“Thanks to a stray email we can now confirm that Dow Constantine, King County Executive, has a penis and that Constantine used his penis to have sex with a lady. Constantine was widely believed to have a penis and to have used his penis to have sex with ladies as Constantine lives with a lady with whom he was widely believed to be having sex using his penis. However the stray email that confirmed the existence of Constantine’s penis was not written by the woman with whom Constantine lives and was widely believed to be having sex. So we can now report that King County Executive Dow Constantine, age 50, has had sex with at least two ladies in the roughly thirty-five years that he has been capable of achieving and maintaining erections to the point of ejaculation. Here’s what we don’t know: We don’t know what sort of agreement Constantine has with the lady with whom he lives. Do they have an open relationship? Are they monogamish? Does Constantine having sex with other ladies violate the terms of his agreement with the lady with whom he lives? We don’t know. Does the lady with whom Constantine lives have sex with other county executives? We don’t know. Two other things we do know: We know that there were no financial or political shenanigans. So there’s no official misconduct to report. And Constantine isn’t a Republican—that is, Constantine isn’t a member of political party that seeks to regulate the private sexual conduct of other Americans, builds campaigns around the theme of “family values,” and attacks opponents for their perceived sexual and moral failings. So there’s no hypocrisy to report either. Summing up: area man had sex with a lady and another lady might be mad at him. Or she might not. We don’t know.”

(Source: slog.thestranger.com)

Clint and I have gotten together with our good friends Cesar Torres and Matt Saba several times now for a bi-annual tamale-making, cocktail-drinking, movie-watching party. After a few times now, we have begun to really refine our recipes and techniques, but something we have continued to struggle with has been the perfect tamale masa texture. We have used various recipes ranging from the hipster foodie stuff you find on Chowhound to books from world renown Mexican cooking experts like Diana Kennedy. The tamales are always delicious, but all four of us continued to agree that we had yet to find the magic bullet recipe for masa that allows for the right balance of flavor, fattiness, fluffiness, and cooking time.

The last time the four of us got together was in December while Matt was home visiting from his year in Berlin, but I have decided to venture out on my own a couple times since then to see if I could perfect the masa ratios before the next time we’re all together again. We had watched a YouTube video by a Mexican grandma who said the secret was to add baking powder to help with the fluff. In addition to that, I had read online (corroborated with Cesar’s family elders) that whipping the lard before adding other ingredients is key. It finally hit me: you make masa like cookies. First whip the fat, then slowly incorporate the solids. 

Anyway, long story short, I think I perfected the tamale masa ratios. I’ve been hanging onto the knowledge in my brain for a couple weeks now and I fear I’m going to lose it soon, so I felt like I should document it. And why not document it here?

This is basically my/our own recipe at this point, though the base recipe is from Diana Kennedy’s Oaxacan bean tamales. 

-1 pound corn masa (from a bag)
-4 ounces of pork lard*
-roughly 4 to 4.5 teaspoons of kosher salt (or  ~3 teaspoons table salt)
-1 teaspoon baking powder
-chicken broth

Begin by making sure the lard is at least room temperature, if not a bit warmer. Use an electric mixer and whip the lard to the point where it’s beginning to form peaks; you want a lot of air in there. In a separate bowl, mix the corn masa, baking powder, and salt. After those are combined, add them slowly to the whipped lard and fold together until just combined. Use the chicken broth to add moisture as needed—I think I used somewhere between 1/2 and one cup last time I made tamales, but your needs will vary. The end texture of the masa mix should be similar to cookie dough but perhaps a bit stiffer. You don’t want it to be wetter than cookie dough though—if it is, add some more masa to stiffen it up a bit.

Soak your corn husks in warm water (or toss them in the steamer for a few minutes), then begin spreading the masa mixture in the husks. I’m not here to tell you what you should stuff your tamales with (there are plenty of options!), but I used some leftover spicy lamb and chorizo chili recently as a tamale stuffing and it came out really, really well. Other ones we have tried include pulled pork shoulder (braised in a green tomatillo sauce/liquid) and black refried beans with cheese. 

Once you’re done folding and loading up your steamer, steam the tamales on medium heat for about an hour. I have learned that, contrary to our original impression, tamales are not supposed to have to steam for 4+ hours—if they aren’t done in an hour, you have messed up the ratio of ingredients in your masa. So, steam for an hour and take one out to test the texture. The masa mixture should have firmed up to become a fluffy, delicious casing for your stuffing. If it’s still too wet, let it continue to steam for another 15 minutes and try another test. 

