2022 in Review: Cats, Mushrooms and Politics

...orhood. I call this one the Death Star. I got lazy and did not make enough bread. This one is one of the only loaves I baked. On one of my many Pomona pet sitting sojourns I discovered an abandoned sushi buffet shaped like a boat. And a brutalist Baptist church. You’ll also find this mysterious, unmarked business. While in Pomona I took a zoom class on how to draw cartoon characters. The instructor had us draw Spiderman. He did it by leading us th...

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Our Rocket Stove

...dered making a cob oven, a mud domed wood fired oven in which you can cook bread and pizza. There’s a trend in the eco-world to build cob ovens and we felt a certain pressure to keep up with the eco-Joneses. We started to build the base for one and then began to think about how often we would actually build a fire, especially considering that it has to burn for several hours before a cob oven gets hot enough to cook in. Also, where would we get th...

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Earth Building Classes!

...s were made on site by students using native soil, and they’ve been baking bread and making pizza with ingredients grown on-site! It was great to work with such an enthusiastic group – cooking with dirt is more than mud pies! Got something going on?: Drop us a line! We’re anxious to hear about new projects, preservation efforts, classes and folks doing recreational or professional adobe work in California. There’s a lot of people in our community...

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The Sound is Forced, the Notes are Few

...he years have proven useful in this crapular period. I’m happy to have the bread making, coffee roasting, carpentry and other skills to fall back on. I guess I’ll have to do some negotiations with the muses on how to write about those skills. At the same time there’s an alternate history universe in which Kelly and I are more lacking in morals and better at the business side of things. In that universe we would have capitalized on the success of o...

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Shoemaking Advice?

...reason every kitchen seemed to have a decorative plaque made of lacquered bread dough. The subject matter was usually a mushroom, or a cluster of mushrooms. Sometimes an owl. More rarely a Holly Hobby-type figure. Here endeth the lesson.) Free People actually seems like a fine book. It basically steps you through making one basic type of shoe that you can modify in different ways. Erik wailed about the horrible hippie-ness of it all when I showed...

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