Search Results for: label/pirate gardening/page/2/2011/04/making-it

525 results

Return of Recipe Friday! Spicy Korean Tofu

Mrs. Homegrown
Food, Recipes
7 Comments
Ummm…Our food stylist is on vacation! This was lunch today. It would look much better if the tofu sheets were reclining whole on snowy rice and artfully sprinkled with green. We’ve been eating a lot of this lately. It’s Erik’s favorite meal these days, in fact. I make it for him whenever he’s grumpy and he perks right up. I like it too, and I especially like that it’s fast cooking and I usually have a...

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What to do with all those hot peppers: Harissa!

Mr. Homegrown
Food, Gardening, Recipes, Vegetable Gardening
13 Comments
Lyn, a reader in Canada with way too many hot peppers on hand, asked us what we thought we should do with them. We have the same problem here this year, an overabundance of very large, hot Italian Long Peppers. Thumbing through some recipe books we realized that we had all the ingredients to make Harissa, a spicy Moroccan condiment. The recipe is simple and quick. We cut open five of our hot peppers, discarded the seeds, and combined them in a f...

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Cheap and Natural Handsoap–and a rant

Mrs. Homegrown
Body Care, Domesticus, How-to, Thoughtstylings
31 Comments
....  Ah, but yes–liquid castile soap is runny. Indeed. I can hear the complaints already.  The way around that problem is to use one of them fancy-schmancy foaming soap pumps. You can buy them at specialty retailers, but it’s probably cheaper to buy one at the supermarket, use up the soap and then start refilling with liquid castile soap. The one in our bathroom is an old Method pump and is still working fine after three years. The se...

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Buddy Burner

Mr. Homegrown
Preparedness
8 Comments
An easy craft project for the family survivalist, taken from the brilliant 70’s Mormon classic: Roughing it Easy, by Dian Thomas. A buddy burner is a heat source for camping or emergencies made out of a tuna can, candle stubs and cardboard. It acts like a Sterno can, will burn for 1 1/2 – 2 hours, and can be recharged and reused. To make a buddy burner you need to gather: a clean tuna can, a piece of corrugated cardboard, a bunch of candle...

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Artichoke Season at the Homegrown Revolution Compound

Mr. Homegrown
Vegetable Gardening
1 Comment
n Revolution compound resides. In cooler locales they will thrive all year round. In warmer places they die back in the summer but return like crazy in the early spring. We just cut them to the ground when the leaves die off. It’s a huge plant so make sure you give them plenty of room–at least a six foot diameter circle, preferably more, for each plant. The only drawback is that aphids love them, so they require constant spraying down...

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Is Kombucha Safe?

Mr. Homegrown
Fermentation, Food, Thoughtstylings
27 Comments
We love to ferment things, with one notable exception: kombucha. During the last kombucha craze, in the mid-90s, we picked up a “SCOBY” blob and dutifully fed it tea and sugar until we stumbled upon an article written by mycologist Paul Stamets, “The Manchurian Mushroom: My Adventures with “The Blob.” In that article Stamets tells a convoluted story of having a kombucha culture tested by a lab. He didn’t tell...

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Do Something Day

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
4 Comments
strict belief in the tenets of Mahayana Buddhist teachings, I asked his holiness Tenzing Norbu to bless the fridge upon his last visit. He guaranteed blessings and long life would be bestowed upon the fridge and the contents it protects. We have not used the fridge yet and unfortunately we need to move and can not bring the fridge with us. It is sad, but we are happy to give this spiritual appliance to another.” At $1,500 Harvey passed ove...

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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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The Tiny House

Mr. Homegrown
Design
RLeave a comment
...eedy and evil landlords. Meanwhile, in rural America, most new housing consists of trailers, euphemistically known as “manufactured housing”. Trailers offer interesting possibilities, even for urbanites. But while it’s possible to pimp out an old trailer and make a decent living space, it’s hard to escape the fact that these structures were meant to be hauled down a highway and used for camping. Trailers often have a trans...

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Laundry to Landscape Legal in LA

Mr. Homegrown
Water and Power, Water Conservation
4 Comments
...ming that you don’t need a permit within LA city limits for “a graywater system in a one or two-family dwelling that is supplied only by a clothes-washer and/or a single-fixture system.” Though, confusingly, it also goes on to say, “Any alteration to the building or plumbing, electrical or mechanical system requires a permit.” I guess we shouldn’t expect clarity from a department that can’t seem to get a...

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