SuperForest

Hi SuperForest

So, after enjoying the flowers, my beloved zucchini have borne fruit (and it turns out that zucchini are, like tomatoes, technically fruit rather than vegetables, as they develop from flowers and contain the seeds for the next generation):

And they’re a key component of simple and delicious spicy zucchini linguine!

chop the zucchini, together with a chili, a couple of garlic cloves and a tomato:

Then fry up the zucchini for a few minutes in some nice olive oil, until they shrink down (losing a fair amount of water) and start to turn golden. In the meantime, stick some linguine (or spaghetti) on to cook (I don’t have great “al dente instinct” – so, in lieu of this, I add a good handful of salt to the water and genuinely do watch the clock for the cooking time it says on the packet – take the pasta off the heat at exactly [11] minutes, or whatever it says, not more, and you shouldn’t be too far wrong):

Add the chillies, garlic and tomato and stir it up:

Grate on a helping of parmesan, with vigour:

As Gordon Ramsay would say: Done!

Tasty tasty – and adjustable (more chilli, no tomato, more garlic! more garlic! good for the heart AND yummy) to your taste.  If you like pasta, then check out SuperForester April’s broccoli recipe – one of my favourites and affectionately referred to by my flatmate as “broccoli surprise” – the surprise being that the ’sauce’ is nothing but broccoli and it’s delicious. And I’m informed (by the parental helpline) that it’s not too late to put some garlic cloves in pots, keep them in dry conditions, and over the autumn they’ll start to germinate, ready for a new garlic harvest in the winter.

Love

P

Hej SuperForest

A short thought for a (at least here) rainy Tuesday, from American philosopher and poet, Ralph Waldo Emerson (who has also provided us with an inspiring definition of “success”):

You become what you think about all day long.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882)

(image via)

So succinct, and yet with such a large measure of truth to it, no?  We’re all here on SuperForest because we embrace the power of positivity – to shape our worldview and interactions, to shape things to come, and – I think – to shape ourselves.

Anecdotally, I’m sure we can all find some support for Emerson’s statement: a day where everything seems bad, everything has had a negative connotation, seems to be a day when everything will have a negative connotation. Conversely, and joyously, a day when I determine it will be positive seems to shower a deluge of random positive events.

And despite my conviction against all reason that the world does revolve around me (okay, not really, but I recognize in myself a propensity to become self-absorbed and, by extension, take the vagaries of life personally… what can I say, we’re all works in progress;), a rational mind would have trouble believing that the preponderance of negative-upon-negative or positive-upon-positive is the result of the objective turn of events.

Isn’t it more plausible that a day focused on negative things is, if not more likely to result in negative outcomes, at the very least more likely to focus your perception of those events on the negative?  AND conversely, that a day where positivity is the focus, more likely to shine a light on positive encounters, events and conclusions?

Positivity builds Positivity – both in ourselves and those we engage with.

I know this, and yet… I’ll admit that a busy day, or a challenging meeting, can throw my focus off track. So, today I decided to try an experiment. One that I like to call “No Positive Too Small”.

Today I decided to broadly catalogue my thoughts and see which I would be happy to “become” in Emerson’s terms.  And I’d highly recommend that all of you try the same experiment. You might be surprised at some of the things that bring you happiness.

Some highlights from my notebook:

- gosh, I love coffee. Coffee is marvelous. Okay one more (delicious, fairtrade) coffee!

that’ll be the coffee

- ooh, a shower. And that shampoo that smells nice. And some nudie stretching. Nice!

- hey SuperForest.org!

- Ah, sunshine on the way to work, nice. Thank you cab driver for stopping to let me past. Hey colleagues, I like you! I hope you had a great vacation, I’m glad that you’re back!

- yo, little sister. You rock! And a coffee!

- pretty clouds outside the window and a chat with office-mate about home-grown vegetables. Embracing common ground while trading tips and veg. Yes.

- okay, so this work is difficult… challenging… and I’m really glad that you, as my boss, think that I’m up to stretching myself with this responsibility. Isn’t it great that if we really push to get this out soon, we can feel like we did the best we could for our client?

- wow, that girl looks beautiful in that dress. I should tell her. No, I won’t, that would sound crazy. Ah, whatever “Excuse me, I just wanted to say that your dress really suits you and you look great!”

