Author: Mr. Homegrown

095 Bean Holes and Deep Fried Turkeys with Eric Rochow of Garden Fork

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Food, Podcasts
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With Thanksgiving just around the corner in the US it’s time to rock the friends and family with some new cooking traditions. How about baking beans in a hole or deep frying your turkey? I discuss these topics, plus how to plant garlic with Eric Rochow of Garden Fork. Eric’s got some great how-to videos:

Make sure to subscribe to the Garden Fork Youtube channel!

If you’d like to leave a question for the Root Simple Podcast please call (213) 537-2591 or send an email to [email protected]. You can subscribe to our podcast in the iTunes store and on Stitcher. The theme music is by Dr. Frankenstein. A downloadable version of this podcast is here.

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Saturday Tweets: Playing Chicken, Healthy Eating and Fixing Stuff

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Saturday Linkages

Deep Frying in a SolSource Solar Cooker

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Food, Solar, Solar Oven Summer, Videos, Water and Power
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We did a little deep frying test of the SolSource Solar Cooker (provided to us by the manufacturer) and made us some beignets this morning. As Kelly says in the video, a little known fact is that solar cooked deep fried dough pillows won’t make you gain weight. Never! Really!! (Not.)

But they are mighty good! The test worked out really well and now we want to do something fun with it, like take the solar cooker to the streets and make donuts for The People!

We’re also really pleased to find that we can hit deep frying temperatures with the cooker, even in November. We’ll be doing more videos about solar cooking in the coming weeks.

The beignet recipe we used comes from King Arthur Flour. Note that we have a new Youtube channel. Please do us a favor and subscribe!

Least Favorite Plant: Bidens

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Gardening, Least Favorite Plant
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14856148_1192325424191374_6246555258212959974_oBeware the Bidens! Kelly and I were naive when it came to this common plant. It looked innocuous so we let a few grow. We’ve never seen it before in our yard and had to post a picture to Facebook’s only useful group, Plant Identification, in order to identify it.

Bidens is in the Asteraceae family which includes sunflowers, daisies and asters. There are many different varieties of Bidens and an equal number of popular names, according to Wikipedia: “beggarticks, black jack, burr marigolds, cobbler’s pegs, Spanish needles, stickseeds, tickseeds and tickseed sunflowers.”

Those popular names should give some clues as to the plant’s behavior. Brush up against it and this happens:

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It turns out that nature has brilliantly designed these seeds to hitch a ride on mammals. Just touch or lightly brush up against the seed pods, which resemble mid-century chandeliers, and you’ll be picking out seeds for the next hour. Plants can’t move on their own so they’ve got to enlist helpers. In the case of Bidens, we’re the Uber.

Do you have Bidens in your garden?

Saturday Tweets: Post Halloween Edition

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Saturday Linkages
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