Easy Scandinavian-Style Bread

...ough starter, take on the mantle (or apron?) of Household Baker, and start making these loaves myself, but I’m already taking on extra chores with him off his feet, so I’m not inclined to take up this one as well. Yet we can’t live two months without good bread. What to do? Fortunately, I’ve found a solution to our bread crisis: a perfectly good yeasted recipe which makes a dense whole grain loaf with minimal effort. No starter. No kneading. No ri...

Read…

Moon Gazing

...ings, we could make some other kind of celebratory food–I’m thinking about making some little round crepes with red berry sauce to celebrate the blood moon. Or perhaps our new traditions won’t involve food, but crafts, or songs, or copious toasting–or maybe we can just all stand outside and howl at the moon. It would do us some good, I think. What is a blood moon anyway, you ask? It’s a moon stained red by the Earth’s shadow. What’s a super moon?...

Read…

Instant Soup Stock=Happy Flavor Bomb

...ause I want to. Back in 2013 I linked to this post by our friend Pascal on making instant soup stock with foraged greens: Wild Food Soup Stock. It’s great! But foraged greens have a short season here, and lately I’ve been using a more domestic recipe from the great blog Food in Jars: Homemade Vegetable Soup Concentrate. Check them out. You’ll see the ways in which they are similar. Basically you’re just taking all the tasty, aromatic parts of soup...

Read…

De-Cluttering for DIYers, Homesteaders, Artists, Preppers, etc.

...or skill or activity to intrigue us. That is our nature. It’s rather like books. We keep books because we think we might want to re-read them some day, but in truth there are very few books we love enough to re-read. The others just weight down the shelf–mostly because we are distracted by all the new books. (Shiny new books! Shiny new crafts!) If you look back on your creative history, I’ll bet you’ll find that you’ve rarely returned to an older...

Read…

023 Cleaning, Spam Poetry and Shoemaking

...ou’re within striking distance of Santa Barbara and are interested in shoe making lessons, go ahead and shoot us an email at rootsimple at gmail dot com and we’ll hook you up with Randy. If you want 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. Additional music by Rho a...

Read…