- mmmm…. what a delicious sandwich.  Yes, an effusive thank you at my local sandwich shop is more than in order!

- ooh, a personal email! How exciting. I think I’ll respond rapidly with many typing errors :)

- Wow! I forgot I had that Bowie song on my itunes! Yes, I think I will sing it under[over] my breath at the coffee machine for the rest of the afternoon! [Maybe with some subtle dance moves. Maybe. Okay, definitely.]

- Ah! I’m so glad I have Labyrinth on dvd!

- ooh, look at the rain on the window.  I love that sound.

- Hmmm… these wool pants, they’re really comfy.

- flickr, tumblr, flickr, tumblr, yay!

- Hey, look how the sun is starting to set earlier – I can almost feel the autumn creeping up. I can’t wait. Gah, and I just realised that autumn is the opportunity to start knitting hats again!

- hey, SuperForest.org!

- tube newspaper guy, hey, yeah how are ya? yeah, I’m a regular. I feel cool.

- No, but really, these pants are comfy

- Ah, home. How I love my longjohns, my zucchini, calls to Belgium, that leftover lasagne! Little sister, SuperForester Sophie,  did I mention that you both rock?!

them’ll be the longjohns

- Oh, new sewing machine (nope, that’s it. I’m afraid the details of my love for learning to use my sewing machine in haphazardly incompetent style will have to remain private;)

So, I’m sort of joking, but not really – of course I had negative thoughts today (tiredeness, tonsilitis [honorable mention goes to my newfound appreciation of what an awesome job my throat usually does, all day every day, many times a day, of swallowing!], work stress), but I found that the act of making a note of the positives as I thought them, however seemingly trivial, really focused me on appreciating them. I’m not exactly proud of this list – I get that most of it seems a little self-centred. But I picked a random day just to see where I got the joy from, so I feel like I can’t judge myself for the results. But I can try to influence myself going forward.

So, SuperForest, I’d like to ask you: What happy thoughts did you have today?

Whatever it was, from comfy pants to a great news story to a particularly tasty sandwich or a shared smile with a fellow commuter, I’d love to hear – remember, there’s No Positive Too Small – Let us know in the comments?

Love, in my badass thermal longjohns of love,

P

Good Evening SuperForest

We love TED talks here on SuperForest – eye-opening, entertaining, illuminating talks from a wide variety of experts in a plethora of fields.  My top tip for Tuesday would definitely be: if you haven’t yet signed up to the TED e-newsletter, do! A weekly email drop of featured TED videos, it never fails to throw up something fascinating. You can sign up here.

We also love a good infographic – and a favourite is David McCandless’ Information Is Beautiful site – a few picks we’ve featured include Every Country is Good at Something, the Evidence for the Efficacy of Health Supplements and the Surface Area Required to Solar Power the World.

Now, to combine the two, David has given his own TED talk – explaining the value of infographics in parsing the vast amount of information we are bathed in every day, and the use of design in aiding comprehension. Check it:

Isn’t it amazing how, by assigning a visual meaning or map to numbers, they can suddenly ‘click’ into focus, into meaning?

McCandless builds on the phrase “data is the new oil”, reflecting on the importance of data as a modern resource, to instead suggest that “data is the new soil“:

Data is a kind of ubiquitous reserve that we can shape to provide new innovation and new insights … it feels like a fertile medium and over the years online we’ve laid down a huge amount of information and data and we’ve irrigated it with networks and connectivity … and it feels like visualisations, infographics, data visualisation, they feel like flowers blooming.

McCandless also makes an interesting point about our design-sense. A lot has been written recently about the negative effects of our pervasive internet and media culture on our abilities to concentrate or to interact. However, McCandless draws out a benefit that our unprecedented access to data, and unprecedented connectivity in interpreting it, has given us: a growing sense of how such data is best comprehensible.  As McCandless – who only recently ventured into design – says:

It’s almost like being exposed to all this media over the years had installed a sort of dormant design literacy in me. And I don’t feel like I’m unique, I feel like every day all of us now are being blasted with information and design. It’s being poured into our eyes through the web and we’re all vizualisers now, and we’re all demanding a visual aspect to our information.

