Our lemon tree has had quite a few lemons hanging on it since before Christmas and they currently look like very sad decorations. It would be too easy to say make lemonade, but it’s cold outside and drizzly. and in any case the lemon tree won’t wait much longer. Time to do something about that.

I...

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An interesting post from Brent Lineberry explained why he no longer makes his own yoghurt and prompted me to examine my own practice.

I’ve made my own yoghurt since forever, when my Mom bought a strange kit that consisted of a tray cover, like the kind you see removed with a flourish in fancy restaurants, only double-walled aluminium, which covered a set of six hexagonal jars that came together with a hole in the middle for a much smaller jar. You heated the milk, let it cool, inoculated with yoghurt from the previous batch, in the smaller jar, poured it into the big jars and the small jar and put the cover on. Twelve hours later, yoghurt.

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The available figures on honey adulteration are pretty alarming: 46% of samples in the EU, 100% of honey exported from the UK, more than a quarter of Australian samples “of questionable authenticity”. However, as Matt Phillpott pointed out in a recent episode of Eat This Podcast, one of the great difficulties honey poses is that it is so variable. All of the many “natural” components of honey vary from batch to batch, hive to hive, season to season, so that while a specific “unnatural” chemical might unambiguously signal adulteration, other kinds of evidence are a lot less cut and dried.

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It’s alive! The Carnival of IndieWeb, that is, with the first monthly roundup from Sara Jakša, who started this ball rolling. I looked at them all, because that’s a key point of blog carnivals, to discover things you might not otherwise have found.

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We are looking after a friend’s place in the country and perhaps the hardest work is keeping on top of the vegetable garden. Ignore it for a day, and there are five large cucumbers, mocking you. My cucumber repertoire is somewhat limited; raita, quick pickle, sandwiches and, when I remember, Yan-Kit...

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