Stern Sprouted Wheat Vegan Cookie or Health Bar Type Things

...closest I’m going to get to dessert for a while. The recipe comes from the book, From the Wood-Fired Oven by Richard Miscovich, where the recipe is used as an example of what you can cook in a bread oven which has almost cooled off, because these bake at very low temps. Actually, they’d be good candidates for a solar oven. Or even dashboard cooking in the summer! There are four ingredients: sprouted wheat, raw almonds, dried fruit and a pinch of s...

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SolSource Review Part I: Assembly

When we wrote our second book, Making It, I wanted to include a parabolic solar cooker project. I found a castoff satellite TV dish and covered it with aluminum foil. The problem was how to position a cooking surface in front of it while simultaneously tracking the sun. If you knew how to weld this might be possible– if still a challenging project. I just couldn’t figure out a way to do it without custom welding and gave up on my dream of solar g...

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The Tiny House

...or growing your own food. And these small building literally sip utilities making them ideal for hooking up to solar power and very cheap to heat and cool. They are also expandable as your needs or family grows. And perhaps most importantly, they prevent expansion of all the things we don’t need, the giant plasma screens, the inflatable Christmas decor and all the other clutter causing detritus of our consumer culture. For more information on the...

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There Will Be Kraut–Lecture on Fermentation at the Historic Greystone Mansion

...ro-biotic” supplements. Erik Knutzen, co-author of The Urban Homestead and Making It: Radical Home Ec for a Post-Consumer World, will give an overview of the world’s fermented foods and discuss how you can make your own. He’ll cover everything from sauerkraut to pickles to sourdough bread to the great kombucha controversy to the health benefits of fermented foods. He may even discuss arctic explorer Knud Rasmussen’s untimely death from eating ferm...

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Mead!

...ut we thought we’d note how we made it, based on a recipe in Ken Schramm’s book The Compleat Meadmaker. We downsized the recipe from five gallons to one gallon, figuring that we’ll experiment with a few different small batches rather than taking a chance on one big batch. Here’s how we did it after first sanitizing everything with Idophor sanitizer: 1. Boil 1/5th of a gallon of water (we used bottled water since our tap water is a bit on the heavy...

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