… and It feels like design is about solving problems and providing elegant solutions and information design is about solving information problems

It all reminds me of a conversation I had a while back with SuperForester Pierangelo, who works in news graphics, where he stressed a value: that of communicating in a way that the most people could understand.  I think there’s a lot of value to this – it’s not a question of (nor should it be conflated with) ‘dumbing down’ – rather as consciously trying to maximise the ways in which we all can understand – and so are able to engage – with our world.

As a smile-making aside: I laughed aloud when I searched SF for “information is beautiful” – a whole host of posts (the vast majority unrelated to McCandless) came up. Turns out, here on SuperForest, provision of Information and appreciation of Beauty coincide a lot!

As Hans Rosling says:

Let the data-set change your mindset

Love

P

Hi SuperForest

Today I’ve been thinking about Maths (or “Math” to use the Americanism as I shall hereafter;). It’s not something I do often, but Tom Henderson, mathematics lecturer and improv comedian, and his “Punk Math Philosophy” are the reasons why.

As he says on his Kickstarter video:

Punk identifies problems, Math solves problems.

check out Tom’s Kickstarter page here

Sure, it may sound a little gimmicky, but (as Henderson explains in an interview with Technoccult) in his view, it’s a tool of empowerment – in the same way that punk enabled anyone to participate in a band and express themselves, math can democratise a form of effective engagement:

It is this:

1) People use the average Joe’s poor mathematics as a way to control, exploit, and numerically screw him over.

2) Mathematics is the subject in which, regardless of what the authorities tell you is true, you can verify every last iota of truth, with a minimum of equipment.

if you are concerned with the empowerment of everyday people, and you believe that it’s probably a good idea to be skeptical of authority you could do worse than to develop your skills at being able to talk math in such a way that anyone can ask questions, can express curiosity, can imagine applying it in the most weird-ass off-the-wall ways possible.

So, it seems couched in essentially ‘negative’ terms – opposition, oppression, The Man – but the message in there is positive: if you can engage with it, maths can provide a toolset that will enable us to better evaluate what we are told and better express ourselves.  Or, at the least, talking about maths in an entertaining fashion is fun.

Henderson is looking to publish a math book based on this philosophy. It’s already met its Kickstarter funding goal, but you can continue to donate here if punk math appeals to you .  But more than the book, I was happy to discover Henderson and his partner in math magic, Nick Horton’s, excellent podcasts: Maths for Primates – entertaining, illuminating and funny.  If you feel like you’re not getting the fun of math, or that you used to love it, but your number-brain has become rusty from lack of use, you could do far worse than have a listen: I tried it out as “background” during an evening at work and found myself engaging with types of infinity, rather than typing my document (so, good in the broader sense – notsomuch in the multi-tasking workplace sense!).

Infinite Love in all its sizes

P

Hey SuperForest

As summer begins to wind down, back-to-school feelings surface and a slight crispness to the air in the mornings anticipates the build up to autumn, growth continues apace in my rooftop city garden – as if a reminder not to wish the summer away so fast:

My first sunflower!

The sunflowers are blooming – I find it almost impossible to look in the face of a sunflower and not smile at the condensed colour of the petals and abundance of tasty seeds.

And the chillies are bearing fruit:

I’ve been excited to see how many insects just a few containers are attracting: ladybugs, wasps, hoverflies and, most excitingly, bees -I like to think I may have contributed in some small way to some delicious London honey.

But gardening, as everything, poses challenges disguised as problems – most recently, in the form of powdery mildew on the zucchini:

white mildew on the leaves

Powdery mildew (the fungus Sphaerotheca fuliginea) is a pretty common infection in zucchini plants, starting with white spots on the leaves and – particularly in warm, humid conditions – developing to coat the leaves, eventually killing them – and without leaves, the photosynthesising powerhouses, the plants can’t flourish.

Sphaerotheca fulginea (via)

So, I was somewhat dismayed to see the fungus rapidly spreading across the plants. But one thing I’ve learned from this whole hasty endeavour in growing has been that my (I’m ashamed to admit) all-too-frequent tactic of sitting back, seeing if the problem will resolve itself, leads more often to dead plants than to Darwinian triumphs – and I didn’t want to resort to chemical fungicides – so, naturally, I took to the internet! (Yep, I would’ve called my Mum, but sadly the Gardening Hotline is on summer vacation). And a little google-fu discovered something awesome: whilst nature provides challenges, it oftentimes also provides surprising solutions – and the solution to powdery mildew? MILK

milky zucchini

Weekly spraying of mildewed leaves with a simple solution of milk and water (approx. 30% milk is thought to be optimal) controls the mildew as well as synthetic fungicides – a faintly funky smell results, but this seems a pretty fair price for avoiding the use of synthetic fungicides. Who knew?

post-milk bath

As you can see, it seems to have been quite effective: the yellowed spots were fully mildewed before and the plants look much healthier now.

