Urban Homesteading: What Went Wrong

February 25, 2019

...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...

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Build Your Own Furniture

Mr. Homegrown

October 27, 2006

Design

5 Comments

...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,...

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On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

Mr. Homegrown

January 7, 2019

Reviews, Thoughtstylings

23 Comments

...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...

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What You Need to Bake Bread

Mr. Homegrown

March 16, 2018

Bread, Food

5 Comments

...resources and tools: Bake With Baker Again, get yourself a copy of Baker’s book. It’s a class in baking organized into recipes in ascending order of difficulty. Work your way thought the book and by the end you’ll be a baking god and the life of every party. Baker is a fan of whole grains and sourdough and if that isn’t enough he has the only decent gluten free bread recipe I’ve ever tasted. At the end of the book you’ll find cookie and scone reci...

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The Jerusalem Cookbook

Mrs. Homegrown

February 17, 2015

Food, Reviews

7 Comments

...a wonderful dinner party last week and cooked all of the courses from this book. Now, Kazi is an expert cook, so I’m sure she doesn’t really need a book to put on an good spread, but she assured us that she was experimenting on us: she’d never tried any of the recipes before, and was cooking them straight out of the book as written. The meal was astounding. Of course, her beautiful presentation and the excellent company had much to do with it, but...

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