Saturday Linkages: Fueling Up

Only in India DIY Six ways to reuse plastic mesh bags: http://collectedquotidian.com/2012/10/21/six-ways-to-reuse-plastic-mesh-produce-bags/ … How I Work: I’m Mark Frauenfelder, Editor-In-Chief of MAKE Magazine, and This Is How I Work – http://lifehacker.com/5954275/im-mark-frauenfelder-editor+in+chief-of-make-magazine-and-this-is-how-i-work … Free Heat for Your Home: Homemade Briquettes and Logs http://naturalbuildingblog.com/free-heat-for-your-...

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Tracking the Mood of the Gardener

Swiss chard from the winter of 2010 A Root Simple reader I ran into this weekend took issue with my assertion that fall is the best time to start a vegetable garden in Southern California. Thinking about it some more I think she may have a point. Some of you may have noticed that we have a new feature on the blog–if you click on an individual blog post you’ll see a list of related posts at the bottom. Looking at some of those older posts showed t...

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Cooling with Beer . . . Cans

...doing something similar on the hot south side of our house, except with deciduous vines. That way, we’ll let light in during the winter and have a living shade wall during the summer. Perhaps we’ll grow beans and become Los Angeles’ Bean House. The Beer can house is located at 222 Malone Street in Houston, Texas and is lovingly cared for by the Orange Show Center for Visionary Art....

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Solar recipe review: Moroccan Chickpea Tagine (Works on the stovetop, too)

...an likely pull this out of your pantry right now. If you have fresh cooked beans or your own canned tomatoes it would be all that much better, but this is a good recipe for busy days. The resulting stew is comfort food, spicy and sweet. My one critique is that it is perhaps a little too sweet. It calls for raisins or currants, and I used raisins. The raisins ended up being preternaturally sweet–perhaps due to the slow cooking? They’d be fantastic...

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The Jerusalem Cookbook

...lots of meat and fish recipes, but it also has plenty of salad, vegetable, bean and grain recipes, so it’s friendly to both vegetarians and meat eaters. We’re mostly vegetarian, and we feel like we’ve only scratched the surface of the meatless offerings so far. Though there are a lot of veg recipes which use eggs, yogurt and cheese, there are also good vegan-friendly offerings. To give you a feel for the book, these are the recipes we’ve enjoyed s...

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