I love when we can find natural alternatives to using chemicals or pesticides – do you have any tips to share? I’d love to hear them.

Bathing in milk: good enough for Cleopatra, good enough for zucchini.

Love

P

Hey SuperForest

Did you ever play that game where you’re quizzed on the capital cities of the world? Yay! me  too. But I have to admit, two-and-a-half year old Italian girl, Gaia would likely beat me hands down. Check it:

So, in order, we got: Brunei (Bandar Seri Begawan), Zimbabwe (Harare), South Africa (Cape Town: “Citta’ del Capo”), Bulgaria (Sofia), Romania (Bucharest), Hungary (Budapest), Norway (Oslo), Iceland (Reykjavik), Ireland (Dublin), England (London), USA (Washington), Mexico (Mexico City: Citta’ del Mexico), Cuba (Havana), Guatemala (Guatemala City), Malaysia (Kuala-Lumpur), Japan (Tokyo), Uruguay (Montevideo), Paraguay (Asunción), Brazil (Brasilia), Argentina (Buenos Aires), Senegal (Dakar), Canada (Ottawa), United Arab Emirates (Abu Dhabi), Nepal (Kathmandu), India (New Delhi: Nuova Delhi), the Maldives (Malé) and Oman (Muscat).

And darling Gaia seems to be having so much fun!

Love love

P

Hej hej, Dear SuperForest

As you may have seen, recently I’ve been keeping you posted as to developments in my fledgling apartment garden – but, whilst I’ve mentioned how I’ve been surprised how little space I’ve needed to grow things, I realised I haven’t really introduced you to it. So, by way of belated introduction, here’s the indoor part:

(marigolds, sunflowers, rocket, spinach, kitchen window)

Consisting of a table I constructed by my kitchen window – it’s been a good way of cultivating seedlings before they’re ready to go outside. The ‘table’ is a repurposed metal pinboard salvaged from a skip outside a gym refurbishment on my way home from work (along with, oddly enough , the photographic-grass-print acetate that now covers it – it’s waterproof and it amuses me to have the plants growing on the ersatz greenery) on a base of my favourite sturdy cardboard boxes and is hosting my now flowering marigolds, 17 inch sunflowers and baby peppers, rocket and spinach.

And the outside part, on the roof outside my bedroom window -  it’s not exactly a “roof terrace”, but it has enough space for containers:

To the left of the picture is a thai restaurant – which not only, if I’m out on my roof in the evening, gives me the opportunity to wave at diners and entertain them with my rooftop hooping but, incidentally, has an inadvertently SuperForesty take-out policy: officially? they don’t do take-out. But, as they’re right next door and sometimes it’s nice to eat thai food in your pajamas, I’ve discovered that if I bring my own containers (and “don’t ask, then we don’t say yes!”) they’re quite happy for me to decant and vamoose with my dinner – result: tasty dinner a casa and no wasteful take-out packaging! And as SuperForester Lora has already shown us, gardening is a great way to get to know your neighbours: My lovely downstairs neighbours also have a courtyard – now the home of a fresh new zucchini plant (which seems to be flourishing) – it turns out, in an unexpected bonus, that having a random garden is a great way to connect with your urban neighbours. Can we say “WIN”?

And, the current piece de resistance, the zucchini flowers!

The flowers on straight stalks are the male flower, whilst the swollen stalks on the female flowers are what grow into zucchini!

Zucchini flowers (in Italian, fiori di zucca) are a delicious treat – particularly when stuffed with mozzarella and anchovy and lightly fried. A terribly simple recipe:

Some x zucchini flowers (as many as you have. Top tip: if you leave them on the stalk they wilt after a day – instead, pick them after their first flowering day and they’ll keep nice in the fridge for a couple more);

1 x pack of mozzarella (or cheese of your choice – I had a lovely spanish version of this with manchego and honey drizzled on top);

1 x tin of anchovies; and

1 x egg + a bowl of plain flour.

