Earth Building Classes!

...e 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 that we ha...

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Mallow (Malva parviflora) an Edible Friend

...into a green sauce and use the leaves as a substitute for grape leaves for making dolmas. Modern Mexicans also make a green sauce with the leaves. If any of you readers have recipes, please send them along. If that ain’t enough, the mucilaginous nature of the plant can be exploited by making a decoction of the leaves and roots to use as a shampoo, hair softener, and treatment for dandruff. And yet, like so many other gardening books, the oh-so-bou...

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Worth Doing From Scratch: Corn Tortillas

...works great but my Mexicano friends in the know suggested a wooden press. Making masa from scratch is a huge amount of work and I’ve done just fine with supermarket masa harina. As I like to measure dry ingredients by weight I’ve figured out that for enough tortillas for four people you need to mix 250 grams of flour with 300 grams of water. Cook as many tortillas at once as you can. I can do three at a time on our stove. Cooking one at a time ta...

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How to Make Your Own DIY Instant Oatmeal

...and this is also when I add my emphatically unsoggy nuts. I’m mulling over making a savory version of this to use as a quick meal/snack. Something involving a trip to the Japanese market for some seaweed and maybe a bit of instant dashi powder? A note on oats. There can be confusion over oats. Whole oats are called oat groats. Don’t use those. Steel cut or Irish style oats won’t work either. You want the flattened kind of oat. Those come in two ba...

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Baking Bread with Specialty Malts

...king and just use malted grains directly in your bread. The grains used in making beer are, mostly, barley that has been malted (sprouted) and then either caramelized or roasted. To make beer you soak the grains in warm water to extract the sugars that form in the malting process. Fermenting that sugary malt water creates alcohol. Most of the grain used to make beer is two or six-row malt. You add so-called “specialty” grains (that have been caram...

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