George Rector: M.F.K. Fisher’s Dirty Old Uncle

...or, c.1937. Rector (1878-1947) was a restaurateur and popular author. This book is ostensibly a cookbook–I don’t know what else it would be–but it doesn’t have recipes per se. Instead, he just mentions how to cook things as he’s steaming along. I’m in love with the hardboiled yet strangely comforting prose (though I do have to ignore the casual sexism and racism of the period). Seems most cookbooks these days range from bland to, at best, passiona...

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The Monkey Rope

...ck you should. I just finished reading it and, next to the Bible, no other book comes close to Moby Dick’s sprawling, hallucinatory weirdness. It reads like a long prose poem, a philosophical horror novel, a meditation on our relationship with the natural world and, well, who knows what else. I’m haunted by one chapter in particular, “The Money Rope.” In this chapter Melville describes the narrator, Ishmael, tied by a line to Queequeg, who is assi...

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How to Design and Fabricate Homestead Projects

...raw lots of ideas out quickly. For learning how to draw there is no better book than Drawing From on Right Side of the Brain. Once you go through that you’re ready for a fun book I’m currently making my way through called Sketching for Architecture + Interior Design. Modeling Lastly it’s time to get those ideas in the free version of the 3d program Sketchup. You can learn Sketchup in an evening or two and it has really helped separate the wheat fr...

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Root Simple: 2015 in Review

...affiliate got a lot of comments (Our Amazon Problem) as did my post on Facebook distraction (Is Facebook Useful?). How-to posts I really wish that I could do more how-to posts, but the fact is that they are the most time consuming. We did manage to do a few good ones: Stuff you Learn When the Power Goes Out (with El Niño storms approaching, it’s time to review this one), Restoring a Built-In Ironing Board, Three Things I’ve Learned from Baking Bre...

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Saturday Tweets: Cheap Heaters, Paper Airplanes and Lost Ornaments

...ps://t.co/n4IvJEytGn — Root Simple (@rootsimple) November 3, 2015 Gorgeous book of paper airplanes collected by anthropologist Harry Smith https://t.co/GFtA3w8rUO — Root Simple (@rootsimple) November 3, 2015 It’s time for food justice in Ramona Gardens https://t.co/SoXTBK27L0 — Root Simple (@rootsimple) November 3, 2015 Beautiful, free/open 3D printed book of lost Louis H. Sullivan architectural ornaments https://t.co/IPgqsjSELq — Root Simple (@ro...

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