It’s so simple: All you need to do is rinse the flowers, stick a bite-sized piece of mozzarella accompanied by half an anchovy inside the flower, then twist the end of it, dip it in the egg first, then the flour – then pop it in the pan. Once the batter is golden after less than a minute, whip it out and it’s delicious.  Or, as my exceptionally Scottish Dad said last weekend when I busted my homegrown moves on him: “What did I have for dinner? FLOO-RS”. Awesome.

I hope that I will develop some fruit to go with the flowers but, even if I don’t, I feel as though the flowers are gift enough.

Love

P

Hey SuperForest

SuperForester Jaell recently posted about the excellent Minneapolis Nice Bike programme – and now I’m excited to be able to tell you that my very own London town has finally jumped on the bike hire bandwagon:  the long-awaited Barclays Cycle Hire scheme has arrived!

(scenic bike!)

Launched last Friday, thanks to famously cycling Mayor Boris (yep, that’s him below) we now have 600 bikes at 400 docking stations across London, available to pick up and drop off as you please. And the best thing? After you sign up (and pay for a 24hr, week or annual access membership – with annual access at £45) you get as many half-hours as you want for free.

(the attendant I spoke to told me that Boris had just been by, on his bike natch, to check how things were going)

At the moment the bikes are available if you sign up online, but from the end of August they’ll be available to borrow on the spot – so if you’re planning a visit to London, do bear this in mind.  The bikes are pretty heavy, but they’re comfortable, feel very sturdy and, if you get a flat tyre, you just need to park it up at the nearest docking station and press the service button.  Another tasty touch is the integrated, dynamo, LED front and rear lights.  Although, as Jaell mentioned with the Minneapolis scheme, do bring your own helmet as they’re not provided.  You can check out the location and real-time availability of bikes here and the cycle conduct guide here.  And if, like me, you’re a London resident but a little nervous of the hectic traffic, then it’s absolutely worth checking with your council whether they provide free cycling-in-London classes (Camden council is a nice example) to learn in practice tips for safe city cycling - free or subsidised cycle training is available in all London boroughs.

I signed up online on Friday and received my bike key in the mail on Monday morning – just in time to take a bike for a lunchtime spin round the office – I realised quite quickly that a pencil skirt is not the most elegant of impromptu cycling gear, but sadly have no photographic evidence of my maiden voyage.

Word to the wise from my chat with the introductory attendant: if you’re cycling for longer than half an hour, do scope yourself a docking station halfway, park up the bike, wait five minutes (hey – it’s not that long – why not use it well: pay compliments to passers-by! do some jumping jacks! call your Mum!) then you can whip out a bike for another free half hour. Win!

I’m sure there’ll be some teething problems – for example, this evening, there were no bikes left near my office (which is really a fabulous thing – encouraging suited, deskbound workers to hop on a bike after work? I can’t think of anything better) so I guess they’ll need to do some redistributions overnight until they work out the kinks, but overall I’m really excited that London – a city not known for its cycle-friendliness – is really giving this a go.

Maybe one day we’ll look like Utrecht:

Join in! Make it work!

Love to you all

P

Hihi SuperForest

I’ve been entertaining myself with a papercut recently and thought it would be a good opportunity to share, along with a couple of tangentially related quotations that I like:

You can’t cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water.

Rabindranath Tagore (1861 – 1941)

papercut-in-window action

and one more that speaks to me, from Vincent:

Someone who has been wandering about for a long time, tossed to and fro on a stormy sea, will in the end reach his destination. Someone who has seemed to be good for nothing, unable to fill any job, any appointment, will find one in the end and, energetic and capable, will prove himself quite different from what he seemed at first.

Vincent Van Gogh (1853 – 1890)

Because we all face our own stormy seas sometimes, but the clouds do clear.

Love

P

Hi SuperForest

The Guardian today has a wonderful gallery of wildlife photographer Scott Linstead’s work – using fast shutter speeds and special flashes, Scott captures nature’s action shots in incredible clarity. Here’s a taster:

photos Scott Linstead

Check out the whole gallery here, and more of Scott’s work here.

Love

P