Have a vegetable garden? Then you should hopefully have earthworms. A lot of earthworms. You may already know earthworms are the great transformers of landscape, but there's another reason why you should want them in your garden: turns out if you have earthworms you're less likely to see damage inflicted by...

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This is a sweet, simple idea for an outdoor play kitchen. All all you need is a crate, a fruit box, and a couple of cans!

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I'm sure I am not the first cook to drop her head in her hands and groan, "Why can't we just go metric!" while trying to scale a recipe up or down, or trying to divide by 32 in her head. Unfortunately, you can't force the country to measure in easily-converted units of ten just because it would make baking brownies for the school bake sale less of a headache. But you can make life easier for yourself by memorizing this short list of essential cooking conversions.

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The other day it occurred to me that all the delicious things in life — bread, cheese, wine, beer, pickles, kraut, just-cooked meats — become more delicious because of rest, because built into their process is a time where they sit quietly and do nothing. Actually, that's not quite true. They are doing something: yeasts are eating sugars and burping carbon dioxide, juices are being absorbed, fermentation is being initiated, etc. But from the point of view of the cook, we are leaving it alone. We are taking our hands off of the process and allowing the wild and uncontrolled elements to take their turn. 

What would happen if we did the same thing for ourselves, in our own lives?

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So, you may be thinking to yourself, "That meal looks horrible." And it was. The only redeemable thing on the plate was the ham loaf in the back. Stirred into an omelet the next morning, it tasted like pancakes and sausage. 

But I adore old cookbooks, especially from the 70s and 80s, the dawn of the career woman. With Betty Friedan's "The Feminine Mystique" in the background, these books were meant to help women have it all — a career, a family, and a fabulous reputation as a hostess. As it happens, we can't really have it all. And, while some of those cookbooks are full of old school goodness, others didn't make anything easier, as I recently discovered when I revisited one of the recipes.

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Q: I am one of those "can't boil water" people who never really cooks. I want to learn, but I'm not sure where to start. I'm finally moving into my own place this summer and I don't have any tools of my own. What do I need and what are some easy recipes that I can start learning with?

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Earlier today Dana offered some thoughts on organizing your cookbook collection. She admits that how you choose to organize your cookbooks is all about personal preference, but if you need some visual inspiration, where better to look than our Kitchen Tour archives? Here's a quick peek at how 15 different cooks find ways to store their beloved cookbooks in the kitchen.

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I cook a lot. These past couple of weeks, for instance, I've been cooking through all the un-photographed recipes in Bakeless Sweets and shooting them for the book's website. The amount of dishes generated by these 75 recipes has been mountainous. So this clutter of dishes expresses how my kitchen looks, most of the time (and actually, this isn't too bad, in comparison! I will under no circumstances, however, show you my stovetop right now.). And yet I have an open kitchen, with the mess on display for everyone to see. (See my whole kitchen renovation reveal here.)

So can you guess what the most important element of my open kitchen is? 

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Do you live with roommates? If so, you know that sharing the kitchen can have its challenges. How do you keep the peace when you're dealing with different dietary needs and storage styles? One simple way to keep the lines of communication open — and foster a little good will at the same time — came to us from Lauren in Portland. We recently photographed Lauren's kitchen for The Kitchn's upcoming cookbook, and here's the tip she offered for sharing a kitchen with two housemates:

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OK.  So we've made our peace with our cookbook addiction.  Now, how are we going organize all those precious volumes in a way that is attractive, useful, and practical?  Read on for a few hints.

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