wait to cross the border into our northerly neighbor for a respite from the rising mercury.
Before we moved into our present home, we lived in a 2,000-square-foot loft in an urban neighborhood. Our kitchen took up over 200 square feet of that open space with cupboards and cabinets galore, and an island counter that was so massive, friends joked about having go-go dancers groovin’ on it while we hosted dinner parties.
Now that we’re living in the coastal ‘burbs in a more traditional house, our kitchen has been downsized to less than half that space. They just didn’t need all that storage back in 1929 when our bungalow was built.
As such, we had to get creative when we moved in — along with all our stuff. A lot of stuff. I’m an unapologetic gadget geek, and I have tools for every task at hand, whether it’s a julienne peeler or an ice cream maker.
Thanks to my husband’s mad Tetris skills, we were able to stack and store all our things quite efficiently, but the one thing we did have to part with was our spinning spice rack. That tower of spices required at least a square foot of shelving, and we just didn’t have any coveted counter space for it, nor did we have any available drawers to stash our spices.
It got me to thinking… What if we could store our spices vertically?
Sometimes, you just don’t have time to wait around for your pickles to pickle before you can eat them. For those times, there’s quick pickles. Well, quick enough, anyway…
These are my favorite quick pickles to make — deliciously tangy in just a few hours and scrumptiously served with the barbecue platter of your choice. I especially like them with Korean short ribs, where the sweet ‘n spiciness pairs well with a red pepper marinade. They also make a good, crunchy side snack for friends who don’t like kimchi.
You can start them in the afternoon while you prep the rest of your dinner, and by evening they’ll be ready right before the ribs (or the Asian flank steak, or even the Argentinian milanesa) come out.
If you asked most people what color egg yolks are, they would likely answer yellow. Yolks have always been associated with the color yellow, which is unfortunate because backyard chicken keepers know better. Backyard chicken keepers know that yolks can and should be a bright, bold orange, and those bright, bold orange yolks are a sign of a happy, healthy hen.
Last year, I compared my pasture-foraging, insect-pecking, soil-scratching, whole grain-feeding chickens’ yolks to the yolks of both their “free-ranging” and factory-farmed counterparts. The results were clearly visible: Yolks from my homegrown eggs were not only darker, but also fuller and thicker. Even the eggshells were denser and harder to crack.
But what’s the big deal about orange yolks?
Apricity. Such a beautiful word, the way it rolls off the tongue, and yet your spell-checker will tell you it doesn’t exist… at least, not anymore.
Stemming from the Latin word apricus, meaning “exposed to the sun,” apricity describes that exhilarative energy we all experience on a clear, crisp day: the warmth of the sun in winter.
Back in October, I added a new tray to my Worm Factory 360 to keep all those ravenous red wigglers well fed. And then… I kinda forgot about them for a while. Blame the wedding… which I use as an excuse for every end-of-year procrastination, including my Christmas gifting, my garden digging, my oil changing, even my tax preparing. And, uh… those are still not done.
But I digress. I finally got around to harvesting my worm compost, and luckily, my hub has been feeding our Wormville every week from the compost pail on our counter. (If you don’t own a pail like this
Though I added my second tray in October, my first tray has been steaming and stewing since last August… six busy months of being broken down by thousands of worms working their way through my garbage. All those onion skins, banana peels, and cantaloupe rinds have magically been transformed into rich, black castings.
If there was any fruit that identified most with Southern California, that icon of buttery goodness would be the avocado.
The Hass avocado, once an obscure cultivar, now accounts for 80 percent of the world’s avocado crop and 90 percent of California’s avocado crop, where San Diego leads the way with the highest number of orchards.
Its namesake, Rudolph Hass, was a US Postal Service carrier and a hobby horticulturist living in La Habra Heights, California. In 1926, Hass purchased seeds from a fellow avocado enthusiast and planted them in his fledgling avocado grove.
The subspecies of the seeds was never known, but many believe they came from a Guatemalan hybrid that had already been cross-pollinated by the time Hass bought them.
Only one seedling survived out of those seeds, and after many failed attempts to graft the seedling with branches from Fuerte avocado trees (the industry standard at the time), Hass decided to leave his little tree be… after being convinced not to cut it down in favor of his more reliable cultivars.
When the tree began bearing odd, bumpy fruit, Hass and his family sold what they couldn’t eat to co-workers at the post office and to the Model Grocery Store in Pasadena. The superior flavor and high demand firmly put the Hass avocado in its place as a luxury fruit, selling for $1 each (equivalent to today’s adjusted cost of $15… can you imagine paying over $30 for a bowl of guacamole these days??).
Hass patented his tree in 1935 (the first U.S. patent ever granted for a tree) and contracted with a local grower, Harold Brokaw, to produce grafted seedlings from the cuttings of this tree. The Hass avocado grew quicker, yielded more, lasted longer, and tasted better than the Fuerte avocado, eventually becoming the Big Kahuna in the commercial avocado market by the 1970s.
From that single mama tree that Rudolph Hass started from seed, comes every single Hass avocado tree that exists in the world today. Just imagine the first cuttings that Brokaw took, spawning generations of cuttings over the course of 80 years, all propagated from that one tree. How trippy is that?
The mama tree lived on in suburbia after Hass’ death in 1952 and was cared for by Brokaw’s nephew until its own demise in 2002. The tree struggled with root fungus for more than a decade and was eventually cut down. Two plaques commemorate the spot where it grew near a private residence at 426 West Road in La Habra Heights (should you find yourself in the neighborhood and want to wow yourself with a piece of agricultural history).
If you live in California and have an avocado tree in your yard, chances are it’s a Hass. And chances are, it’s just dripping with fruit right about now, and you’re wondering when they’ll start to soften.
Don’t make my mistake the first year I moved into my house, and just wait… and wait… and wait… until my avocados started dropping to the ground one by one, over-mature. And definitely don’t pick them before their prime, else you’ll just cut into a piece of rubber that even tastes like rubber (yes, I’ve tried).
So how can you tell when an avocado is ripe on the tree? The short answer is, you can’t.
I know, not very helpful. But wait!
