Solar Oven Triumph: Fluffy Egg Strata

...then mix all the rest of the ingredients: the milk, the melted butter, the herbs, the salt n’ pepper. Pour the egg mix over the bread. Let it soak in. The bread might float a bit before it takes enough water aboard to sink. You should have pretty good coverage of the bread. A little poking above the eggs is fine. The bread needs time to soak so it really breaks down. The magical thing about strata is that the bread and egg and cheese meld into one...

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Saturday Tweets: From Zines to Hedgehogs

...t back: https://t.co/Qolk4BE0zh — Root Simple (@rootsimple) May 7, 2018 10 herbs you probably haven’t heard of but should grow | Alys Fowler https://t.co/5ZDthQa7H2 pic.twitter.com/yOTRrsvH6V — Guardian gardening (@guardiangardens) May 6, 2018 ‘I had to guard an empty room’: the rise of the pointless job https://t.co/q8RhMn391u — Root Simple (@rootsimple) May 6, 2018 Humility in science communication https://t.co/NAPo2gyqXP via @2020science — Root...

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Supper for a buck?

...I’m not going to try to do the math and add up the costs of the onion and herbs and olive oil I add to the beans. And I surely don’t have the patience to figure out the cost of the salad from our garden (do I have to figure in the mortgage?), but I do know that around this time of year I could forage a salad for free from the spring weeds. But for the sake of a sensationalist headline, I’m ballparking our supper for two at about a dollar. It may...

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Country Wisdom

Thanks to a tip from the Soapboxers, SurviveLA augmented our homesteading library with a copy of the extremely useful book, Country Wisdom & Know-How by the editors of Storey Books. Country Wisdom is a compendium of tips culled from the Country Wisdom Bulletin published in the 1970s and oriented to the “back to the land” movement of that time. While geared to country living there is plenty in here for city dwellers such as ourselves. Divided into...

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Mandrake!

...r mandrake, an endangered plant in many places, are available from Horizon Herbs, a company trying to revive cultivation of the plant. This summer season we’re surrounded by nightshade plants, tomatoes, ground cherries and eggplant. These common nightshade family members, as well as mandrake and the datura that the local Native Americans used for there spirit journeys, have a strange relationship to human culture, at once edible, sometimes poisono...

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