That’s it! If you have extra tips, let me know, but I think I’ve finally nailed this one.

* If you absolutely must substitute other fats for lard because you want to be a better vegetarian or even vegan, use butter or Crisco. (Butter for a form of animal fat that wasn’t obtained via slaughter, or Crisco for a fully vegan vegetable fat.) I can’t vow for the taste balance if you do either of these things, but those are the two fat alternatives. Do NOT use an oil that is liquid at room temperature like olive oil or canola oil. You need a fat that will act as a soft solid at room temperature if you want the ratios and texture to come out right.

On this day, January 31, 2012, I made a chunky tomato basil soup (base recipe; I made some tweaks) with heirloom tomatoes from our 2011 garden that we froze for exactly this occasion. The soup also contains chicken/duck stock that Clint and I made from scratch, dried cayenne pepper flakes from our 2010 garden, and fresh basil & thyme from our 2011-2012 indoor winter garden. 

With it, we are making grilled cheese sandwiches using bread that I made this morning. (Sadly the cheese did not come from milk originating from a cow living on my back porch.) 

If this is what obnoxious food hipsterdom tastes like, then I embrace it fully.

(In other news, I tried the Kumato tomato. It was OK. Only subtly different than a typical grocery store winter tomato—we did several blind taste tests. Definitely sweeter to the tastebuds, but not significantly more flavorful overall. Would still buy them over “normal” grocery store tomatoes if I had to choose, but only in the winter when I can’t grow my own.)

As some of you know, I do all my grocery shopping via Peapod, a “grocery store” that functions entirely on deliveries. Instead of building stores that consumers have to go to, with appropriate climate and decor and aisles for food, Peapod just maintains giant warehouses of food and employs packers to put together users’ online orders for delivery the next day. I love everything about Peapod, but this post isn’t about Peapod. That’s just the lead-in to what I’m really here to talk about.

So, I was shopping on Peapod’s website today, since Thursday is the day when all the sales turn over for the next week and I love sales. I noticed that they added a new item called the Kumato® tomato. I was immediately drawn to it, because I am (now) a tomato enthusiast who is disgusted by mealy, tasteless grocery store tomatoes that I have recently learned are not only disgusting and tasteless, but also farmed in Florida under abusive conditions—and sometimes actual slavery. But the Kumato® tomato—at least those that are available to us here in the United States—was grown in greenhouses in Canada and developed in Belgium. The description that you can find online basically claims it’s a tomato that “ripens from the inside out,” is sweeter than your typical grocery store tomato, but maintains its firmness and ship-ability so that it can still be sold in a standard grocery store.

I was intrigued, but probably not for the reasons you think (unless you know me well, in which case, it’s definitely for the reasons you think). As someone who grows many varieties of open pollinated, heirloom tomatoes every summer and has spent way too much time researching tomato biology over the last three years, I am no certified expert on tomatoes, but I am certainly well educated (if I must say so myself). I take the snobbish—if not completely valid—stance that grocery store tomatoes can never measure up in flavor to a home-grown or farmer’s market heirloom tomato, not just because of the way they are grown, but also because of the varieties offered. Grocery store tomatoes are typically the most tasteless varieties (because those are the ones that will grow under the most duress, which is how they grow them in Florida for the commercial tomato industry), but they are also picked green and then gassed in a warehouse in order to become red. Basically, when you’re buying a grocery store tomato, you’re buying the most shitty tomato variety they could find that is not even actually ripe. And you probably contributed to modern-day slavery too by buying it, but that’s another post entirely.

So, this is why I was interested in the Kumato®—because heirloom tomato growers (whether they are home gardeners or farmer’s market sellers) can’t grow in the winter, so what are you supposed to do if you want a tomato in the winter for some tacos or to make an Italian red sauce? At this point, I’m pretty much willing to consider anything I can find that tastes better than the crap the grocery stores normally offer you and doesn’t contribute to Floridian slavery, so the Kumato® had some new and intriguing things to offer. Oh, and it’s also a black variety, which is nearly unheard of in the mass market.

