Dig through & dig in

Our annual food-shopping moratorium is officially on. Does this happen at your house? You preserve and preserve and preserve, then worry so much about making it last that you face a freezer/pantry overflow crisis come March? Oy. It happens every year here, although I have a hunch it arrives at just the right time.

That is, in the sense that there isn't much local food shopping to be done these days. The carrots are all gone from the greenhouse, and the spinach is dwindling, fast. I am embarrassed to admit that because of a very late Fedco order, our spring seeds haven't even arrived yet! So perhaps the crisis is really a blessing in disguise.

At any rate, it yielded a blackberry-apple crisp, so it can't be all bad.

It was probably one of the easiest crisps I've ever made: a frozen homemade pie shell leftover from the day this winter that Alex and I tested clam pie recipes (21, to be exact!); wrinkled, shriveling apples that my mom brought down back in late January, soft but still good once we cut in; and blackberries from the freezer, picked in August at my brother and sister-in-law's, down the road.

I tossed the fruit with sugar, flour, lemon juice, and a pinch of cinnamon and nutmeg—then loaded it into the shell. The topping is one from my mother's recipe box—from a Pepperidge Farm piecrust sticker way back when. It has oats and brown sugar and walnuts, and of course plenty of butter to melt and ooze and hold it all in.

Blackberry-apple has always been a favorite of mine—ever since my mother started making this jam—but what do you have in your freezer? I have a feeling all sorts of combos would be good—apple-rhubarb? blueberry-cranberry? strawberry-pear? Dig through, and dig in!

APPLE-BLACKBERRY CRISP

Whenever I make blackberry jam, I always add bits of apple for pectin—a trick I learned as a kid from my mom (the extra pectin in the apples helps the jam set). I've always loved the flavor combination of tart apples and sweet berries, so when I found a bag of August-picked berries in the freezer the other day and a sad, too-soft-for-eating pound of apples in the fridge, I knew I had a crisp on my hands. This recipe is adapted from one my mom makes with apples and raisins. With vanilla ice cream, it's perfect.

for the filling:
4 cups sliced baking apples
1 cup blackberries, frozen or fresh
1/4 cup sugar
2-3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1/8 teaspoon cinnamon
1/8 teaspoon nutmeg
a pinch of salt

one 9-inch pie crust, bottom only

for the topping:
1/4 cup all-purpose flour
1/4 cup rolled oats
1/4 cup firmly packed brown sugar
1/4 cup cold butter, cut into cranberry-size pieces
1/4 cup chopped walnuts or pecans

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. In a large mixing bowl, toss the apples and blackberries with the remaining filling ingredients. Spoon the filling into the pie crust.

In the same bowl, toss together all of the ingredients for the topping. Use your hands to sprinkle the topping over the filling, taking care to distribute the butter evenly (otherwise, certain areas of the topping will be dry while others are super wet).

Bake for roughly 35-45 minutes, or until the fruit is soft and juicy and the topping is golden brown. Pay special attention to the nuts, as if you overcook the crisp they will be the first thing to burn.

The season in my stomach

Hi everyone!

There is no new Local Food Report this week—it's a repeat, the one from last year on Gray's Grist Mill in on the Massachussetts/Rhode Island border. Alex and I have been out of town, but we're finally back and settling into laundry and work catch-up and a fresh batch of granola and warming up the fire to fend off the rain. I'll be back Monday with a recipe.

In the meantime, I had to share this essay from 4th grader Zoe Popovic from Westbrook, Maine. My godmother saw it and emailed it along, and it totally made my day.


Excerpted from this article: "Soup to Nuts: Eat, write, say" by Meredith Goad, published in the Portland Press Herald on March 16th, 2011.

