What You Need to Bake Bread

...resources and tools: Bake With Baker Again, get yourself a copy of Baker’s book. It’s a class in baking organized into recipes in ascending order of difficulty. Work your way thought the book and by the end you’ll be a baking god and the life of every party. Baker is a fan of whole grains and sourdough and if that isn’t enough he has the only decent gluten free bread recipe I’ve ever tasted. At the end of the book you’ll find cookie and scone reci...

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The Jerusalem Cookbook

...a wonderful dinner party last week and cooked all of the courses from this book. Now, Kazi is an expert cook, so I’m sure she doesn’t really need a book to put on an good spread, but she assured us that she was experimenting on us: she’d never tried any of the recipes before, and was cooking them straight out of the book as written. The meal was astounding. Of course, her beautiful presentation and the excellent company had much to do with it, but...

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Building a Makeshift Treadmill Desk

...s, although I’m standing on the side rails … Say something about your blog/homestead/books . . . I’m the author of the novel Place Last Seen (Picador USA, 2000), and have been blogging at Livingsmallblog.com since 2002. I’ve written for Culinate.com, Ethicurean.com and have a cookbook review column at Bookslut.com. I’ve been published in the Best Food Writing of 2010, and am currently working on a book proposal for a nonfiction book about finding...

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Hamlet’s BlackBerry: Dealing With the Crisis of Overconnection

...nversations with friends and relatives fill me in on what’s going on. Read books made out of paper! Even e-book technology can encourage mindless surfing. Reading an old fashioned book can help develop powers of concentration and focus. Use old tools: Powers gives the example of note taking with paper and pen. Sometimes older tools can help reduce distractions–your paper notebook, after all, is not going to chime in with an incoming email. Rituals...

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