purple carrots

When any of us think of carrots, the first thing that comes to mind is a bright orange vegetable. But if you do some research into the history of carrots (I know, I'm a dork), you'll find that orange carrots are a relative novelty compared to  the other colors of carrots.

Remember when I wrote about yellow carrots? Until the 1600s, carrots were usually one of two colors: yellow, like I posted about before, and PURPLE.

The lighting is bad here... but these carrots were actually really dark! I got them from my CSA, and had first thought they must be a trendy new breed of carrots. Little did I know it's actually a very old strain!

A little internet sleuthing (supported by the Carrot Wikipedia page) tells me that orange carrots were cultivated in the Netherlands in the 1600s in honor of the House of Orange. Before that, any recipe that called for carrots either had white-ish, yellow, or purple carrots!

They taste just the same as orange carrots, but feel much more historic (ha ha). Here we enjoyed them raw in a salad.

new layout!

Ta da! What do you all think? I'm madly in love with this new layout. The header image came from some tulips I loved at the Boston Public Garden (I included a pic of them in this post in 2008), and the color scheme, while arguably not as "me" as the former black-and-bright-green ordeal, is friendlier on the eyes.

For my reference as much as yours (I have a bad memory and a tendency to memorialize ugly things past), here's a screenshot of the old color scheme:

I am incredibly proud of figuring out the proper CSS to add, center, resize, and not mess up my header image. I have been fighting with CSS a lot at work lately, and am finally starting to feel like I have a vague idea of how to make things go the way I want.

This morning, thinking how unsure I was about switching layouts, I realized that despite claiming not to like change, I change all the time, and I roll with it pretty well. I just don't like liminal areas--I don't like when things are in the process of changing. So I went all out and got all the major stuff over with today. There will be a couple more minor renovations over the next month or so, but now I've gone through the biggest change, and I feel good.

How do you all deal with change? Does that apply to transient things like website layouts? And most importantly, WHAT DO YOU THINK OF MY NEW LAYOUT?!