Just because eating fresh, local food is all the rage these days doesn’t mean our desire for out-of-season produce has disappeared completely. Not surprising then, that home canning is back in style.
The New York Times says urbanites are doin’ it, while a series of home-canning work parties called Yes, We Can debuted in San Francisco. And even packaged food companies realize the chicness of homemade stuff. The strawberry jam and chutney for sale on Jamie Oliver’s website have a totally DIY vibe with handwritten labels.
So you’d best take a look at CHOW’s canning tutorial, find something to can, and get crackin’. If you don’t grow anything of your own, then you might want to follow the example of our etiquette columnist, who scored fruit by posting a request on Craigslist. Or, if you live in LA, you can check out one of Fallen Fruit’s maps, and ransack a tree near you.
Skate, a flat, sting ray–looking cartilaginous, mild-flavored fish, has recently become a menu standard—probably because it’s still relatively cheap.
Spotted at: Employees Only in NYC, served crispy with “spaetzle paprikacz”; at Zola in Washington DC, “lacquered” with sherry and served with mushrooms, sunchokes, rocket, and a grilled oyster vinaigrette; and pan-fried and served with green beans, fried capers, and a brown-butter lemon sauce at new San Francisco restaurant Midi (pictured).
These chic serving bowls by designer Jill Rosenwald from Boston really do it for me. Based on a shape created by mid-century modern designer Hans Coper, they’re low, wide, and unique enough to give as a wedding gift.
A Georgia teen made her prom dress out of soda can pop tops, and it looks awesome. An inspiring example of a teenager doing something undeniably cool in a media world full of stories about teenagers … well, mostly just sexting, at this point.
What’s inside your refrigerator says so much about you: your love of chili sauce, your secret jones for midnight ice cream, your need for acidophilus milk. Artist Mark Menjivar was so interested in this subject that he made a three-year tour of the United States to photograph refrigerator interiors. The photo series that resulted, “You Are What You Eat,” appears in GOOD Magazine, and lets the fridge contents tell the stories of a middle school science teacher, a blind person, the owner of a defunct amusement park, and others. It’s a simple idea executed beautifully.
Just as entertaining as the pictures themselves are the short captions describing the fridge owners: “Red Cross Board Member/San Antonio, TX/1-Person Household/Sleeps with a loaded .45 pistol on nightstand,” reads one; “Bar Tender/San Antonio, TX/1-Person Household/Goes to sleep at 8AM and wakes up at 4PM daily,” it says below a shot of heaped takeout containers. Oh, and hey: Is that a snake in the freezer of the Marathon, Texas short-order cook?
By now, everyone knows what happens when you mix Mentos and Diet Coke, but thanks to Wired’s June issue, we now know how to delay that reaction in order to prank unsuspecting guests. The secret? Just before the water turns to ice in your ice cube tray (good luck figuring out when that happens), plop Mentos into each cube, then allow them to freeze solid, sealing the mint inside.
Later, mix Diet Coke with rum, drop in the adulterated ice cubes (hoping no one notices the weird white hunks), wait five minutes, and, when the candy’s gum arabic meets the cola, watch your friends’ drinks fizz up and your carpet get horribly stained. I dunno, maybe you’d rather stick with fake bug ice cubes.
By the way, if you’ve been wondering what happens when Mentos and Diet Coke are combined in zero gravity, wonder no longer.
These affordable and badass all-cotton, flour-sack kitchen towels are screen-printed with a grenade motif by hand. The artist will do custom orders for sets and colors.
Eggs are nearly eclipsing bacon as the “It” ingredient of our economically troubled times. Good, filling, cheap, homey. And nowhere are they better served than on a thin-crust pizza. Typically soft-boiled, so the yolk runs over the top when you stick your fork in it, accompanied by cured meats (sausage, guanciale, pancetta) and arugula, or basil. Spotted at: Motorino, Brooklyn; Serious Pie, Seattle; Flour + Water, San Francisco; and Pizzetta 211 (pictured), San Francisco.
The Washington Post wages a bit of class warfare, documenting the slide into irrelevance and/or bankruptcy of the American country club in a manner that’s ostensibly sympathetic but ultimately snarky. The crux of the story is an anecdote about well-heeled regulars at a club finding that the reinvented, now-open-to-the-public dining room can’t even get their salad order right:
“And Mr. Cluss has always preferred a simple salad before his dinner, with olives sliced from the bar, finely shredded lettuce and no croutons. The new waitress returns with a salad loaded with croutons, and Charles frowns as Mimi picks them off his plate. ‘No croutons,’ he mutters as the waitress walks away. ‘No croutons. No croutons.’”
The story weaves some interesting insight into the battle for the soul of country clubs between the layers of snark and evocative prose, and manages to be multidimensional in its telling of the saga of Pennsylvania’s Uniontown Country Club.
