Search Results for: label/peak oil/2011/04/making-it

379 results

What Mountaineering Accidents Can Teach Us About Food Preservation

Mr. Homegrown
Food, Food Preservation
13 Comments
Would you eat pickles made by these two? Each year the American Alpine Club publishes a book detailing all the mountaineering accidents in North America. The club’s goal is simple, as they put it, “to help you learn from the mistakes of others.” I’ve often thought that the same approach should be applied to many of the activities we love in the homesteading movement, especially food preservation. Now, I think t...

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Age of Apocalypse

Mr. Homegrown
Age of Limits, Thoughtstylings
39 Comments
...rgin America’s individualized entertainment programming. Satellite TV! Shop Ebay at 30,000 feet! I shut the TV off and picked up a book, but I kept getting distracted by the screen I could see in the row in front of me. It was displaying a nonstop parade of gruesome images–mangled corpses, gunshot wounds–what passes for “entertainment” on mainstream television. Which brings me back to the Age of Limits conference. In...

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Bean Fest, Episode 8: Really Good Lentil and Whole Grain Soup

Mrs. Homegrown
Bean Fest, Food, Recipes
7 Comments
photo by wollongonger Welcome to Bean Fridays, our ongoing series highlighting the beautiful bean. We had a brief hint of winter here this week, three days of chilly grey skies and lingering drizzle. I was in heaven–but it didn’t last, and we’re heading into another heat wave. But anyway, that taste of winter put me in the mood for soup. So today I’m going to share my favorite soup recipe. I’m stretching th...

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The Art of Memory

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
6 Comments
...bards of the past who could recite thousands of lines of poetry, or the Greek rhetoricians who could speak for hours at a time without notes? Thankfully the basics of the lost art of memory can be mastered in an evening. And  it’s all in a short section of a 2,100 year old document called the Rhetorica ad Herennium. Here’s the memory trick the ad Herennium describes in two easy steps. Step one. Say, for example, you want to memorize...

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Be Idle

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
1 Comment
...s puritanical approach to the new simplicity. A compelling speaker, Andrews echoed our wariness and used the Slow Food movement as an counter-example to the pitfalls of the simplicity movement. The Slow Food movement began in Italy as a reaction to the invasion of American style fast food which threatened Italy’s rich culinary traditions. The genius of the Slow Food movement according to Andrews, is that it linked the pleasures of good food...

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Return of Bean Friday! Chickpea, Pasta and Tomato Soup

Mrs. Homegrown
Bean Fest, Food, Recipes
3 Comments
This is the soup at day two, when the pasta started to fall apart. It was prettier day one, with all the pasta whole and springy. But you get the idea. This one is a keeper. I had to share. We forget how good chickpeas (aka garbanzo beans) can be. They get relegated to hummus duty and not much else. This is a mistake. When cooked right, chickpeas take on a sweet creaminess that ought to make them the queen of beans. This recipe highligh...

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It’s Calendula Season!

Mrs. Homegrown
Body Care, Domesticus, Gardening, Herbal Medicine, Herbs
17 Comments
Just a reminder to you all that Calendula officinalis (aka Pot Marigold) is super-easy to grow in the garden. Why should you grow Calendula? To make Calendula infused olive oil, of course– as I’m doing above, with inevitable feline assistance. Well, that’s why I grow it. Calendula infused olive oil is the base of all my lotions and potions, because it is such a potent healer of dry, itchy, burnt or otherwise irritated skin. I&...

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Borage: It’s what’s for dinner

Mrs. Homegrown
Food, Gardening, Herbs
13 Comments
...s vanish on cooking. Some sources say only to use small leaves for cooking but I say fie to that. I used leaves of all sizes and after cooking there was no difference between them. Borage is actually rather delicate under all its spikes and cooks down considerably in to a very tender, spinach-like consistency. Instead of making little tacos with it, we folded it into tortillas with a bit of goat’s milk gouda to make yummy green quesadillas&...

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Bushcraft Video

Mrs. Homegrown
Appropriate Technology, Preparedness
21 Comments
...e other, ready to share their knowledge with you. And they are almost all men. I’ve only found a couple of women who put their adventures on video. I’m not sure why this is such a male dominated field, except that it is greatly fueled by the love of pointy implements and the display and discussion of such implements–which seems a very masculine past time. But that’s generalizing, because I can attest that around our house,...

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Interview With Apartment Gardener Helen Kim

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Herbs
1 Comment
We got a lot of emails after posting the image above of Los Angeles based photographer Helen Kim’s astonishing windowsill garden. It’s a great example of what you can do with a small amount of space, and brings to mind William Morris’ advice, “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful”. Helen graciously sat down for an email interview to talk about her beautiful and useful garden...

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