I made soup out of a Halloween pumpkin and it didn’t completely suck

...Eating?“, tipped me off to an Epicurious Curried Pumpkin soup recipe that uses coconut milk and hot pepper flakes. The recipe takes advantage of the fact that you could make delicious soup out of cat litter with coconut milk and hot pepper flakes. Of course that same soup would taste a lot better made with a kabocha squash. And Halloween pumpkins make great worm food. But I was reasonably pleased with the soup, especially after it had mellowed in...

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I Gave Up Facebook for a Week and Didn’t Miss It

...Call it passive aggressive, but I’m going to unfollow “friends” who post nothing but divisive click bait. I may unplug on Sundays entirely. I’ve got some dense books to read. I want to give the last word to Root Simple reader Federico, who uses Facebook to post pictures of his amazing sketchbook (I’d miss seeing those images if I deleted my account). Federico suggested some rules for using social media based on Michael Pollan’s food rules: “Post...

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Saturday Tweets: Chia Seed Granola, How to Measure a Tree and Fake Locksmiths

.../t.co/OVUCIlkRbX — Root Simple (@rootsimple) February 13, 2016 How One Man Uses the 99 Cent store for his First Aid Needs: https://t.co/SuYCLFHVeY — Root Simple (@rootsimple) February 13, 2016 How do you measure the height of a tree? Cool low tech method, courtesy Tree Map LA (which we've joined!) https://t.co/SM8TNWScme — Root Simple (@rootsimple) February 8, 2016 Fake Online Locksmiths May Be Out to Pick Your Pocket, Too https://t.co/Z3Grnwd...

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Pl@ntNet: “Shazam” for Plants

...e.com/watch?v=W_cBqaPfRFE Pl@ntNet is an iPhone and Android phone app that uses image recognition and crowd-sourcing to recognize plants. It’s free, so I downloaded a copy yesterday and ran around the yard to see how it works. You take a closeup of a leaf, flower, fruit or bark and the app takes a guess on an identification. My first attempt was Nasturtium, which the app immediately identified despite my bad photo. It also correctly identified daf...

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The Walls Have Eyes

...r adapters etc all equipped with hidden cameras. Could their be legitimate uses for these devices? Maybe the sight of a baby monitor offends your aesthetic sensibilities and you’d prefer it discretely hidden in a smoke alarm? Possible but unlikely. We all know but don’t want to think about these inexpensive electronics in the hands of Airbnb voyeurs. While our ancestors once scanned the savanna in the hopes of bagging a gazelle for dinner we moder...

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