Search Results for: label/homegrown%20evolution%20amazon%20store/2011/04/making-it/2010/06/the-urban-homestead

971 results

Growing Chayote

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Gardening
16 Comments
...sely intertwined the chayote with an equally prodigious passion fruit vine making for a combo that produces many pounds of fruit all summer long. Chayote (Sechium edule), for those not in the know, is a wonder plant of the gourd family hailing from Mexico and Central America. It has a mild slightly sweet cucumber-like taste. They can be boiled, pan fried, steamed, baked, pickled or chopped up and tossed raw in a salad. Though requiring a fair amou...

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Mead!

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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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A Parvati Solar Cooker

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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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Spent Grain Bread–We Brew Econo

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Miscellaneous
4 Comments
...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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Allium ursinum

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Gardening
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...bears and wild boar. People can eat em’ too, with both the bulb and leaves making a tasty addition to a number of dishes (see a detailed report on Allium ursinum in the Plants for a Future website). Favoring semi-shade, Allium ursinum thrives in moist, acidic soil–forest conditions, in other words. In short, not appropriate for our climate in Los Angeles, but folks in the northwest might consider planting some. Like all members of the Allium speci...

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