Making It

...ctions for a wide range of projects, from building a 99-cent solar oven to making your own laundry soap to instructions for brewing beer. Making It is the go-to source for post-consumer living activities that are fun, inexpensive and eminently doable. Our goal in this book was to provide really stripped down, simple projects that use only inexpensive, easy to source materials. We also tried to use the same materials and ingredients over and over a...

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Waxed Cloth Food Wrap (Made in a solar oven for bonus self-righteousness points)

...didn’t get too hot. I put the tray in the oven, closed the lid (no clips, making the heating is less efficient on purpose) and waited about 10-15 minutes. The temp would quickly rise above 150F and the wax would dissolve, then I’d take it out before it got any hotter. Fast and easy! Again, the reasons you want to keep the temps low is because 1) you might get discolored wax if you let it bake for too long above 185F and 2) in the very unlikely ev...

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How to Make Stock

...ut them in the freezer if you don’t have time to make stock at the moment. Making fish stock is pretty much like making chicken stock with a carcass. Gather all the fish bits or shells you have and add them to the basic ingredients for veg stock. Skip the mushrooms and potatoes, though. Maybe add a little more onion. Parsley goes well with fish, so try to use that if you can. A bit of thyme is also very nice. White wine is a traditional addition t...

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Beans 101 (Return of Bean Friday!)

...beans to soup. Maybe to a ready-made soup, to beef it up. Or maybe you’re cooking a soup from scratch. Just drop the beans in at the end, so they have long enough to warm up. Pour off the cooking broth from your homemade beans and drink that as soup. Or puree cooked beans into a nice thick soup, adding water if necessary. Put your beans on toast. Sound unappealing? Then change the name: Crostini. See how marketing works? Toast up some stale bread...

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Jas. Townsend’s 18th Century Cooking

...one of the most prolific and accomplished YouTubers I’ve encountered. His cooking videos feature professional lighting and sound (rare in the YouTube universe) and look like something PBS would (should?) make. And Townsend has produced over 500 videos giving Kelly and I a chance to spend many evenings catching up on the finer points of pemmican, hardtack and pickled smelt. Neither of us are historical reenactors, though Kelly sometimes accuses me...

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