THE SEASON IN MY STOMACH
by Zoe Popovic, Grade 4, Congin School, Westbrook

I usually bring my own lunch to school. Sometimes the kids that buy lunch tease me. It used to bother me, but it doesn't anymore. I know where my food comes from. I have seen it in the fields; I've dug my own potatoes. My food is always changing. I can tell the season by what is in my lunch box. Starting the year with the summer harvest and the green taste of basil on my juicy tomato and mozzarella sandwich. Before I know it I have a thermos filled with butternut squash ravioli and sweet apples just picked over the weekend. In winter the staples from our farm share—rice and beans. I know summer vacation is on its way when my lunch turns green again with veggie wraps filled with baby greens. I also see yogurt mixed with the preserves from last summer's days spent picking blueberries and I know that soon I will be back in those fields. I have been a member of a CSA for as long as I can remember, whether getting a box from the farm or visiting. I know my farmers Amy and Tom, and I know the farm. When I eat my lunch I can picture where it came from. I see the path through the fields of flowers down to vegetables. I know where to turn off to cool myself in the river. I imagine the games that I played with the other kids between courses at the potlucks. I think of the chickens running around and being ridiculous. I picture the sunflowers by the barn and remember waiting for them to have plump seeds for picking. If someone has something to say about my lunch that's okay. It doesn't bother me. I know where my food comes from and don't think they can say the same. When the bell for recess rings, I offer to share a carrot and they take it with a smile and we run outside.

The Local Food Report: seed ordering 2011

With Spring just around the corner (!), it's finally time to start thinking about gardens. Our seed ordering guide was a hit last year, and we've decided to do a second installment for the upcoming season. This year, I talked with Anna Henning over at The Full Circle Food Project. When choosing seeds for the upcoming season, she lays out a few criteria to keep her on track. Here are her guidelines for this year:

1. Keep a balance between more practical vegetables that are easy to grow and prepare and exciting ones that boast bold flavors and colors.
2. Choose the "good sports," the vegetables that can thrive in varied weather and don't need to be picked or watered too often.
3. Go for heirlooms. Save and share the seeds they produce. As Anna says, that is the epitome of knowing where your food comes from.

With these criteria in mind, here are Anna's seed picks for the upcoming summer:

Beets

Cylindra Beet: A cylindrical variety that can be planted close together. The result? Less space and more crop. These are also better for slicing.

Golden Beet: A big hit last year. They are sweeter and milder then purple varieties, and don't stain your hands and other food!

Cherry Tomatoes

Beam's Yellow Pear: Incredibly prolific.

Cherry Roma: Exactly as it sounds. These paste-type cherry tomatoes are handy for cooking.

Tommy Toe: A prolific, heavy bearing variety. Delicious.

Beefsteak-type or Slicing Tomatoes

Crnkovic Yugoslavian: A beefsteak variety. Juicy, huge, and resistant to cracking.

Dr. Wyche's Yellow: Golden, meaty, and gorgeous.

Italian Heirloom: Excellent full tomato flavor. These are ideal for slicing and canning—very little waste and easy to peel.

Soybeans

Hakucho: An early yielding variety—just 65 days between planting and harvesting. This is a dwarf (1ft) and doesn’t take up tons of space like the others. The pods grow in a very concentrated fashion, and because they all mature at the same time, you can harvest whole plant at once.

Carrots

St. Valery: A long, tapered variety (not stumpy!). Gourmet quality.

Chicory

Witloof: A compact variety that is sweet and crunchy and can be grown in a tight space. Eat it raw leafed into a salad or grill it and serve it with heirloom tomatoes. If you have a basement, the roots can be saved for next year.

Beans

Empress: These have an amazing bean flavor and heavy yields.

Tendergreen: Very productive over a long season. These produce even in hot weather.

Royalty Purple Pod: When raw, a gorgeous purple. Green when cooked. These add a nice contrast and are stringless, which means less work to eat! They also germinate in cool wet soil and can be planted in the beginning or at the end of the season.

Winter Squash

Burgess Buttercup Winter Squash or Waltham Butternut: Two varieties that are more resistant to squash vine borers than others.

Looking for seeds? Anna's recommendations for heirloom seed sources are: Sage Thymes, Seed Savers Exchange, High Mowing Seeds, Fedco, Annie’s Seeds, Victory Seeds

P.S. If you want to learn more about the Full Circle Food Project or get involved with Anna's work, visit the project website here. For a quick pick-me-up, make sure you take note of the countdown to Spring at the top of the page. We're almost there!

A batch, maybe two

I'm not quite sure where to start today, so why don't we just dive right in?

