Facing a nearly empty vegetable bin, Ed Schneider improvises a meal of shrimp with ginger and mustard seed.  Read More →

By Mat Rogers The 1979 children’s book Ox-Cart Man describes a colonial family who spends all year raising a crop and an ox, building the ox’s cart, and making mittens, brooms, and candles. Then the ox-cart man sets off to market to sell the crop and the mittens, brooms, and candles, then the ox, then the cart. He returns home carrying the supplies from the market the family will need for the next year and everyone starts over again. Maybe... 

For the past few weeks, I’ve been watching the snow drift down with deceptive lightness, only to accumulate in deep piles (18″ and counting here in northeastern Ohio) that have well and truly buried any remotely green thing on the ground. While it’s lovely to sit inside and watch winter’s show, I also find myself reaching for the seed catalogs. Winter may not depress me as it does some people, but now and again I long...