When you read the Kumato®’s Wikipedia page, there are several interesting claims:

Unlike other tomato varieties, seeds cannot be purchased by the general public. Syngenta[5] has stated that they will never make Kumato seeds available to the general public as the Kumato tomato is grown under a concept known as a club variety, whereby Syngenta sells seeds only to licensed growers that go through a rigorous selection process, and participation is by invitation only. Syngenta maintains ownership of the variety throughout the entire value chain from breeding to marketing, whereby selected growers must agree to follow specified cultivation protocols, and in addition pay a flat license fee per acre of greenhouse, the cost of the seed, in addition to royalties based on the volume of tomatoes produced. Typically Syngenta licenses only one large vertically integrated greenhouse producer per country that has well established relationships with grocery chains.

[…]

That said, anyone can retrieve seeds from a Kumato and grow plants for private use.

I’ve done some research into the Kumato® since I learned about it earlier today, and this is what I’ve learned.

First of all, the Kumato® that is marketed as a commercial variety is not the same as a similar variety, also referred to as the Kumato, that is available as an heirloom variety to home growers. As I suspected, the Kumato® is a patented, hybrid variety, which itself means several things. Being patented means that the company that developed it can indeed retain all the rights to its growth, and it means the last line in the Wikipedia page is factually incorrect. (I know: a Wikipedia page is factually incorrect? Stop the presses!) Not all hybrid tomato varieties are patented, and not all hybrid varieties are created by evil GMO corporations, so don’t go thinking that the hyrbid-ness makes the Kumato® evil. The reason it makes sense that it’s a hybrid is because hybrid varieties are usually genetically stronger, but generally unstable, than their open pollinated heirloom brethren. You need some of that gene strength when you’re going to grow and store tomatoes for commercial distribution, and every tomato you buy in a grocery store is a hybrid for this reason.

However, a hybrid means that the seeds are not viable. Typically if you try to save the seeds from a hybrid tomato and then plant them, the fruits that come out of your resulting plant won’t be similar to the fruit they came from at all, and may not even represent either parent of that tomato. Basically, if you manage to produce fruits at all from the seed of a hybrid tomato, they are freakish, unpredictable fruits—and it’s possible they may not even be edible, depending on what’s going on with the tomato’s genetics. So, because the Kumato® is a patented, hybrid variety of tomato, there is virtually no way that a home gardener would be able to save seed and grow their own patented Kumato® plants for private use. It’s simply not possible biologically.

There are other annoying things about how the Kumato® is marketed, and how it’s parroted among foodie blogs. (Don’t get me wrong; I don’t think the average person knows that much about tomatoes and so I don’t blame them for parroting company information. I just think it’s annoying to read the same misinformation over and over again.) For example, there is the claim that they “ripen inside out,” which is the company’s own explanation for why the skin is a dark brownish, sort-of-green, sort-of-reddish color. That is just plain craziness—there are many “black” varieties of tomatoes that have the same coloring (one of my favorites being the Black Krim, which you may remember that I have grown for several seasons now). The tomatoes don’t “ripen from the inside out” and other tomatoes don’t ripen from the outside in—that’s just the color they are, and that’s what they look like when ripe.

There’s also the claim that they are sweeter than “normal tomatoes” because of a higher fructose content, leading the reader to believe that this is some kind of super-tomato. Again, most tomatoes actually have higher fructose content than your average grocery store tomato—almost anyone with any familiarity with tomatoes would argue that grocery store tomatoes have a significantly lower than average fructose content, so it’s probable that the Kumato® has an average fructose content for a black-variety tomato hybrid. This doesn’t make them weird or even unique; it just makes them fairly normal while your average pinkish-reddish grocery store tomato is the one that is the freak.

Finally, there is the claim that the Kumato® is a “gourmet variety.” This is slightly more nuanced for me; I don’t really think it’s “gourmet” in the sense that it’s better than all tomatoes you can find, but it’s certainly better than what you can buy from a store in the dead of winter in North America. So, on one hand, it’s not better than what you could grow at home (especially since you can save seed from what you grow at home; think of those as “open source” tomatoes), but it’s probably significantly better than what you would normally get from a grocery store in terms of flavor.