Here's the news from my end: it's March, and my mother's birthday is in a few days, and hey, I made a batch of scones and they were good! Delicious, even. Here's their before shot:

I found the recipe over at 101 Cookbooks, when I was looking through the archives the other day. The scones came originally from a cookbook called My Nepenthe by Romney Steele, and this morning, they seemed like just the thing to ward off yet another day of gray. The original version called for currants, but I had a bag of dried cranberries I'd picked up from Crow Farm in Sandwich lying around, and so I swapped those in instead. The oat/orange zest/cranberry combination proved just right—a little bit hearty, a little bit sweet, a little bit tart, and a big hit. I ate one right out of the oven, took a half hour break, and dug in again. They have a nice crumb—moist and big, and a little bit chewy—and the oat flavor is there, subtle, just underneath the citrus. The cranberries add tang and chew—for everyone's good, Alex had better come home and claim some soon.

I can't stay much longer—there are, after all, still bowls and whisks and spatulas to be scrubbed and a dog that's very anxious for a walk—but I wanted to pop in and tell you to make a batch, maybe two.

CRANBERRY ORANGE ZEST OAT SCONES

This recipe is adapted from this recipe over at 101 Cookbooks. One thing to note is that the scones are very large—like those you might find at a commercial bakery. If you like smaller ones for home consumption, divide the dough into two balls before you pat it into discs. Then cut each disc into sixths instead of eighths.

1 and 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

1 and 1/2 cups whole wheat flour

1/2 cup light brown sugar

2 teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoon baking soda

2 sticks cold butter, cut into small pieces

2 cups rolled oats

zest of 1 orange

2/3 cup dried cranberries

1 cup buttermilk (or almost 1 cup milk with a dollop of plain yogurt in it)

1/4 cup coarse sugar, for sprinkling

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.

Whisk together the flour, brown sugar, baking powder, and baking soda in a large mixing bowl. Cut in the butter and mix using a pastry cutter, until the butter is in small, pea-sized bits. Add the oats, orange zest, and cranberries. Pour in the buttermilk and stir until the dough is just moist.

Use your hands to bring the dough together. If it is still too crumbly, add more buttermilk a splash at a time until it comes together.

Working on a cutting board or piece of parchment paper, turn out the dough and pat it into an 8-inch round. Cut the round in half and then into quarters and finally into eighths, so that it forms 8 wedged triangle shapes. Use a spatula to transfer the scones to the prepared baking sheet, and sprinkle the top of each one with the coarse sugar. Bake for 12 to 15 minutes, or until the bottoms are golden and the scones are cooked through.

The Local Food Report: Meet monkfish

Have you ever seen a monkfish? They are, to quote my husband "pretty ugly looking things" that look more like Gelatinous Starship Enterprises than any fish you've ever seen. Here—take a look:

Just to be clear, that man up there is not my husband. He's someone who went fishing with Kayman Charters in Gloucester, and they were nice enough to share his photo with me because I did not have one of my own. You see what Alex means, though, about the Gelatinous Starship Enterprise, right? That monkfish must be at least two thirds head.

Which is a shame, really, because the only meat is in the tail. There's the tail meat and the liver, which is sort of attached to the tail, but we never see the liver around here because it's such a delicacy in Asia. They cure it and serve it as nigiri or sashimi in places like Japan, and it's in such high demand over there that the boats here cut it away from the tail meat and ship it off to market right away.

At any rate, for each twenty pounder, you only get about five to seven pounds of meat, and even that is a lot of work. First you have to deal with all the slime and gook that comes with the head, and then, once you get past that, you have to separate the skin from the meat, and then the meat from a sausage-casing like layer that surrounds it. It's hard work.

But if you like monkfish—and I do—it's worth it. The meat has a texture similar to shrimp or lobster meat that, when cooked properly, snaps rather nicely when you eat it. (It's also known as Poor Man's Lobster for this reason.) Not only that, but it has a subtle, not-too-fishy flavor, sort of like a cross between cod and striped bass. This lends it well to chefs and high end restaurants, but most people don't really cook it that often at home.

Alex says that's mainly because for a long time, monkfish has had a reputation around here as trash fish. Locally, the boats that get it are mostly bringing it in as bycatch—scallop dredgers and groundfish draggers pick it up as they move along the ocean floor—although some boats are also starting to target it. Which leads to the other reason it's not that popular—sustainability issues. While most scientists agree that monkfish population levels are fine, dragging is not considered a sustainable harvesting method because of the bycatch and the damage it does to the ocean floor. That said, according to NOAA, monkfish habitat is only minimally vulnerable to these fishing gears.

