Seed, nut and fruit energy bars

...are should hold you over ’til your next meal. DIY Larabars I first started making these when I wanted a DIY version of a Larabar. If you’ve ever had a Larabar and looked at the ingredients list, you’ve seen that the ingredients are dried fruit and nuts, period. Which is great–I don’t like soy and added sugar and wheat filler material in my snacks–but Larabars are pricey for something so simple and replicable at home. Admittedly, dried fruit and nu...

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Behind the Scenes at Root Simple is a World of Big Pumpkins, Pomegranate Catapults and Man Crates

...e working hard to bring another great event to our community this year.” A favorite part of the lineup according to event producers is the Pomegranate Grenade Launch. Dreamed up by the committee and brothers Brian and Nick Davis of Twin Pomegranates Winery, the Pomegranate Grenade Launch is a massive slingshot that launches pomegranates at a target some distance away. Organizers say Madera Municipal Airport provides ample space for vendors and dis...

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Make a Pepsi Can Stove

...ook? Thankfully the world of backpacking offers a number of solutions. Our favorite is the Pepsi can stove which you can build using these incredibly detailed instructions. [Editor’s note 7/27/08: looks like the author of that Pepsi can stove site failed to renew the url and, sadly, the link no longer works. We’ll try to find an alternative.] [Editor note 10/5/11: The instructions are back! In PDF form.] The stove uses denatured alcohol solvent, s...

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Ikea Karlstad Couch Hack

...at in the process. To prevent this we took to putting a stack of our least favorite books underneath one end. While this was going on the cats, like marauding Visigoths, took to using both arms of the couch as a scratching posts. It was time for an intervention, an “Ikea hack” that would save the couch from the hydraulic jaws of the bulky item pickup truck. I set as my goal to make new arms for the couch that would be sturdy and cat-friendly. The...

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Everything Must Go Part 4: How to Fold Your Clothes

...may seem a little extreme, but this simple change in behavior seems to be making all the difference in our dresser drawers. Very simply, KonMari politely insists (while flicking her pink glitter cat o’ nine tails) that we shape our all of our foldables into neat rectangular packets and stand them cheek-by-jowl in our drawers, rather like file folders in a standing file. As someone who has always folded clothes into squarish shapes and stacked the...

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