So, what do I actually think of the Kumato®? I haven’t tasted them yet, but I added them to my list on Peapod for delivery this weekend. I have high hopes for a better-tasting tomato that I can have delivered in the middle of winter from a traditional grocery store that actually tastes like something and wasn’t grown and picked with shady slave labor. If it tastes even half as good as one of my summer heirlooms, I’ll consider it a win. I also plan to save seed and grow at least one this summer to see how the freaky hybrid children turn out, though I’m not counting on any real Kumato®s coming out of it.

So that’s your tomato rant for today, Thursday, January 19, 2012. This post has not been copy edited in any way whatsoever. 

My friend and colleague from Ars Technica, John Siracusa, gently reminded me last week that my Tumblr RSS feed had turned brown in NetNewsWire, signaling that I’ve already fallen behind on writing for my new blog and it was about to join dinosaur bones and MySpace as irrelevant to the kids these days. So here I am, living up to my promise to him that I would write something.

I can’t remember when I last talked about the books I had finished reading with mini book reviews attached, but I know it was too long ago. So, here I will give you one (or three) line thoughts on the books I completed recently-ish:

The 19th Wife: A random recommendation from my Grandma Rose on my mom’s side, I found this book to be completely enthralling. A semi-fictional story, semi-historical account of the origins of Mormonism, the book hops back and forth between discussion of actual historical documents and life of Ann Eliza Young (19th wife of Brigham Young) and a fictional “murder mystery” type story about a modern 19th wife. The fictional part of the book was okay; I could have done without it, but it wasn’t bad. The rest of the book was fascinating and I could not put it down. I learned more about the origins of Mormonism than I had learned in the previous 30 years of my life.

The Pot Book: This book is basically a collection of essays and interviews on the subject of cannabis (marijuana), its health effects, research on its medical benefits, US (and worldwide) legislation, social issues, and more. It’s not a continuous narrative on the topic, which can be somewhat jarring when jumping from chapter to chapter, but it’s still a highly recommended read from me. I would almost be highly skeptical of anyone who has a strong opinion on the matter (in either direction) if they had not first perused most of the studies and topics discussed in this book first.

Steve Jobs: Walter Isaacson’s biography of Apple CEO Steve Jobs. I already wrote my review of this book at Ars Technica, but let’s just say I felt it was long, dragged out, and a little disappointing when it came to the writing/editing. That’s the bad. The good is that it contains all sorts of new information from Jobs’ point of view that we would have never otherwise gotten if Jobs hadn’t hand-picked someone (in this case, Isaacson) to do this book. If you’re a collector of Apple memorabilia or history books, you’ll obviously want to add this to your collection regardless of whether it’s a great book or not.

The Art of Happiness: I bought this on a whim because I like the Dalai Lama, so why not? As it turns out, this was “co-authored” by both the Dalai Lama and a psychotherapist, Dr. Howard Cutler. And by “co-authored,” I mean it was written entirely by Cutler with sparse quotes and interviews from the Dalai Lama. I have nothing personal against Cutler, but I hate the tone of this book—to me, it makes too-obvious observations from an overly naive point of view, and the overall writing really grates on me. People seem to like this book, so I guess I’m an outlier on this one, but I really can’t recommend it.

Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education: This is one of Michael Pollan’s first books, published in 2003, which largely discusses his personal relationship with gardening and the earth and how it shaped his view of our society in that context. It’s not a particularly heavy or technical read—it’s not really “a gardener’s education” so much as it is a sort of philosophical view of what “gardening” means in our modern world—but I liked it.

Bossypants: Tina Fey’s “biography,” though it’s not so much a biography as it is a series of short stories about Tina Fey’s life (somewhat a la David Sedaris). I loved this book. That’s all there really is to say about it. The humor is dry and hilarious while the writing is also open and candid. I want everyone to read this book.

Foie Gras Wars: I actually can’t remember when I finished reading this book, but it was a while ago. I don’t care though, because I never wrote about it. Anyway, I have a tendency to be into single-subject sociological nonfiction books about food*, so it’s no surprise I was into this book. Basically, it discusses the foie gras industry, what happened in Chicago that led to its ban (and subsequent unban), what foie gras means culturally, and so on. This was one of the most fascinating food-related books I have read, in fact, and I have read good number of them. If you’re at all even marginally interested in foie gras, animal rights, or even Chicago politics, you should read this.

* Foie Gras Wars joins other books like Salt, Four Fish, Tomatoland (which I am currently reading), Banana: the fate of the fruit that changed the world, and probably a couple others that focus entirely on a single food category or item. I have another book about the “scandalous world of olive oil” on my Kindle sample list as I write this, so, you can see I have a problem here. Really, I just love food.

