Medium? Large? Or Jumbo? Ever wonder how, in the pre-mega-industrial age of farming, they graded eggs? Well, the Acme Egg Grading Scale is the answer. Friends of mine have one, and, for the past three or so years, I have seriously thought about swiping it. No need. This year, for my birthday, my friend Craig sent me my very own egg grader!!! Best present ever, if you aren’t counting the vintage apple peeler that arrived in the same package. Anyway, fast forward to a hot summer weekend. Some other friends of ours were visiting us upstate. Over cocktails and dinner preparations, they decided to start grading our eggs. Here is the end result. Lovely type treatment…don’t you think? Keep in mind that just because an egg looks large, it may not rate as highly as a smaller egg of denser proportion.

Garlic scapes are crazy and curvy, not to mention tasty. If you aren’t sure what they are, let me explain: scapes are the young flower stalks that emerge on hardneck garlic in early to mid summer. They get snipped off so the plant can direct more of its energy towards the bulb still in the ground. They are a fresher, milder version of mature garlic. That nature can produce these swirly beauties is astonishing. Some VERY generous friends dropped off an enormous bag of these the other day. Before whirring them into parsley, almond, lemon pesto, they had their moment in front of the camera. Karl Blossfeldt sure had the right idea when he turned to nature for inspiration.

I always eat breakfast at home (far less out of virtue and more out of the desire to have coffee in my pyjamas), so I don’t usually skimp on buying decent fruit or healthy homemade bread. Although I recognize that this eating and spending habit is a luxury, the total still couldn’t possibly rival a daily latte at Starbucks. Well, not so fast. Last night, at our fancy local grocer, I knew something was amiss when I paid up for a basket full of food. I was embarrassed at the total, but instead of being responsible and backing out of the purchase, I did a quick tally, amortized out the excess cost over the number of items in the cart, and figured that I should definitely shop more judiciously in the future lest we go broke. I tend to look at price tags on everything (habit picked up from my father!) and find myself returning products to the shelves – although not often enough – if they are too expensive. But I didn’t see an amount on the fruit. I know from experience what the normal price range is, so I blithely added both containers to my array. The tags were scrunched up and hidden, and now I can see why. $11.99 for the strawberries and $7.99 for the blueberries. You read that correctly. The perils of eating fruits and vegetables out of season are legend, but yikes. I am ashamed for so many reasons. The strawberries are a little more than .38¢ a pop and those pretty little blueberries top out at .11¢ each. I had 6 strawberries and 26 blueberries. $5.14 worth of fruit. This doesn’t even begin to take into account the rest of my meal: the piece of toast with almond butter or my coffee with milk. So very very wrong.

Not the most exciting snack on the planet. But certainly one of the only biscuits to be developed as part of a dietary regime designed to stifle destructive carnal appetites. Invented in New Jersey, of all places, by the Presbyterian minister Sylvester Graham, the graham cracker was originally made of far sterner stuff: graham flour with little or no sweetener. The thinking being that if one is to curb sexual enthusiasm, the solution would be to eat a bland diet. Apparently, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg also subscribed to this theory. Hence the invention of corn flakes. Who knew? These days the crackers are laced with loads of sugar, cinnamon and maybe even chocolate. And even worse, they are made from white flour. The ultimate sin.

We had a boatload of tomatoes from the garden and the farmers’ market this year, so I decided to do some proper canning of sauce. Because tomatoes fall into that danger zone of medium acidic foods, unless you have a pressure canner, you need to add some lemon juice or citric acid to the sauce in order to make the whole process safe. All the recipes I looked at (I settled on the one from this wonderful book by Ashley English) recommended using bottled lemon juice, because real lemons vary in their acidity. This could be an issue: read sickness or death. Not in my nature to mess around with that! So, I moseyed on over to the local supermarket and picked up one bottle each of lemon and lime juice (I was also canning tomatillo salsa). It wasn’t until I got home and used the lemon juice that I really looked closely at the packaging. It’s a great design. And when seated next to the bottle of lime juice, they do tell a funny story. I did a little homework and found out that the bottles were designed in 1955, and have been in continuous production by the same Swiss firm, Sidag AG. Yep, almost 60 years old. World Radio Switzerland ran a series about Swiss design and highlighted the bottles as part of their excellent programming.