Liberating yourself from processed and prepackaged food often starts with the small stuff. For me, salad dressing was a game changer. Once I realized how simple it was to make, and started reading the labels on commercial brands (Canola oil as the number one ingredient? Water as number two?!), I could never go back.
In the summer, eating local is easy. Farmers’ markets abound, featuring mounds of beautiful, colorful produce. In the winter, there are potatoes, sweet potatoes, and a rotating cast of root vegetables that require a bit more work than the kiss of the grill and a splash of olive oil. Fortunately, there are a few green
A Chinatown company churns out tofu
Manufacturing is a centuries-old tradition in Philadelphia, but over the last 50 years, countless factories have left the city. In 1990, Yatsun Wen, a Chinese immigrant, started manufacturing tofu by hand in Chinatown. Now, 20 years later, his company Nature’s Soy has distribution up and down the East Coast, and
photo and recipe by erin gautsche, farmtophilly.com
This vegetarian casserole is a variation on the traditional Shepherd’s (or Cottage) Pie, created in England in the late 18th Century to feed poor working families. The top layer features the ubiquitous (and cheap!) potato; we’ve replaced the traditional filling of leftover meat with
A local architectural salvage company finds value in the discarded.
Walking into Provenance Old Soul Architectural Salvage’s Fairmount Avenue space is a bit like entering the world of a children’s book—the sort with creaky doors and hidden passages to menacing places. The best kind. There is a strange sort of magic to old things, to objects that have
A few years ago, two friends started filling up their homes with what most of us would consider trash. At the time, neither one of them even had a reason for spending most of their spare time rummaging through various job sites and dumpsters for wood, much of it
Warren Muller turns the detritus of everyday life into something illuminating.
Look closely at one of Warren Muller’s spectacular light sculptures and you might spy some familiar items: old metal lunchboxes and canteens, colored glass vases and chipped teapots, tin funnels and candy molds, shovel handles and wire baskets. In Muller’s exuberantly creative version of recycling, cast-off objects
Wild for Salmon’s Steve and Jenn KurianIn a recent blog post, the New York Times‘ Mark Bittman discussed his love of wild Pacific salmon. While extolling the virtues of this mighty fish, he touched on some very disturbing issues surrounding farm-raised Atlantic salmon. He linked to Barry Estabrook’s blog, The Politics of the Plate, who in
Grist.org has posted a slideshow of creative urban gardening solutions. It really doesn’t take very much to grow food, you just have to be inventive. Today, the temperature finally snuck above 40 degrees and the sun felt high in the sky—it’s the perfect time to begin looking ahead to spring, and seeking out some inspiration.