** Cutting out the intro to this post and the footnotes, it totaled 699 words. So, close enough.

Many of you who know me or follow my posts on Twitter are aware that I have recently (in the last ~3 years) gotten into gardening in a big way. I think gardening and horticulture are my new favorite hobbies and I study them obsessively in my available time, while basically performing plant-based science experiments (in the form of “growing stuff in different ways”) constantly.

Anyway, I’ve wanted to write down my observations about my gardening efforts from 2011, partly because I want to know whether others have thoughts to add and partly because I’m making notes for myself for next year. Hopefully someone out there will find this useful. 

For those wondering about my setup, I grow almost exclusively in self-watering containers (EarthBoxes) on a south-facing deck in urban Chicago. The deck gets light for almost every hour the sun is up on any given day. When things aren’t planted in EarthBoxes, they’re planted in random other (non-self-watering) containers that I’ve acquired over the years. 

This year, I grew mostly heirlooms. They were:

• Black krim tomatoes—I grew these in 2010 for the first time, so this was my second year on these
• Pineapple tomatoes—first time
• Limmony tomatoes—first time
• Chocolate cherry tomatoes—first time for this cultivar; I was turned onto growing cherry tomatoes last year after I took a commercial start from my parents, but wanted to try with an heirloom variety
• Ichiban eggplant—first time
• Little Tyke cucumbers—a hybrid (non-heirloom) that I chose randomly for its size, first time
• Rainbow bell peppers—first time
• Lavender bell peppers—first time
• Serrano peppers—first time
• Basil of several varieties—old timer at this by now
• Thyme—second year on this
• Rosemary—first time
• Chives—second year

Lessons learned

These thoughts aren’t very organized; I apologize in advance.

Chives can survive very abusive conditions: This was my second year growing chives and I have learned that they can take an awful lot of abuse. My current set of chives has been growing in a terrible pot without a drainage hole and not enough soil. They’ve been drowned so many times by torrential rains and spent so many weeks living in a swamp due to my own laziness, yet they continue to grow. In fact, they even survived over winter from last year—they obviously didn’t grow when it was -20F outside, but when spring rolled around, they proved themselves very hardy and I didn’t have to re-plant. Right now I have them inside because I want to continue growing them over the winter—they don’t even get any kind of direct sunlight, and they still continue to grow. Very cool.

Tomato plants go dormant when temps are over 90F: Experienced growers already know this, but this was the first year when I observed it first and then went to the Internet to verify. Those fuckers just shut down completely if there are 3+ days of temperatures over 90, but the upside is that as long as you keep them alive by watering them, they’ll pick up production again once the temperatures cool down. I think a lot of people tend to get frustrated and let the plants die when it stays hot for a week or two, but if you’re patient and help them live through it, they’ll produce when the worst is over. Definitely observed this firsthand this year when my tomatoes went dormant for almost an entire month in July. 

Not a super huge fan of the chocolate cherry tomato: Nothing against these guys, but the plant wasn’t a heavy producer at all and the fruits were just average for me. If they were mindblowing, then we would be having a different conversation. I’d guess that we got one cumulative pint, total, of cherry tomatoes over the entirety of the growing season, and they only ripened in groups of twos or threes over a period of five months. I’m ditching this cultivar and plan to try a different cherry tomato variety next year. 

Pineapple tomatoes: the slow but steady champion: Early in the growing season, I had pretty low hopes for my pineapple tomato plants. Out of the two I was growing, one still had zero flowers while everything else was flowering, so I cut it down to save resources. The other was very, very slow to set fruit—slower than my five other tomato plants at the time—and I swore sometime in mid-July or even possibly August that I’d never plant this variety again. But then a magical thing happened when my lone remaining plant set fruit: they were glorious. The variety is known for being huge and colorful and maybe sweet, though not many people seem to comment on its sweetness. Mine, however, were moderately large (not the giant 2-pound fruits people talk about online, but more like normal beefsteak size) and incredibly sweet and delicious. Ultimately, this ended up becoming my favorite variety despite my heavy bias towards black krims. I can’t not plant this one next year. 

