Putting Your Civic House in Order: How the Young Members of the Family Help

...children can be made the means of contributing to the family income, thus making it possible for them to stay in school longer. In one district two inexperienced young boys in their very first garden venture raised so much produce that they supplied the table for a family of seven for a whole year and had a good deal to sell besides. It proved the practical value of instruction in agriculture, brought about a better appreciation of it and inciden...

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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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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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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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Urban Homesteading: What Went Wrong

...sual glace this morning though the introduction to The Urban Homestead and Making It, I still think they are mostly solid. What I’m more concerned about are things I may have said in book appearances, blog posts and press interviews after the books came out, specifically that the changes we need to make to avert crises such as climate change and healthy food systems are all about personal choice. While I never said we could save the planet by lear...

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