Fallen Fruit

...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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An open letter to Trader Joes

...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 The family poultry farm alluded to in your cover art has long since been replaced by huge industri...

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Mead!

...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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Damned Figs!

...r of . . . Styrofoam packing materials. We tried everything from drying to making jam with these accursed figs but never got satisfactory results. During the day flies laid their larvae in the fruits yielding gooey masses that would drop to the ground to provide rotting fig feasts to visiting rats and possums. We replaced the fig tree with the Valencia orange tree in the photo above. One of the most important lessons we’ve learned in our ten years...

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Spent Grain Bread–We Brew Econo

...ment, as a flavoring for our wild yeast bread (recipe and instructions for making that bread here—we added 4.5 ounces of the spent grains to the dough–and we just threw them in whole without grinding them up as some folks on the internets suggest). The rich, smoky taste and the dark color these grains imparted to the bread makes us want to brew another batch of beer soon, if just to make bread. The spent grains we didn’t use for bread got fed to t...

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