Limmony tomatoes are reliable, heavy producers: The sub-head pretty much says it all. I liked my two limmony plants because they put up with a lot of shit and did not GAF. They were my tallest plants and my heaviest producers. They also were the earliest to produce and the latest to produce. Basically these things produced all season like gangbusters. The fruit was medium-sized, bright yellow, and sweet. Will plant at least one of these again next year.

Rainbow and lavender peppers really are the exact same, but with different colors: Also, strangely, all of my rainbow peppers ended up being dark purple (lavender peppers were light purple). I have no idea why this happened—they are, as per their name, supposed to be a rainbow of colors and eventually end up as red (the color they change to when they are very ripe), but that basically never happened for me. 100% dark purple bell peppers came from my rainbow pepper plants. Maybe this is a result of cross-pollination between the rainbow bell peppers and lavender bell peppers? I think they can do that since their cultivars aren’t so different that they can’t cross.

Serrano peppers: Easy, survived a lot of shit, but not as heavy producers as cayenne peppers (which we grew last year). 

Ichiban eggplant: Early and long producer, produced all season (even while it was intolerably hot, unlike the tomatoes). They were my first of all the plants to set fruit and they were among the last that I ended up harvesting from. We only had two plants going, but they produced enough eggplants for Clint and I to begin getting sick of eating eggplant all spring, summer and fall, plus we gave away a good amount to friends as well. I love eggplant so I’m growing this again next year, but I’m still undecided as to whether I want to plant one or two. It was kind of a lot of eggplant. 

Thyme survives outside over winter in Chicago: That’s pretty much it. It does. Crazy huh?

Little Tyke cucumbers: This is the first time I’ve tried to grow cucumbers so I don’t have any past experiences or varieties to compare against. I would say that these were very vigorous vines and heavy producers (we had three plants), but note to self for 2012: you need a taller trellis! These, planted in the same EarthBox with the eggplants, were huge water sucks (both types of plants need a lot of water); sometimes they took twice as much water as the other EarthBoxes on a given day. Also, the cucumbers were the first plants on the deck to peter out at the end of the season. They depleted the soil of all nutrients (as evidenced by their sad-looking yellow leaves) and I cut them down in early October. Not sure yet as to whether I want to plant this exact variety next year or whether I want to try another kind of cucumber. I liked their small size for pickling and salads.

Blasphemy! Let one basil go to flower: I’ve grown basil for several years now but I keep changing their conditions to see what works and doesn’t work. Basil doesn’t need much horizontal space, but a nice, deep container seems to work great. Also, if you want bees and other pollinators to come around your garden to pollinate flowers for your other veggies, I highly recommend letting at least one sacrificial basil plant go to flower as soon as you can get it there. (If you’ve never grown basil before, you may not know that you are supposed to snip all flower buds you see for as long as you can, as flowers can change the flavor of the leaves and make them tougher.) The basil flowers are incredibly fragrant and bees effing love that shit. They’ll stop by for the basil and leave after having touched on every other flower in your garden, pollinating everything. 

As a side note, never be afraid to aggressively prune and cut your basil plants. I joked several times this summer that I couldn’t figure out whether I was trying to kill my basil or it was trying to kill me. Basil is a plant that reacts well to “topping” (snipping off the entire head of a branch so as to spur the creation of two more branches in a Y shape) and the more you do it, the more aggressively it grows, bushier than ever. And as a bonus, when you do this, you keep the flowers at bay.

Transplanting and fertilizers: If you’re not watering with a fertilizer solution on the day you transplant into the ground or a bigger container, you’re losing out on a big growth opportunity. Almost all plants go through a transplant shock when they’re put into new soil with an undoubtedly different pH level and nutrient mixture, and watering with fertilizer helps to put the roots into temporary overdrive so they grow into the new soil faster and easier. I use a fish emulsion fertilizer at something like a 5-1-1 NPK ratio. Nice and gentle, but effective. 

(I’m phobic of chemical-based fertilizers like Miracle Grow because 1) they can and do give chemical burn to your plants and can potentially kill them if you’re not careful, and 2) why bother when you could use something that can’t burn your plants, is near impossible to mess up, doesn’t use chemicals at all outside of what’s naturally occurring in nature, and equally as good?)

Lessons already learned for my fall/winter garden this year: I only just got my fall/winter garden started, but I’m planing to grow two catskill brussels sprout plants, two kales, and a spinach.  I chose these because they are seasonal; they’re plants that can survive some frost (and actually benefit from it) and less light during the day. The first thing I learned: spinach seeds do NOT like to germinate in warm temperatures and I am having really bad luck at this.

