Stern Sprouted Wheat Vegan Cookie or Health Bar Type Things

...ough out into an rough rectangle measuring about 7 x 9 inches. The dough itself will be about 3/8 of inch thick. If you don’t have parchment or a rolling pin, you can surely pat the dough flat on the pan with wet hands. I would recommend flattening the dough on the baking sheet, because it’s hard to move it. If you used the parchment paper, just transfer the rolled-out dough on its piece of parchment paper onto the cookie sheet. If you want, you c...

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Craig Ponsford Bakes Whole Wheat Ciabatta

...order to handle dough you’ll see Ponsford use water instead. He also wets containers that he puts dough into. It’s a lot neater and less flour gets incorporated in the dough. Whole wheat doughs need to be wet. When he does use flour, as in the end of the video he’s using it strategically–in order to keep the loaf from getting to dark in the oven. Baking bread is actually fairly simple as long as you realize that the devil is in the details. Use a...

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The Homegrown Mailbox: How and Where Do I Get My Soil Tested?

...your soil is contaminated, skip the test, and grow things in raised beds, containers or stick to ornamentals. You could also try bioremediation: each season plant a cover crop, let it grow, and then pull it up and dispose of it. Test the soil until it comes out clean. This works well, but it can take many years to get all the contaminants out. For those of you in Los Angeles, our local Extension Service agent Yvonne Savio kindly sent me the follo...

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Bisphenol-A

...lastic found in all kinds of products including baby bottles, plastic food containers, Nalgene bottles, some wines (from the plastic stoppers and the lining of fermentation tanks) and the lining in metal cans. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration says it’s safe, a viewpoint contradicted by at least 100 studies. The problem: BPA is a endocrine disruptor linked to a host of problems, according to some researchers, including cancer, obesity, childho...

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The Chicken and the Egg

...der the consequences of the economic and quality race to the bottom of factory farming’s economy of scale–an abundance of cheap, tasteless and nutritionally deficient eggs that like the endless flood of shipping containers full of plastic crap from China poisons both our bodies and souls. Here’s a list of questions to ask the folks who provide your eggs. And more Francine Dancer for those without chickens....

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