Beans 101 (Return of Bean Friday!)

March 1, 2013

...en change the name: Crostini. See how marketing works? Toast up some stale bread. Rub it with a piece of garlic. Drizzle with olive oil. Then put a spoonful beans on top. Beans are a great side, of course. If you eat meat, you can use beans to help round out your plate. Beans and sausages. Beans and chicken breast du jour. Pork chops and beans. Last week Erik and I had a rare, fancy meal out and I had a magnificent piece of honey-cured salmon on a...

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How To Make a Sourdough Starter

Mr. Homegrown

November 10, 2012

Bread, Food, Videos

42 Comments

...starter that you use to “inoculate” a larger batch of starter to use in a bread recipe. Keep your starter at room temperature and feed every day. Alternately, you can put it in the fridge if you don’t want to feed it all the time. When you want to wake it up, take it out of the fridge and feed for a day or two before you bake with it. You’ll never go back to commercial yeast once you get used to the taste of bread made with a sourdough starter. Y...

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Craig Ponsford Bakes Whole Wheat Ciabatta

Mr. Homegrown

November 22, 2013

Bread, Food

29 Comments

...ut this and with good reason. As he puts it, when he hears about someone’s bread disaster, 99% of the time it’s because they did not use a scale. Rather than dust flour on work surfaces in order to handle dough you’ll see Ponsford use water instead. He also wets containers that he puts dough into. It’s a lot neater and less flour gets incorporated in the dough. Whole wheat doughs need to be wet. When he does use flour, as in the end of the video h...

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Gourmet Foraging and Advanced Acorn Processing

Mrs. Homegrown

October 24, 2013

Food, Foraging, How-to, Preparedness

31 Comments

...burgers in my time, and I’ve come to think of them mostly as excuse to eat bread and condiments. I’ve never had a veggie burger good enough to eat on its own. The acorn burgers they treated us to were not just “good for veggie” but some of the tastiest food I’ve ever encountered. It turns out that acorns have umami qualities, that savoriness that characterizes meat and mushrooms, along with a delicate sweetness. You just need to know how to bring...

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2022 in Review: Cats, Mushrooms and Politics

Mr. Homegrown

December 31, 2022

Thoughtstylings

5 Comments

...apture at least one swarm of bees and hand them off to a friend who has an urban farm and apiary. Kelly and I have a pet sitting arrangement with some friends of ours. When we go away they watch our menagerie and when they go away I head out to Pomona to look after Harpo the parrot and his dog, cat and gecko companions. Random Wanderings When you see a display of fake plastic corn dogs you have to take a picture. I tried and failed to get through...

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