Fabulous Postcards from HenCam

...all handsome gentlemen holding poultry! Our friend Terry over at the great chicken site HenCam has produced three lovely sets of postcard books based on antique photos of people with animals. One set is people and chickens, the second is people with other livestock, and the third in people and their dogs. (She promises she’s trying for a cat collection, but it seems kitties were a little too sly for early cameras, making good pictures (as opposed...

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Home cooking advice?

...ay you’re going to be making soup stock for something (or something you’re making will yield soup stock) — what else can you make which will use the rest of that soup stock? Same for cooking up a pot of beans, or a chicken, or a loaf of bread. Same goes for opening a jar of olives or splurging on a hunk of good cheese. Multitask those ingredients. 5) Pick a cooking style and try to stick with it. Some may disagree with this vehemently, but I’ve de...

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SIPS and Kraut at Project Butterfly

...ject #2: How to make sauerkraut! Contribution:: $20 [ includes a delicious light vegetarian meal and drinks ] Location: Project Butterfly Loft 821 Traction Ave #108 Los Angeles CA 90013 Blurbs: “The Urban Homestead…touches on vegetable gardening, poultry, DIY cleaning products and beer making — all outlined with a sense of play and fun. —Whole Life Times “…a delightfully readable and very useful guide to front- and back-yard vegetable gardening, f...

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Eating the Void: On Making a Raw Café Gratitude Chocolate Hazelnut Pie

I have a small collection of odd cookbooks that have, for the most part, gone unused which is probably a good thing. One that’s collected dust for years is I Am Grateful: Recipes and Lifestyle of Café Gratitude. Friends who have been to this oh-so-California restaurant say that’s it’s good while simultaneously a parody of itself. As the intro to the cookbook notes, The Café Gratitude menu gives you the opportunity to start practicing saying somet...

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I Spent a Year Making a Bed

How’s that for a click bait title? But I really did spend almost a year on this with most of that time eaten up teaching myself how to do marquetry and inlay work. As I mentioned before, my first attempts didn’t go well and I spent a lot of time searching for advice on how to do this particular style of Art Nouveau work that almost nobody does anymore. Sanding and finishing metal and wood right next to each other also proved difficult and I’m not...

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