It's kind of hard to know what to think. But my guess would be that monkfish, like most things, is fine in moderation. And a fish this ugly, well, it needs some love.

If you're into it, here are some recipes to try. If you took me up on my suggestion to make ratatouille this summer, I'd go for this Cooking Light recipe for Monkfish with Ratatoille. I've also been eying this Monkfish and Clam Bourride, from a 2002 issue of Gourmet, and The Minimalist's take on Monkfish with Mashed Potatoes and Thyme looks simple and elegant.

Happy cooking!

The concept is this

Is anyone up for a lasagna today? I'm thinking a summer-in-the-winter, put-up pesto and tomato sauce and homemade bechamel type of gig. Takers? Yes? Ok.

There's only one hitch. I made this about a month ago, and although I can still remember the fabulous August brightness of the tomatoes and the way the pesto made me feel like maybe, just maybe it might be time for a pond swim that afternoon, I did not exactly write down the recipe. Not that I had a recipe to begin with, which is why I think this might be okay. The thing about lasagna is, you really don't need a recipe. You need to understand the concept, and the concept is this:

Find a box of noodles, the thick, flat kind with crinkly edges made for lasagna (or make some yourself). Get out a 9" by 13" casserole dish, and butter it up. Go down to your freezer, or open your pantry, and pull out a pint of that fantastic tomato sauce you made back when you couldn't even imagine the meaning of the words Wintery Mix. While you're at it, grab a half cup or so of the pesto you made with your neighbor's extra basil. Now root around in the fridge and hope for some milk, and butter, and mozzarella, and grab a few spoonfuls of flour and make a bechamel sauce. (Preferably this one, but if you have your own favorite, you just need a similar amount.)

At this point you could also get out some frozen spinach or pick some fresh from the greenhouse, and cook it down with a little bit of olive oil and garlic. Or maybe you have a freezer full of sundried tomatoes. Or, you could be into sauteed mushrooms. Whatever you're feeling here, go with it.


Finally, heat up a pot of water, add a pinch of salt, and boil those noodles. Now comes the hard part: drain the noodles, put them back in the pot, and drizzle some olive oil over them. The noodles will be hot, painfully hot, but if you're like me, you won't have any dishgloves so you'll go ahead and burn your hands, because you need to work quickly before they all stick together in a glob.

Spread a tiny blob of bechamel across the bottom of the casserole dish. Put a layer of noodles on top. Then a layer of tomato sauce, then more noodles, then maybe a few dollops of pesto and whatever vegetables you've got. Then another layer of noodles, and a smooth one of bechamel, and so on and so on. Until you've got a big, layered sandwich of tomatoes and noodles and pesto and vegetables and creamy, delightful sauce. Then, when you get to the top, layer on some slices of mozzarella and maybe even a bit of grated Parmesan.

And there you go. You've got yourself an oven-ready Winter-Into-Summer Lasagna. Happy Monday, everyone, and happy almost-March. Only 22 days until spring!

The Local Food Report: school lunch finances

Hi! Today's Local Food Report is the final piece in my three-part series on Island Grown Schools. We've talked about warm, locally baked snacks, and farming and gardening in the curriculum, and that was nice. But today, we need to talk about something a little more serious: the finances of getting local food into school lunch.

The way Noli Taylor, the coordinator for Island Grown Schools, explains it, school lunch works like this:

Most schools, across the country, have contracts to get their meals from corporate food service providers. These providers are big, often multi-national companies that provide meals to schools, hospitals, and prisons. They buy huge amounts of food from big, industrial farms at very low prices, making lunch inexpensive for the schools and profitable for the companies. Some schools have exclusive contracts, meaning they can only buy their food from the companies, and others have looser arrangements. Either way, school food budgets are based on these sorts of deals, which means there's very little money available for lunch.

Clearly, this is a national issue that needs attention. And as you probably know, it's getting it—through programs like Alice Waters' Edible Schoolyard and First Lady Michelle Obama's Let's Move campaign. But in the meantime, people like Taylor and organizations like Island Grown Initiative (or IGI, the Martha's Vineyard non-profit that works to increase supply and demand for locally grown food on the island and is behind Island Grown Schools) are working to get healthy, local food into school lunches whether there's funding or not.

