After a twenty-year hiatus, I started baking my own bread again. What was the impetus? The New York Times and no-knead bread. These days, my daily bread is Peter Reinhart's Struan bread, but I still have fond memories of the first no-knead loaves that came out of my Dutch oven.

Metal shavings in a can of tuna. Lucky I saw them.

An old Japanese carbon steel knife with a wooden handle; bought cheaply from a friend of a friend who was moving.

I also use the glass jars from the supermarket spices -- wash them up and relabel them with my label machine. I refill them from the bulk spices at my food co-op. They're stored in a dark cupboard, on several of those revolving carousels.

Looks organized, but I *do* have spices that are years old and need to be tossed. Mostly things like oregano and tarragon. I am cooking Middle Eastern, Persian, South-Southeast-East Asian food these days.

Dal made with red lentils and amchoor (sour mango powder), over a mixture of long-grain brown and red rice, with a topping of fresh green chutney (cilantro. mint, red onion, garlic, chillies, lemon juice, and raw sugar).

My one-cup tea mug and strainer. In constant use. I have learned to economize by steeping old leaves with a few pinches of new. Keep adding pinches, I can get four or five cups out of the strainer before I put the leaves in the compost bucket and start fresh.

This may work for me because I drink assertive China teas like lapsang souchong and pu-erh.

Start pasta. Cut up feta cheese if not crumbled. Cut up onion and garlic, saute. Add frozen chopped spinach to onions and garlic. Can also add frozen, chopped bitter greens, like collards. Combination of spinach and bitter greens is best. When frozen greens have thawed and cooked, add cut-up or crumbled feta. Let feta melt. Add salt and freshly-ground pepper. Drain pasta. Put feta and greens over pasta. This dish freezes well, so make a lot and freeze some to microwave later.

I didn't give amounts because you'll have your own ideas about the right proportions. You could of course do this with fresh greens. That would taste better but take longer. The virtue of this quick-and-easy method is that all the ingredients can be kept on hand for spur-of-the-moment meals. You can cut corners even further with pre-crumbled feta and a jar of minced garlic.

Frozen grapes. They become sweeter as they freeze (which is why icewine). Ice cream for us dieters.

I'm already making my own ginger beer, but would love to have more recipes. My one attempt at winging it, the carrot-ginger soda, was a disaster. Not only did it taste bad, it blew up.

A slice of homemade whole wheat bread, topped with white cheddar cheese, heated in the microwave and sprinkled with salt and freshly-ground pepper.

I weigh myself every morning but ... I don't take the weight seriously. I enter the figure in an online program called the Hacker's Diet, which uses an averaging algorithm to calculate the weight TREND. It graphs my weight for me, as white dots for the weight readings and a red line for the weighted average. I am losing between half a pound and a pound a week. My graph is a red line sloping downwards, with the white dots dancing below. My weight can vary by several pounds (water weight, how much I ate the previous day) but as long as the red line keeps going down, I know I'm losing weight. The program doesn't cost anything. It's worth a try.

Tracking calories with Lose It is also helping.