Author: Mr. Homegrown

Discover the Magic of Home Milling this Saturday

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Bread, Events, Food
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In my opinion, way, way too many home bakers don’t know about the benefits of milling your own flour. If you’re in LA this weekend and are interested in getting more intimate with your flour, there’s a fun event at the King’s Roost featuring Paul LeBeau, who will be debuting a revolutionary new home grain mill called the MockMill. The MockMill attaches to your Kitchen Aid and is considerably less expensive than other home mills. Please come, if just to taste what bread made from freshly mixed four tastes like. I’ll be interviewing Paul for the podcast live in front of an audience. Plus you’ll have a chance to meet Guy Frenkel, the baking genius behind this Instagram account. Here’s the 411:

Home Grain Milling Raffle, Meet and Greet at The King’s Roost

Southern California Farmers, Millers and Bakers are meeting up in Silverlake to learn about home grain milling with Paul LeBeau, Managing director of the German mill maker, Wolfgang Mock. We are raffling 2 MockMills along with various locally grown whole grains donated by California farmers. While there is no charge for raffle tickets or the event, we will sell raffle tickets for a third mill and grain basket to benefit the California Grain Campaign, the effort to require 20% of farmers market baked goods to be made with local whole grains by the year 2020.

When and Where:

Saturday, January 28 th , 2-5pm
The King’s Roost
3732 Sunset Blvd, LA, CA 90026
www.kingsroost.com

Organizers:
Guy Frenkel of Ceor Bread, Erik Knutzen of Root Simple, Leyna Lightman, and Roe Sie

Who
Local farmers, millers, and bakers will be there to meet with Paul LeBeau. Paul is the managing director of German based home mill manufacturing company Wolfgang Mock. They have designed an affordable, compact, stone mill attachment for the Kitchen-Aid and, like Roe Sie, the owner of The King’s Roost, they believe that every home should have a grain mill.

Why
To share the benefits of milling fresh flour at home. Benefits like making fresher healthier more nutritious foods for less money, while supporting the local economy, increasing food security and decreasing our impact on the environment.

Where
The King’s Roost in Silver Lake is LA’s first and only urban homesteading store and learning center. We believe it is the only brick and mortar store in the country that carries a full line of home grain mills. We provide classes and supplies not just for milling and baking, but also for chicken keeping, bee keeping, soap and candle making, brewing, fermenting, and aquaponics.

For more information contact: Roe Sie at [email protected]

Bill Cunningham’s Uniform

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Design
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Bill Cunningham at Fashion Week. Photo: Jiyang Chen.

Bill Cunningham at Fashion Week. Photo: Jiyang Chen.

Some time ago and to much favorable response, Kelly announced her equivalent of a moon shot: the sewing and deployment of a practical, everyday uniform. With pockets, of course. Like most NASA scale projects, there have been cost overruns, delays and setbacks. Hopefully she’ll be getting back to it soon.

One person that did figure out a personal uniform was the late New York Times fashion and society photographer Bill Cunningham, the subject of an entertaining documentary you can watch in Netflix, “Bill Cunningham New York.” Cunningham had an eye for creative people, not necessarily rich or connected, with a sense of fashion. He cared little for the niceties of life, preferring to dine on $3 sandwiches, get around on a bicycle and sleep in his studio surrounded by filing cabinets full of 35mm negatives.

He also managed to engineer a uniform for himself in keeping with his frugal lifestyle, but at the same time, oddly stylish. Wherever Cunningham went you’d see him in a French worker’s jacket or bleu de travail. Reading between the lines in the documentary, it seems like he’d stock up on them when the Times would send him to Paris.

Blue worker’s shirts and jackets have a long history in all Western countries including the U.S. It’s the origin, of course, of “blue collar.” American uniform shops carry something similar but I like the cut and pockets of the French and German versions better (hint to American uniform manufacturers: you should bring back your vintage patterns and slimmer sizes!). Some enterprising Etsy folks have shops devoted to vintage European uniforms. Here’s a French uniform shop selling them for around 18€ (a steal at $20 USD–no wonder Cunningham liked them!).