Usually, there's not. But that hasn't stopped Taylor. She's set up meetings on the Vineyard between local farmers and food service directors so that they can talk about price and try to find places where island produce is affordable. It sounds far-fetched, but it turned out veggies like greens are actually cheaper on-island. And in the fall, when the tourists left and schools opened up, farmers were awash in extra produce and were willing to drop their prices for the school.

The most successful program, though, has been the Martha's Vineyard Gleaners. The term gleaning comes out of the industrial revolution, when farmers opened their fields after the harvest to the poor to come and glean whatever produce was left unharvested. Each fall now on the island, farms open their fields to community volunteers and students to collect food that wouldn't otherwise be harvested. Last fall, the gleaners collected over 6,000 pounds of local produce for school cafeterias on the island. Not only was this a lot of produce, but since it was free, there was more money in the budget to spend on other local food that might otherwise have been too expensive.

That's just on the Vineyard. Other schools in our area are making efforts to get local food into their cafeterias, too. Wellfleet Elementary School, for example, just put in a hoophouse last year and started an edible gardening curriculum this fall. And once a month, they open the cafeteria to me and my husband, where we cook up a local fish lunch with product donated from his company, Mac's Seafood. Truro Elementary is working with local farmer Dave Dewitt to put in an experimental bio-char garden, and the food service director there also buys from Dewitt. Gardens are popping up at other schools all over the Cape—Nauset High School is one example—and the school district in Westport buys produce from farms like Noquochoke Orchards in Westport and Quansett Gardens and Tavares Hillside Farms in Dartmouth.

Still, few places have as coordinated a program as what Island Grown Schools has going on the Vineyard. But Taylor's hoping that will change. There are ways to get local food into schools, she says, to get kids interested in growing and eating their own food, to get them to care about supporting their local farms. It's do-able, and she wants to help.

So if you're interested in starting a program like Island Grown Schools or just getting local foods on the radar in your school district, get in touch. Noli Taylor says she'd love to talk, and she can be reached at noli@islandgrown.org, or you can find out more on the IGI website.

Our favorite two

You are not going to believe me, but here goes:

We are still pulling carrots I planted on June 24th, almost seven months ago. I know! I wouldn't believe it myself, except that I wrote down the date in my gardening notebook, and that notebook does not lie. I wrote out the varieties—Purple Haze and Danvers and Atomic Red—and drew a little diagram to show which kind I'd planted in each row.

Then I completely ignored them—forgot to thin them, even—until October, when Alex and I pulled the plastic greenhouse cover over the garden and shut the door. Apparently, they liked this treatment just fine, because when I went foraging after Christmas to see what I might find for a chilly afternoon lunch, I found them stout and sturdy, still a head full of green on top and bright oranges, reds, and purples popping up from down below.

A few of them were carried off by lucky rodents—a mouse maybe, or more likely a vole—but for the most part, we've been getting a full harvest from every row. Some are small, little more than pinky-sized, but others are as round as silver dollars, as long and straight as home-dipped candles.

Mostly, we've been eating them fresh—washed and trimmed and dipped into a bowl of homemade blue cheese dressing or bean dip. But at my mother's suggestion we've also been cooking them down into smooth, velvety soups.

Here are our favorite two—perfect for February and March, for seeing us through.

CARROT GINGER SOUP

This recipe is adapted from The Black Dog Cookbook: Summer on the Vineyard by Joe Hall. I like it because it is quick, easy, delicious, and beautiful. The recipe calls for a lot of ginger—don't add any extra (the soup will get bitter), but don't skimp, either. The ginger adds a lovely bright taste.

1/4 cup olive oil

1 cup diced onion

1/4 cup fresh ginger, peeled and grated

4 cups chopped carrots

4 cups vegetable or chicken stock

1/2 teaspoon salt

2 teaspoons ground coriander

sliced scallions or chives, for garnish

Warm up the oil over medium heat in a large, heavy-bottomed pot. Add the onion and ginger and sauté for 5 minutes, or until the onion starts to get tender.

Add all the remaining ingredients except for the scallions and bring to a boil. Turn the heat down to a simmer and continue cooking, uncovered, for about 15 minutes, or until the carrots are soft.