Also, kale and brussels sprouts attract green cabbage worms, which will pretty much eat your plants to death if you don’t stop them. I don’t actually have a lot of experience having to fight pests up to this point—the outdoor ecology where I live is pretty well balanced in the summer, so I never have to take any serious pest-fighting measures—but this fall stuff is a whole different story. I joked recently that after the apocalypse, when I’m growing food for everyone, we can make stir fry out of cabbage worms for as many as I pick off my plants every day. I’ve begun to fight them by lightly spraying with neem oil (a natural oil derived from a pine-type tree; bugs don’t like it), but I have found that I still have to pick off a cabbage worm or two every week. Hey, at least it’s not 10 every day anymore.

I’m tired of writing and I know I’ll never publish this post if I try to save it as draft for later, so here goes! Any advice, comments, or questions? (I realize there are no comments here, but tweet at me or whatever.)

You’re undoubtedly reading this because you’ve somehow ended up at my new blog, wherever it may be. (As of this moment, I am writing on a plane between San Francisco and Chicago and I haven’t quite decided yet what will happen to this post. It’ll be a surprise for both of us.) If you’re a follower of my old blog—through numerous domains and identity changes since the old college years—you’re probably chuckling at this new shindig. Aren’t I the same person who essentially abandoned my entire online presence aside from Twitter and Ars Technica?

Indeed, there are may reasons why I decided to stop writing in my personal time, not the least of which being that my personal time has suddenly become more valuable than gold—or perhaps saffron, which we all know costs nine baby sacrifices per ounce—and I cherish it as such. Writing in my free time can be a loathsome task when I spend so much of my time writing already. But I have also come to realize that I miss writing about my life, observations, and experiences at a venue that isn’t Ars Technica. There’s nothing wrong with Ars, but that’s not the place for me to be my true self in writing.

I’ve also thought about why I want to write again. Although I ditched my last blog earlier this year, I stopped truly writing years beforehand. Trolls and horrible excuses for humanity infiltrated my life in the years I started writing for Ars in 2005 and I decided—consciously or unconsciously, I’m not sure—that I didn’t want to give anyone fodder to smear me anymore. But that was only part of the story; as some of you remember, I also felt incredible pressure from my family to stop being so frank about my past, who I am, and what I think. My family has played a huge part in my life and has molded who I am, for better and for worse, yet they “asked” me never to acknowledge or write about them again. And I haven’t.

But there are things I want to write.

Truth be told, I used to be a pretty annoying person. Caustic, even. I can’t even look back and read through most of my old blog entries for embarrassment of my younger and more ignorant—yet braver and more brazen—self. There are so many things I have done and so many things that have happened to me even just in the last few years, the years that my blog never documented to any degree, that have changed me as a person. I may still share some of the characteristics of myself from years ago, but I feel completely different now.

I’m giving it another shot. Not so much the blogging, but the Being Real™. But this time, I hope that my writing will reflect a more measured and mature person who, at the age of 30, is finally beginning to see and experience the world through fresh eyes. Eyes that have had time to meditate on a lifetime of complicated and heartbreaking family drama (maybe I’ll save my new descriptions of those parts of my life for my first memoir, a thing that my Purdue friend Josette Torres has dutifully harassed me to pen for years now. I can’t thank her enough for the career support she has given me in recent years despite the fact that I have yet to do anything she has told me to do); years of dealing with sexist, racist, homophobic, abusive, and vitriolic human beings who manage to trickle their way into every aspect of my life; and so on. I still experience some of the frustration, sadness, and—let’s be honest—rage that I once did about many things, but unlike before, I like to believe that I have actually begun down the path of true peace, self-acceptance, and freedom. I’ve already waited for so long to be sure that this is where I am, and I think it’s the real thing. 

Not everything I plan to post on my new and improved blog will be serious. I don’t really have a plan for it; we’ll see how it goes. Writing on a personal blog feels very self-indulgent now in ways it didn’t feel before, but I have learned that I apparently need to self-indulge in order to self-reflect. I may be a narcissist, but if I am, I’m a narcissist who is trying to do good in the world.

If I have to deal with that, so do you. I hope you don’t mind.