Campfire Cooking: Fish in Clay (& Vegetarian Options!)

...e even, for consistent results. You can opt to pat the clay on bit by bit, building up the coating — like this: Or, as Sergio, a chef in attendance pointed out, you can roll out the clay first so it’s all tidy and assured to be of equal width all across. Sergio made a lower piece, placed his fish on it, and then capped it with another matching piece and pinched the edges closed–sorta like a pie, or a calzone, or an empanada, or any manner of delic...

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Of Skunks, Sauerkraut and Stoicism

...We were honored when the nice folks behind Stoic Week 2013 asked us to write a blog post. It begins, Practicality is why stoicism works so well as the philosophical operating system of urban homesteading. While Foucault and Hegel might help me navigate the epistemological frontier, when I’m staring at a carefully tended vegetable bed that just got destroyed by a skunk, you can bet I’ll reach for the Seneca. Read the rest here....

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Help us With a Fodder System for our Hens

.../run. Ideally they’d be grazing on green pasture all day. But our abundant urban predators, lack of space and dry climate make the vision of hens clucking on verdant fields a challenge. I’m thinking of building a DIY fodder system but I’m a bit confused by the instructions I’ve seen floating about the interwebs. Which is where you come in. Have you built a fodder system? Do you know any good instructions? How big should it be for five hens? Or do...

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On Living in Los Angeles Without a Car: A Debate

...elters here. Bus stops are ill-marked afterthoughts in an already unlovely urban landscape. I stand in the pole shade, wondering if the bus will ever come, and I seethe about the way this city treats its pedestrians. Erik: It’s a stereotype that LA is car-centric. If I had a dollar for every time some out of town journalist drops in here for a weekend and files a report repeating the “nobody uses public transit in LA” mantra I’d be a millionaire....

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Black Widow or False Black Widow?

...an invasive, this spider seems to be displacing our native black widows in urban areas. This spider is roughly the same size and shape as a black widow, but is brown with a faint purple sheen. I like this false black widow option a lot. The false widows don’t have a dangerous sting. The spiders in my box are pretty shy, but insofar as I can tell, they are all sort of an eggplant color–not that true, bad-ass black of a classic widow. Nor have I see...

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