Fallen Fruit

April 20, 2007

...nothing to lose but your hunger They also have a set of handy maps of publicly accessible fruit in a couple of neighborhoods and a video for those who missed the fun last night. Rumor has it they will be doing a jam making session sometime this summer and SurviveLA will be there. Now we just need another collective of clever revolutionaries to deal with LA’s other great street resource–abandoned mattresses and couches....

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A Parvati Solar Cooker

Mr. Homegrown

March 24, 2008

Solar

4 Comments

...conventional stove, but with a solar cooker there is no danger of burning, making the process, in our opinion, easier than stove-top cooking. Consider a solar cooker a kind of low-powered crock pot for lazy and cheap people–good for things like rice, beans, soups and stews, but not good for sauteing. Just remember the oven mitts–this thing gets hot! When the sun gets higher in the sky, as we move into summer, this cooker will reach even higher tem...

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In Praise of Disorder

Mr. Homegrown

March 29, 2008

Thoughtstylings

7 Comments

...assed away recently, conceived his life’s work when faced with the task of making safer streets in a small Dutch town that had run out of money. He fixed the problem with the radical idea of removing almost all the traffic lights, signs, curbs even the lane stripes, creating a concept known as “shared space.” Monderman asks, “Who has the right of way? I don’t care. People . . . have to find their own way, negotiate for themselves, use their own br...

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Mead!

Mr. Homegrown

January 24, 2008

Fermentation, Food

7 Comments

...g. The difference between the two readings will be the percentage of alcohol in our mead. A big disclaimer here. We don’t know how well this recipe works, but we’ll let you all know. In the meantime, for those dying to get started, the National Honey Board has some free mead making instructions here (pdf). Lastly, in our search for mead information, we kept coming across ads for chain mail and peasant pants, and figured out that for some reason me...

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An open letter to Trader Joes

Mr. Homegrown

October 16, 2007

Animals, Chickens

16 Comments

...moved the rooster since that would signify that these eggs are fertilized, making us think that your package design folks were snoozing during their high school biology classes. We replaced the picturesque barn with a windowless industrial shed to show the most prevalent housing for poultry and, more than likely, where these cage free eggs came from. The family poultry farm alluded to in your cover art has long since been replaced by huge industri...

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