You’ll never see fresh-cut flowers in a nail salon,” says Justin Mitchell, who co-owns Center City’s Tierra Mia Organic Nail Spa with his fiancée Karina Restrepo. “Flowers die in just a few hours, because the fumes in the air are so bad. It sounds like a tall tale, but it’s shocking, really.”
MoreWith prices for commodities like butter, sugar and flour steadily rising, a picture-perfect castle of wedding cake can carry a steep price tag, especially when made with organic and local ingredients. If you still lust for a traditional tower, look to a local bakery with lots of experience working with organic flour and sugar, like
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They say practice makes perfect, so a quick run-through of the show before the big day is a must. Make sure everyone knows their lines and places, but don’t spend a fortune on a restaurant dinner. Instead, ask a friend with a sweet place to host your rehearsal dinner as their wedding gift, and ask
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Anna Bario and Page Neal are in the business of turning sparkly daydreams into reality, with lessened impact on people and planet. From their Bario-Neal studio/shop in Queen Village, they handcraft fine jewelry from conflict-free gems and reclaimed precious metals, both from their own designs and custom orders.
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With so much excellent grub being produced all around our city, building your wedding menu with seasonal foods has never been easier—or more delicious. Jennifer McCafferty holds sustainability as the core value of JPM Catering, based out of a Manayunk kitchen and serving the city and Main Line.
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“How can we all coexist on these very skinny streets?” asks Rina Cutler, Philadelphia’s deputy mayor for transportation and utilities. “We don’t have room to add more, so we have to make better use of the streets. For me, it’s less about biking, [and more about] creating complete streets and giving people choices.”
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Beer is often called liquid bread, a nod to both grainy origins and covert calorie content. At Betty’s Speakeasy, owner Liz Begosh and pastry chef Adriane Appleby reverse the process, transforming locally brewed liquids into covetable cakes and fudge. “We don’t like to make overly sweet sweets,” says Begosh, a former pro cyclist-turned-pastry queen. “The
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How can you get back to the land when you don’t have any land to get back to? In his new book, The City Homesteader: Self-Sufficiency on Any Square Footage, Scott Meyer shows acre-less urban- and suburbanites how to grow and preserve their own food, raise small livestock and become ever more self-sufficient—from composting to
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At the most fundamental level, food is inseparable from farmers. The richness of our seemingly boundless land beckoned settlers across the continent to build the homesteads, farms and ranches that became the cradle of the first American Dream, literally feeding the growth of a young nation. In 1935, the number of farms in America peaked
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Resembling a pot of creamy, green-flecked pebbles, the addictive herbed farmer’s cheese made by Sue Miller of Birchrun Hills Farm materializes unpredictably enough to make its every farmers market appearance memorable. Sweet, milky and deliciously versatile, farmer’s cheese is just a bottle of milk and a squeeze of lemon away when you can’t get your
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