Get Baking and Share the Loaves

...this bread!” To pick up the basics of home baking I can’t say enough good things about Baker’s book, Josey Baker Bread . Baker’s previous job was in science education which makes him the perfect person to write a baking cookbook. The book is laid out to teach you all that you need to know about bread sequentially. You go from a simple yeasted bread up almost to the Einkorn baguette level. As Josey Baker says, get baking and share the loaves!...

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A Review of Masanobu Fukuoka’s Sowing Seeds in the Desert

...kuoka illustrates this approach in a pen and ink drawing reproduced in the book. Of the drawing he says, I call it “the cave of the intellect.” It shows two men toiling in a pit or a cave swinging their pickaxes to loosen the hard earth. The picks represent the human intellect. The more these workers swing their tools, the deeper the pit gets and the more difficult it is for them to escape. Outside the cave I draw a person who is relaxing in the s...

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Failed Experiment: Bermuda Buttercup or Sour Grass (Oxalis pes-caprae) as Dye

...when I start a project, but I felt lazy. I don’t know if this is a flawed book or not–I’m not judging yet. It’s on probation. It’s a pretty book, and inspirational in that it makes you want to dye everything you can lay your hands on–hell it makes you want to raise your own sheep and spin your own yarn, so you can dip it in acorn, cabbage and fennel dye, sing some folk songs, dance a dance, compost the solids and acidify your garden soil.with the...

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Acedia Part II: An Internet of Narcissism

...ch my friends helpfully provided just for this purpose. Harpo goes at this book with gusto, shredding the remaining pages and tossing the book off the shelf where it thuds to the floor and scares the cats and the dogs. Lasch had the same fury in his critique of the self centered culture of the 60s and 70s. I suspect much of the revival of Lasch has a lot to do with the fact that the social media that dominates our lives is nothing more than an obs...

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Nomadic Furniture

...ed designers. Nomadic Furniture contains instructions for cardboard seats, bookshelves, lamps made from milk jugs, hexagonal dining sets as well as a two page hymn to the waterbed (ok, not sure about that thoughtstyling). The subtitle of the book sums it up, “how to build and where to buy lightweight furniture that folds, inflates, knocks down, stacks, or is disposable and can be recycled.” You can see more of their work thanks to a recent retrosp...

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