Puree the soup and serve hot with a sprinkle of scallions on top.

MOROCCAN CARROT SOUP

This recipe is adapted from one my mother found in a Moroccan cookbook from Williams Sonoma. The original name was Chorba b'khisou bil kseksou, or Carrot Soup with Spices. It has a stunning orange color and a lovely texture.

2 tablespoons butter

1 yellow onion, peeled and grated

1 heaping pound carrots, washed, peeled, and grated

2 cloves garlic, peeled and crushed

1/2 teaspoon turmeric

1/2 teaspoon ground ginger

1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon ground paprika

1/2 teaspoon ground cumin

1/2 teaspoon ground cayenne pepper

5 cups chicken stock

1/4 cup dry couscous

2 teaspoons lemon juice

parsley, for garnish

Warm up the butter over medium heat in a large, heavy-bottomed pot. Add the onions and sauté for 5 minutes, then add the grated carrots, garlic, turmeric, ginger, cinnamon, paprika, cumin, and cayenne pepper. Cook for a few seconds, then add the chicken stock.

Bring to a boil, cover, and reduce the heat to low. Simmer for 15 minutes.

Add the couscous, stir until boiling, then cover and turn the heat down to low. Simmer gently for another 20 minutes.

Add the lemon juice and serve hot, topped with a little chopped parsley.

To Jamaica

Hi friends. I just wanted to stop by to let you know that I won't be around here for a few weeks. On Sunday, Alex and I will be getting on a plane and heading down to Jamaica with his brother's family and a few friends. According to my friend Kristen who's already down there, it is 80 degrees and sunny, and soon our biggest worry will be whether to put on SPF 30 or 45. I can't wait!

While I'm gone, there won't be any new Local Food Reports—WCAI is doing a Valentine's Day fundraiser next week and the week after that will be a repeat. I'm not sure what our access to internet will be like, so I probably won't be posting around here either. But just know that I'll be thinking about you, and toasting you with some Ting, and I'll see you when we get back on Monday the 21st.

Oh, and happy Valentine's Day! The flowers are for you.

The Local Food Report: in the classroom

So, do you remember Tristan from last week? Today we're going to talk about his school again. This week, I want to tell you about all the things Island Grown Initiative (IGI) and its program Island Grown Schools are doing to get farming and local food into the curriculum.

Let's start with the garden:

That up there is a classmate of Tristan's, working on pulling weeds and mulch away from the beds. The day I visited, the kids were discovering the results of a winter-long experiment, which involved trying different kinds of mulches on their raised beds and doing soil tests and hunting for worms to see which one worked best.

A lot of schools have gardens, but what's amazing is that thanks to Island Grown Schools, every public school on the Vineyard has a garden. That makes seven gardens in all, plus three pre-school gardens and one inter-generational garden with teens and low-income seniors at Island Elderly Housing. I think that's pretty cool.

Not only that, but the people over at IGI have worked with over 100 teachers in every grade level and in every school on the island to develop food and farm based lessons that work in all sorts of curricula. For instance the third graders at Chilmark, when they study colonial life, also study colonial herb gardens. If you think about it, food and gardening and farming can really connect to anything—whether it's vocab during seventh grade Spanish or first graders learning about area and perimeters.

When I was there, the kids in Tristan's K-1 class were doing a whole unit on farming. They told me facts about pigs—like how six to twelve are born in a litter, and that they come out with shaggy black hair like their parents, and that it takes eight months before they grow up enough to have their own babies. And cows. Did you know that Holsteins produce the most milk?

Anyway. The thing about the Vineyard effort is that it's coherent. A lot of places are trying to get programs going—trying to get local food into cafeterias and gardens into schoolyards and farming into the curriculum—but very few are doing it in such a comprehensive way. IGI didn't just work with the schools to get a local baker offering warm, healthy snacks, or just put in a garden here and a garden there, or help coordinate a few lessons based on farming facts. Because it's working on an island—a place with limits, a specific, bordered place—it's been able to do much more than that. It's been able to make sure, in a careful, step-by-step way, that it's reaching everyone.

That's harder to do on the mainland, for sure. But I think with the Vineyard as a model, it's possible. School districts, after all, have their own borders and perimeters. If you're interested, there's more inspiration over here. Thoughts?