I’m taking what I learned last year and putting it to good use. Definitely not going to try grow vegetables again, because they need more sun than my fire escape gets. Instead I have four different herbs (lemon balm, spearmint, borage, and parsley) and two flowers my kid picked (Chinese forget-me-nots and Empress of India nasturtiums), all of which are suited for partial shade.
The herb seeds came from Planet Natural , who I really recommend. They have a great selection of heirloom and organic seeds with free shipping when you order just $10 of seeds.
I love tuna salad. Canned white tuna, with minced celery and pickle, some mayonnaise and maybe a few capers… if I could eat that as often as I’d like, I’d end up as mad as a hatter (or maybe just as mad as Jeremy Piven) due to the elevated levels of mercury in canned tuna.
What’s a tuna-phile to do?
Fake it.
Fake Tuna Salad
Mash 2-3 cups of chickpeas with the tines of a fork. (You could trying using a food processor but one pulse too far and you’ve got hummus instead.) This can be a little tedious but the resulting texture is more appealing. To pass the time, I recommend Pandora’s Oldies Soul station, as pictured above. Add minced celery, pickle, mayonnaise, or whatever your mom added to tuna salad when you were a kid.
Gosh, isn’t that nice? Go ahead, click the photo to see it up close.
Well, come on back from your happy place now, because summer also brings some not-so-good things to NYC. No, not the constant smell of wee…. something worse.
Roaches.
As much as I despise them, I have three cats and a kid who still likes to play on the kitchen floor. Spraying a bunch of poison around
is out of the question.
What else to do?
Here’s some of the all- (or mostly-)natural things I’ve done to get rid of roaches.
Clean up. This one is obvious, but it bears repeating. Of course, I have yet to figure out how to clean behind the stove or fridge, so this can only go so far.
Bay leaves. I’m sure this would work better if I had a bay laurel tree, but dried bay leaves from the supermarket will drive roaches away. They need to replaced fairly often to keep working, though.
Catnip. This works the best of anything I’ve tried so far. I put some into fill-your-own tea bags and then stash them throughout the kitchen.
Spraying soapy water on bugs. Okay. This works — on all bugs, as a matter of fact — but for an incredibly gross reason. Soap dissolves the “glue” that keeps a bug’s exoskeleton together… leaving you with a disassembled insect. Barf.
Borax. (Or boric acid, although it’s more toxic and harder to find.) Mix borax with virtually anything and dump the powder into the cracks and crevices. I’ve tried borax with cocoa powder and sugar, but I’ve seen suggestions for cornstarch, flour, white rice, sweetened condensed milk — one site suggested putting chopped onion in it but I’ll be damned if I’m doing any food prep for bugs.
These have worked for me so far, but I’m constantly collecting more ideas, in case things ever get worse. I hear mint and cedar work well, although I haven’t tried it. Also, cucumber and garlic, but isn’t just leaving bits of food out to spoil?
Fellow New Yorkers (and other city dwellers), have you tried to get rid of bugs in your kitchen? What worked?
I am a compulsive recycler. If something can possibly be used again, by god, I have to at least try — and if it keeps me from having to buy something new, I am equally delighted by my ingenuity and my single-handed environment-savingness.
At the same time, I also really love a good household purge. When you live with another adult and a kid (as well as three cats) in less than 650 square feet, there is really no room for anything you not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.
So, what happens when you have something still beautiful but not useful? For example, what to do with a shirt that shrunk in the wash just enough to be too small on my husband while still too big for me?
Recycle it and make it into something beautiful, like so:
For those of you not living on the eastern coast of the US, here’s what you’re missing out on: rain. Rain, more rain, cloudiness, then some downpours, followed by a 30-minute window of sun where you shout, “Holy shit, I see the sun! GET YOUR SHOES ON EVERYONE!” which will immediately be followed by more rain. It’s been going on like this for weeks now — or at least I think it’s been weeks, as without any sun, I have lost any sense of time. (It’s still May, right? Memorial Day soon?)
While I’ve been stuck indoors, fretting over my fire escape plants and hoping an average of 12 minutes’ sun a day will keep everything alive, I stumbled upon this website for Window Farms — “vertical, hydroponic, modular, low-energy, high-yield, edible window gardens, built using low-impact or recycled local materials.”
Here’s the basic idea:
I seriously cannot stop thinking about this. I’m fairly sure it’s completely insane for me to think about building one of these — as I have zero DIY abilities and don’t even own a drill — but COME ON. How frigging cool is that thing? The prototype is growing tomatoes, lettuce, beans, cucumber, okra, basil, arugula and peppers. Okay, okra is kind of gross, but fresh basil! In the middle of winter! How could you not want that?