So enterprising homesteaders, I’m handing you an entrepreneurial opportunity. Buy a pallet of European worker’s uniforms and open yourself a boutique or sell them on Amazon. I’m very surprised no one has tried the latter.

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Saturday Tweets: Waffles, Shipwrecks and Soil Erosion

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Saturday Linkages

The Week in Pictures

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Thoughtstylings
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porchview

Both Kelly and I came down with colds this week. It takes superhuman effort on my part to string words together into sentences when I’m feeling well. With a cold I run an even greater risk of committing grave grammatical and punctuation errors. So rather than write, I decided to shuffle out of the house yesterday and take a few pictures. Above is the view from our front porch.

mallow

The Malva parviflora is back which means that we’ve had some rain this year. I take this as a hopeful sign even though we’re not out of the drought in Southern California.

little library

Our neighbor Jennie Cook (a guest on episode 50 of our podcast) put up a Little Free Library in her parkway a few years ago. It’s been a huge success. I’ve gotten rid of and acquired quite a few books and sometimes I just stroll down to look at what oddball things have shown up.

cactus

One street over a neighbor has a huge stand of this common cactus that I, sadly, don’t know the name of (if you do, please leave a comment).

succulents

A relative sent Kelly a get well bouquet of succulents that now lives on our front steps.

Once I stop swigging DayQuil, Root Simple will be back with our regularly scheduled programming.

Three California Natives that Double as Culinary Herbs

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Gardening
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In my perfect world we Southern Californians would cast off our topiaried Home Depot shrubbery in favor of California natives and a few carefully chosen Mediterranean plants. No more petunias, leaf blowers or fake lawns either. Imagine if all our residential, government and commercial spaces had climate appropriate landscaping? Native insects, birds and other critters would explode in population. It would be a paradise.

It would also be a huge culinary resource. Grow these plants in your garden and you can dodge the controversies of foraging in the wild. Towards that end, I thought I’d look at three easy to grow California natives that look great in a garden and double as culinary herbs.

White sage (Salvia apiana)
If you can grow this one you should. Like most California natives, when used as a culinary herb, it’s much stronger tasting than its cultivated cousins. You need to use it sparingly when cooking with it. Our neighbor has one that made it through our multi-year drought without a drop of water. When you grow it in a garden it’s best to prune it back every year to prevent it from getting rangy looking. You can use the cuttings as smudge sticks or dry them for use in the kitchen. White sage is over-harvested in the wild for the crystal shop smudge stick market which is another reason you should grow this one in your garden.

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Black sage (Salvia melifera)
Our black sage plant has become a giant blob that threatens to take over the backyard. The Chumash people made a tea out of it that functioned as a pain reliever. Like white sage, you can use it in cooking (again, sparingly because of the strong taste).

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California sagebrush (Artemisia californica)
When I imagine of the scent of our local mountains it’s this plant that I think of most. It was the Cahuilla people’s DayQuil. Using it as a culinary herb brings the taste of California to your food. Bees love it too.

You can make a tea with all of these plants and you can dry them for use as a spice herbs. And a reminder that if you’re in a hurry you can dry herbs in a microwave by putting the leaves in one layer between two paper towels. Microwave for one minute and let the leaves cool. If they aren’t brittle, microwave for another minute.

Pascal Baudar (a guest on episode 89 of the Root Simple Podcast) has a phenomenal spice herb blend that uses all three of these herbs combined with some garlic salt. I made a batch last week and have already used it on salmon and popcorn. You can find that recipe on page 158 of his amazing book The New Wildcrafted Cuisine: Exploring the Exotic Gastronomy of Local Terroir. I also strongly suggest taking one of Pascal’s classes.

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