Category Archives: Talk

Gardening

Annie’s Top Five Tomato Growing Tips

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First of all, let me say, “hello” to all of you whom Annie and I met at the Kumar garden on the Going Native Garden Tour! It was a real pleasure talking with you about one of my other passions, California native plants. I hope the experience was as educational and enjoyable for you as it was for me!

Spring is a wonderful time of year for gardeners. The weather begins to warm up, the sun stays up later, and new life springs forth. All over, the stores are starting to sell vegetable starts to people who have been dreaming of garden-fresh summer vegetables all winter long. And what is the top selling plant? It has got to be the tomato.

So, you’ve come home with one or two (or ten!) small tomato plants. Now what? How do you ensure you will have a bumper crop of tasty tomatoes? Continue reading Annie’s Top Five Tomato Growing Tips →

Site News

Menu for Hope IV

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The House of Annie is participating in this year’s Menu for Hope IV, which is is an annual campaign by food bloggers to raise funds for the United Nations World Food Programme to help fight global hunger. Last year, Menu for Hope raised almost USD$63,000 in donations to support the WFP. This year, funds raised will go to a school lunch program in Lesotho (a country surrounded by South Africa) that purchases food from local farmers rather than relying on grains shipped in from overseas.

The idea for Menu for Hope is simple and fun: food bloggers around the world offer food-related prizes for raffle to raise money. Some of the amazing prizes up for raffle this year include a personal tour of the el Bulli kitchen laboratory with Ferran Adria, a private tour of Love Apple Farms plus a dinner for 2 at Manresa , an autographed copy of “Baking: From My Home to Yours” by Dorie Greenspan, a “Best of the Ferry Building” gift basket, a KitchenAid stand mixer, and a wine vacation in Napa. WOW!

In keeping with Annie’s tomato madness, House of Annie’s contribution to Menu for Hope is “The Heirloom Tomato Cookbook” by Mimi Luebbermann. The cookbook is a collection of recipes by different chefs, showcasing heirloom tomatoes from appetizer to dessert, along with wine pairing suggestions. There is also a photographic glossary of heirloom tomatoes, as well as information on cultivating them.

Of course, what good is an heirloom tomato cookbook without any heirloom tomatoes to cook with? So, IN ADDITION to the cookbook, Annie will help the winner choose seeds of 10 varieties of tomatoes out of Annie’s library of over 200 heirloom tomatoes. Annie will mail seed packets of these varieties (10-15 seeds per packet) out to the winner along with the cookbook in January.

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE!

If the winner is in the San Francisco Bay Area, we will deliver 10 starts of heirloom tomato plants, ready for planting, in late April or early May; or they can come to the House of Annie in San Jose in late August or early September to collect a basket of ripe tomatoes from our organic garden.

So, how can you participate? First check out Chez Pim for the complete list of prizes. Make a note of the prize code for each prize you are interested in. Then go to

http://www.firstgiving.com/menuforhope4

and click on the Give Now button. Follow the prompts for how much you’d like to give to the campaign. Specify the prize codes you would like to bid for in the “Personal Message” section of the donation form. To bid for Annie’s prize, use prize code UW24

For every USD$10 you donate, you get one raffle ticket and a chance to win a prize. You must write-in how many tickets per prize, and use the prize code. For example, a donation of $50 can be 2 tickets for UW01 and 3 tickets for UW24. Please write 2xUW01, 3xUW24.

That’s it! The donation will be deducted from your credit card and forwarded to the World Food Programme, and the results of the raffle posted on January 9 on Chez Pim. Be sure to tell all your friends about the campaign, and good luck to all who enter!

Aloha, Nate

Site News

The Great Vanilla Bean Giveaway

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Jaden over at at SteamyKitchen has a drawing going on where she is offering a half pound of vanilla beans to 8 lucky people who leave a link to a recipe containing vanilla on her blog. I have offered up my Crepes post and linked to the YouTube video of me making the crepes at home.

What’s that? You haven’t seen the video? Well, here you go!

I previously offered my Paella post for Jaden’s saffron giveaway. Unfortunately, my name was not chosen. Maybe this time (crossing fingers)!

Hey, this is fun. I’m not just blogging about food, I’m blogging for food as well! I should make a sign:

WILL BLOG FOR FOOD.

— edit Nov 8 update —
I found out that we were one of the people chosen to receive the vanilla beans!  I’m so tickled to have been chosen.  In future posts I hope to show Annie putting those vanilla beans to good use!

Aloha, Nate

Tech

Stop, Thief! (Part 2)

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Contrary to this post’s title, there isn’t a foolproof way to prevent a determined thief from copying pictures from your website or blog to theirs. If you put a picture out there for all to see, someone may want to take it for themselves. For the most part, you have to respect your readers and expect them to show you the same respect in return.

Still, you can take steps to protect your pictures from being inadvertently misused. I have started placing watermarks on my photos and also appending a copyright message at the end of the filename. To do this, I use a program called waterMark v2 from PMlabs.

It is a very powerful program that can batch process several pictures or even folders at once. It even puts a menu choice in your Explorer context menu so that you can just select pictures in Explorer, right-click, and launch waterMark. I have my settings saved as a profile so all I need to do is open the profile and then click Start. Voila!

Best thing of all is, this program is free. One downside I noticed is that it adds 100KB to the filesize but that is something I can live with.

Aloha, Nate