Stirred, Not Shaken

...ties us to nature and I look forward to stirring preparations and perhaps making them with a few close friends. In fact, I’m much more excited about making preparations than it buying a package through the mail. Steiner’s set of herbs all grow well here and many of them I have already. But a cow is kinda hard to come by in Los Angeles. While it may be heresy to some, perhaps we’ll have to come up with some modifications to the rituals that make s...

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The New Homemade Kitchen

...ioned bread baking, the IDT offered classes in mustard, cheese making, jam making, coffee roasting, cocktail crating and much more. Joseph gathered the recipes and collected wisdom of these classes into his posthumously published book The New Homemade Kitchen: 250 Recipes and Ideas for Reinventing the Art of Preserving, Canning, Fermenting, Dehydrating, and More just released this month by Chronicle. The section on cocktails is a good example of t...

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On the History and Uses of the Router

...vid, guided me through the creation of the through and half-blind dovetail joints you can see above. Don’t forget safety. The thing spins at 27,500 rpm and it takes quite a while for it to come to a stop. And don’t forget to turn the power off when making adjustments. The one minor flaw in my old Porter Cable is the power switch. It’s simultaneously difficult to switch off and easy to accidentally switch on. I’ve heard that the new model’s switch...

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Saturday Linkages: Logs, Invasives and Italian Veggies

...http://www.uvm.edu/~uvmpr/?Page=news&storyID=17209#.Ut8epeX8ggE.twitter … Urban Nature: How to Foster Biodiversity in World’s Cities by Richard Conniff: Yale Environment 360 from @YaleE360 http://e360.yale.edu/feature/urban_nature_how_to_foster_biodiversity_in_worlds_cities/2725/#.Ut78MbYkqKk.twitter … Building With Logs – 1957 USDA Government Pamphlet http://feedly.com/e/SggnDsK7 Milky The Marvelous Milking Cow toy (1977) – Boing Boing http://bo...

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24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

...Our beat on this blog has been appropriate technology, gardening and urban homesteading (whatever that means!). Ironically, Kelly and I have had to spend a lot of time in front of screens researching and writing about these very analog subjects that, for the most part, involve an off-line engagement with the natural world. We’ve done this at a time of the explosive growth of social media. Early on there was a line of thought that social media coul...

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