How to Make Stock

...ut them in the freezer if you don’t have time to make stock at the moment. Making fish stock is pretty much like making chicken stock with a carcass. Gather all the fish bits or shells you have and add them to the basic ingredients for veg stock. Skip the mushrooms and potatoes, though. Maybe add a little more onion. Parsley goes well with fish, so try to use that if you can. A bit of thyme is also very nice. White wine is a traditional addition t...

Read…

Making Mistakes and an Update

...s with editing blog posts and posting images, a situation our web czar and book designer Roman is working on. And an update: the Silver Lake Progressive slate that ran for the local neighborhood council won in a landslide. They now have a slim majority of the council and will have their hands full fixing the damage done by their predecessors (who are busy holding last minute meetings in order to spend the last few dimes the council has left after...

Read…

Urban Homesteading: What Went Wrong

...mostly solid. What I’m more concerned about are things I may have said in book appearances, blog posts and press interviews after the books came out, specifically that the changes we need to make to avert crises such as climate change and healthy food systems are all about personal choice. While I never said we could save the planet by learning to make jam, my studious avoidance of political controversy may have left that impression. Along that l...

Read…

Build Your Own Furniture

...signers back in the 60s and 70s left a few highly useful and groovy how-to books on making your own suburban-workshop-modernist furniture with a humble 4 x 8 sheet of plywood. The amazing art/architecture collective Simparch tipped us off to the world of plywood modernism how-to books and we at Homegrown Evolution recommend the stunning Sunset Magazine produced Furniture You Can Build, which is sadly way out of print and very expensive on Amazon,...

Read…

On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

...es our lives. Anthropologist David Graeber takes up these questions in his book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. Judging from the many months I waited for the library’s copy of Bullshit Jobs, Graeber hit a nerve. In fact, the original essay version of this book, “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant” went viral. Graeber’s bullshit job research began with a casual question in Twitter asking if people felt their jobs were worthless or unnecessary...

Read…