christmass cake

that time they were handing out christmass cake in the hudson bay tower at yonge and bloor. turned out to be more of a christmass brownie. 

snowscape

fruit and lamp

prayer orange

the prayer orange, variation of citrus medica, in botantic latin, sarcodactylus, for the fingers the fruit separates into as they grow.

the pulp that other oranges have at heart you will not find, an orange all pith and rind, through which the citrus fragrant oils flow.

for all the difference, scratch a prayer orange and underneath you find an orange.

seedaholic--leaf celery

seedaholic, that internet site devoted to garden seeds. found it while doing an image search for celery vases. a picture of a garden with text mentioning leaf celery came up with all the images of the vases.

leaf celery being the third type of celery. the other two being the well known stem and globe ( celeriac ) celerys.

seedaholic is devoted to unusual and rare seeds, like cutting leaf celery. the online catalog lists the seeds and other gardening items they sell.

leaf celery can be used in all those recipes that the herbs parsley and cilantro have monopolized for a long time.

but the question must be does it taste as delicious as the few blanched leaves one finds at the heart of stem celery.

 

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green house nettles

nettles growing against a low west facing wall of the Allan garden greenhouse. not as one hopes a demonstration by torontos parks and recreation of the edible herbs growing in the land bay. only a few garden weeds enjoying their place in the sun.

stinging nettles are a favorite of herbalists, the fresh leaves lose their irritating effect when dry or heated thoroughly allowing them to be used as a herb tea or added to soups.

nettle plants look like mint plants. one time when we were living on the quarter-section I was telling my sister to watch out for some nettles we were walking towards, mother said "what is that mint, is that mint" I said yeah she tore a few leaves off one plant and held them to her nose, said she couldn't smell any mint so she rubbed them harder and pressed them closer to nose and them let out a yelp as the stinging took effect.

 

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roman tastes

while looking for information on the mediterranean herbal-spice silphium i found these blogs, pass the garum and rune soup. the garum is the text to an experiment in learning about classical rome through cooking and eating classical roman foods. rune soup has two posts on the disgusting food and vegetables of the ancients, the other posts are on mysterious agency. i have made fish-salsa and the stewed celery from recipes in john edwards translation of apicius de re coquinaria, they were ok.

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alister--rice--crowley

while internet-browsing images of alister crowley this photo of a plate of food came up with the other visual offerings. it led to a blog with a miscellanea of arts and culture posts. it is the method of cooking the rice that interested me. some of the authors other food posts describe her mothers cooking and reveal the truth about the chai latte. ( reposted from reginesenotebooks )

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puereh stiletto

Chinese tea paraphernalia at aliexpress for puer-eh tea drinking. a needle with a solid wood handle and a solid wood sheath to match it. made specially for prising apart the compressed loaves of fermented tea leaf before adding them to water.

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better nails

as found at the mocoloco.

''i have found again and again--without counter example--that our ability to see the field of centers in a thing, and to produce the centers which are indicated geometrically, tends to produce an object which works better. ... form follows function! but if we look at the examples i have given, it seems very unlikely that this is what took place when they were made. ... example after examples suggest emphatically that this is what came first: making the centers beautiful was the driving force. ...

'' the geometry that occurs in the 14th-century nail produces life that has both functional and ornamental qualities to an extraordinary extent. ... it also works incredibly well because of its size and the thickness of the head, it has a very long life and great strength, lasting in some cases 600 years--something that a 20th-century nail could almost never do. is it a coincidence that the 14th-century nail works so well both as an ornament, and as a functioning long lived nail? what is the connection between the ornament and function in the nail?"

christopher alexander; the nature of order, bk-i.

 

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