In the old days, the greengrocer, the fishmonger, and baker could often be identified by what they wore — an apron, or smock, or jacket that was specific to that trade. More than just an uniform, these garments were often a badge of honor and reflected the pride people took in their work. They were also kind of cool, and they are having a comeback.Once upon a time, certain skilled trades were considered a respectable way to earn a living.

If you have an old picnic table that’s ugly and scarred, or if you’re at a public picnic site and want to cover the table tops with something cheerful and easy to clean, consider this: oilcloth! A few yards will instantly add a bright and celebratory vibe to your gathering!Oilcloth used to be just that: a heavy duty cotton or linen cloth that was soaked in linseed oil until it became saturated. The cloth was then hung to dry to produce an almost waterproof fabric.

I was pretty happy to spot these bolts of 100% cotton tea towel fabric at my local fabric store. The edges are finished with selvages, so you just have to sew up either end and voilà! you have a lovely tea towel for considerably less than what it would cost to buy them pre-made. The fabric comes in classic stripes and checks as well as vintage patterns.According to the Fabric Depot website, a typical tea towel takes 3/4 of a yard to make one towel. The fabrics pictured here run between $5.

Bokashi is a method of composting developed in Japan that uses microbes to decompose food, effectively fermenting it so that it doesn’t smell as it is breaking down. Besides lack of smell, another advantage with bokashi is that all food, including meat, fish and dairy, can be composed with this system. Bokashi has gotten a lot of attention in large-scale commercial uses, but what about at home?

It’s the brand spankin’ new year and with this fresh start often comes a desire to make changes and improvements in our daily diet. While this is an admirable pursuit, sometimes in our enthusiasm we tend towards extreme depravation which is never sustainable and only leads to failure. What’s needed is a sensible plan, one that is varied, delicious and interesting and (whoopsie!) just happens to be really good for you.

I have a lot of cookbooks. A lot. I haven’t counted them but it’s probably in the triple digits. And of those scores of titles, there are only three dedicated to desserts. One is by Maida Heatter, another is by Lindsey Shere and the final is this one, Pure Dessert by Alice Medrich. Read on for why this book has a special place on my shelf.I don’t shun desserts but I don’t make them that frequently.

OK. I know this is going to be a bit of a hard sell, since most of our readers are in the US and the book I’m about to talk about is only available in the UK. I completely understand it that this may be a huge barrier for some of you. But I’m so taken with Orlando Gough’s Recipe Journal that I can’t help but share it! I can say with confidence that it was absolutely worth the effort to get it from London, England to my home in Oakland, California.

Amanda Cohen owns Dirt Candy, a vegetarian, or more accurately a vegetable, restaurant in the East Village of New York. We already know that vegetarian food has moved far beyond its 1960’s hippie reputation, but you may not know exactly how far unless you’ve experienced Ms. Cohen’s bold, sassy, vegetable-focused food.

One reason many people shy away from copper cookware is the price but the other oft-cited reason is the maintenance. Copper pots will quickly lose their shine and if you care about such things, you would need a Downton Abbey-sized crew to keep things ship-shape. Me, I actually don’t care for shiny copper and the few pieces I own have taken on a lovely, varied, matte patina.

Item: Bee’s Wrap Price: $14.00 – $17.00 for sets of three; $12:00 for XL bread wrap Overall Impression: This is a fantastic alternative to plastic wrap! Many people I know would like to get away from plastic wrap in their kitchen but this is hard to do: plastic wrap is just so convenient and there aren’t any good substitutes on the market.  Until now.

We’re all about sourcing, prepping, cooking and eating good food here at The Kitchn, yet there’s one area we seldom think about: using food plants as dye. But now that I have the beautiful poster pictured above hanging in my kitchen, I’m inspired to take another look at my food scraps and consider what color they might produce on a t-shirt, or a napkin. Take avocado pits, for instance.

Louisa Shafia is a Brooklyn-based chef and cookbook author whose first book Lucid Food was lauded for its fresh approach to cooking with organic, seasonal food.  In The New Persian Kitchen, she turns her attention to the vibrant flavors of Iran. She was introduced to this food as a child when her Iranian aunties would visit, bringing unfamiliar ingredients like pomegranate molasses, turmeric, and dried lime and filling the kitchen with enticing, delicious smells and tastes.

It wasn’t that long ago that you could pick up old blue canning jars for just a few quarters at your local thrift shop. Now they’re a hot vintage item and you’re likely to pay ten times that amount or more, if you can even find them. But the blue jar situation is no longer so difficult, or expensive, thanks to Ball, the 125 year old producer of canning equipment.

It’s a bit of a puzzle, but for some reason wall mounted dish racks are hard to find here in the US, despite the fact that they are very common in Europe and in Great Britain in particular. Perhaps our lack of exposure to this clever and attractive way to store dishes has kept demand down? With open-shelved kitchens all the rage right now, this might just be the moment for us to wise up.

Although it does contain four recipes, Michael Pollan’s new book Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation is not a cookbook.  It is, however, a book for cooks, as well as a book for people who would like to cook but don’t, or can’t, or won’t.  In other words, if you eat, then you may be interested in this thoroughly engaging look into past, present, and future of cooking.Pollan and his family learn to cook with Samin Nosrat in their Berkeley kitchen.

After interviewing Allison Carroll Duffy and getting her 5 Essentials for Summer Canning, I couldn’t wait to check out her new cookbook, Preserving with Pomona’s Pectin. If you are interested in low- or no-sugar jams, or you’d like to sweeten your preserves with sugar alternatives such as honey or agave, then you should definitely check out Pomona’s Pectin and this lovely, informative new cookbook!

There are as many kinds of cooks as there are people in this world, but nonetheless, we can still be grouped into rough categories.  One of these categories is people who grow bored or impatient or frustrated when they have to follow a recipe.  And this is not a small, select group either: How to cook without recipes is one of the more popular requests we get here in The Kitchn.

Nothing could be simpler than scrawling the name and date of your just-canned jam or pickles on a piece of masking tape and slapping it on the jar. After all, who doesn’t have masking tape and a Sharpie stashed in a random drawer somewhere? But you can take things to a much classier level by switching out one piece: replace that masking tape with washi tape!