Transcendental Taggers

...g the amenities of rural life, i.e. nature and agriculture, to our lives here in this somewhat ugly but interesting place we call home, the City of Los Angeles. In short, we intend to put the Urban in Urban Homestead. By the way, to the transcendentalist gangbangers who did the tagging – nice handwriting – you are obviously not the product of the same public schools we are....

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Book Review: Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

...eased my heart. I hope you have a chance to hear this podcast, or read her books, and if you’re like me, I hope it eases your heart, too. At one point, and I can’t remember if this was in her interview or in the book, maybe both, she tells of asking her grad students a question. She asks them, “Many of us love the natural world. What would it mean if you knew the world loved you back?” Her students, all being budding scientists, could not accept t...

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By Hand and Eye

...r instance, and the shelf spacing came from an exercise on page 131 of the book. Far from being restrictive, I found the principles in Walker and Tolpin’s book liberating. I now had a starting point for any design project. For modern folks it’s difficult to imagine working without a ruler. Walker and Toplin explain, Instead of asking, “How high is this base dimension in inches?” pre-industrial artisans would have asked, “How tall is this base in p...

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Book Review: A Feast of Weeds by Luigi Ballerini

...ademic tome. Ballerini is erudite, witty, even bawdy at times. Ballerini’s book infuses foraging with history and meaning, Gathering, cooking and reading seems like a triad of imperatives much more appetizing than the believing, obeying, and fighting through which one famous twentieth-century dictator tried to reduce Italy to idiocy (largely succeeding) and the buying, pretending not to know, and not giving a damn about others with which his polit...

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Who Wants Seconds? Book Giveaway

...low me to get my hands on that recipe. Thankfully, with the release of her book Who Wants Seconds? Sociable Suppers for Vegans & Everyone in Between, I don’t have to resort to espionage. The lasagna is on page 142. The book has a wide range of recipes for everything from simple family suppers to big dinner parties both meat dishes and vegan fare. If you’d like to try out some of Jennie’s recipes there’s some on her website for pickled cranberries,...

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