How to Roast Coffee in a Whirley Pop Popcorn Maker

...ll be dark brown. For a French roast: pull as the second crack reaches its peak. Beans will be very dark and shiny. Cooling the beans and removing chaff As soon as you finish roasting you need to cool the beans down as quickly as possible. Pour them into a metal colander or bowl. I take them outside at this point and pour them repeatedly between a colander and a metal bowl. The chafe will drift away in the process You don’t have to remove all of t...

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Time for some comments . . .

...the Triple Headed Hydra of Despair: Climate Change, Economic Collapse and Peak Oil. Don’t worry about us becoming a doomer blog, though. We’re going to focus on positive strategies. But we want to pause for a moment and listen to you guys. Here’s some of the things we’re curious about, but feel free to sound off about anything else: We’re sensing anxiety in the air. Are we imagining it? Are you anxious over these things? The people you know? How...

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Steal this Book!

...or you can get an autographed copy from us over on the right side of this page. Tell your friends and family! Blog, twitter, friend, digg and yell! From the press release: The Urban Homestead is the essential handbook for a burgeoning new movement: urbanites are becoming farmers. By growing their own food and harnessing natural energy, city dwellers are reconnecting with their land while planting seeds for the future for our cities. Whether you’d...

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Shelter

...topics anticipated the non-hierarchical structure of the Internet. On one page you’re looking at Turkish rock houses, and on another geodesic domes built out of scrap materials. The lessons I’ve learned from Khan’s work are the importance of context (site, cultural, weather etc.) and the joy of putting hammer to nail to build something yourself even if you don’t know what the hell you are doing. Sometimes the most ramshackled comedies of architec...

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A Purple Dragon Carrot

...ets. John clearly has more important things to do than updating a Facebook page. My dragon carrots grew without a hitch in our “guerrilla” parkway garden. As you can see from the photo, the carrot has a deep purple color reminiscent of the domesticated carrot’s wild ancestors, which were probably tamed in what is now Afghanistan. Wikipedia identifies the purple hue of these carrots as anthocyanin a possible source of antioxidants and a common pigm...

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