I am on the furthest eastward point of St. John US VI in a beautiful rented villa open to the sea and air on all sides. The only discordant part of the gorgeous setting and decor are the fake indoor plants that seem to be de rigueur in vacation homes. The silliest is the fake banana tree…
Sliced tomatoes, purple shiso, purple basil, sliced burgundy pole beans, and chives from my urban farm just outside the kitchen door One of my favorite cookbooks is Edward de Pomiane’s cookbook ,”Cooking in 10 Minutes”[ first published in 1948] I love it, not so much for the recipes, but for the theory that a delicious meal…
If only I had a last name that sounded fabulous spelled backwards. Arnold Issacs had such luck. In 1954 he was commissioned to create 10 dresses for a General Motors magazine ad. He charged $1,000 per dress, a vast sum in the fifties, and insisted that his name be emboldened in each ad. As the…
Last cold and rainy Summer was not the best time to move from edible gardening to wearable gardening but by September last , the cotton did bloom. It didn’t have time enough time to set cotton though. This year in early April I sowed Nankeen, Erlene’s Green,and Red Foliated cotton seeds on my window sill. Being a particularly…
In the third quarter of July, I noticed a little empty space in the garden leading to the house. It was a stubborn piece of earth. In that spot, I had tried several times to germinate watermelon seeds and seeds from particularly delicious melons I had just consumed. Nothing grew. That tempting piece of earth did not seem…
I planted several varieties of beets in my garden including, “Golden, Early Wonder, Flat of Egypt and Chioggio.” They range from the lovely pale anemic beet, “Albino”, to the “Bull’s Blood” beet that bleeds a healthy iron red from the moment I cut the stems in the garden. Thinly sliced “Bull’s Blood” beet in my garden The first preparation I tried,…