Bread and Transformation

...w. The baking method I’ve used for over a decade is from Nancy Silverton’s book Breads from the La Brea Bakery. You use a sourdough starter and at least half the flour must be white to get it to leaven properly. I’ve had great results, but would like to someday make a loaf entirely from whole wheat with a sourdough starter. Reinhart, in his book Whole Grain Breads: New Techniques, Extraordinary Flavor claims to be able to do just that and not end...

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The Connection Between Human Health and Soil Health

...ian and author Dr. Daphne Miller discusses in the lecture above and in her book Farmacology: What Innovative Family Farming Can Teach Us About Health and Healing. In the research for the book Miller visited farmers who, as she put it, “farm in the image of nature,” who approach the farm as a living organism. While she cautioned that there is little research behind the connection between farming practices and health, she suspects that biodiversity...

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Alektyomancy: Divination by Rooster

...sed, and the letters were read in the order in which the rooster pecked the seeds. The interpretation of the oracle is unknown.(1) Thankfully you don’t need to own a chicken to practice alektyomancy. There’s an online version. 1) From I.P. Couliano’s book Out of this World: Otherworldly Journeys from Gilgamesh to Albert Einstein. Couliano was, incidentally, a gifted scholar whose life was tragically cut short by an assassin’s bullet. His book Eros...

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I’m Fed Up With Amazon

...(which has always been very generous to Kelly and I as authors–placing our books prominently and hosting a book launch event for us). Right now I’m left with a problem. I’ve got hundreds of Amazon links embedded on this site and need to ponder what I’m going to do about that. When Amazon dumped California-based affiliates a few years ago rather than pay their taxes I switched to Portland-based Powell’s partner program but nobody used it. I’ve also...

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Warning: This Blog is Based in a Mediterranean Climate

...d Vegetable Planting Calendar and the Digitalseed Flower Planting Calendar Books: The New Western Garden Book: The Ultimate Gardening Guide (Sunset Western Garden Book) Pat Welsh’s Southern California Organic Gardening (3rd Edition): Month by Month And for those of you who live where it regularly freezes and snows, you’ll be amused to hear that in all of my years of gardening the first time that I’ve ever had plants get serious frost damage was ea...

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