023 Cleaning, Spam Poetry and Shoemaking

October 29, 2014

...icle on the laborers who moderate social media comments. Earth Skills Shoe making classes offered by laughingcrowe.com Sewing classes at Sew L.A. We’ll add a link for Randy’s website when he finishes it–in the meantime, if you’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...

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Whole Wheat Sourdough Starter Recipe

Mr. Homegrown

June 24, 2007

Bread, Food

6 Comments

UPDATE : we have a whole (so to speak) new take on making a starter. See our sourdough starter video for a better way to do this. Back in March we showed how to make a sourdough starter with white flour. This month we converted a white starter over to whole wheat and have baked many successful loaves of bread with it. The reason that we have to do this conversion rather than starting out with whole wheat flour is that whole wheat tends to get mol...

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I made shoes!

Mrs. Homegrown

October 21, 2014

Domesticus

32 Comments

...shoes. Who knew? Randy estimates he could make a pair of turnshoes in about 10 hours, but leading a pack of wayward newbies through the process takes 32 hours. More, really, as we had homework. I’d say 40 hours went into each pair of shoes. After doing this, I will never again balk at the price of a pair of bespoke shoes. Lesson 3: It is, in fact, worthwhile to make your own shoes. Turnshoes are very much like gloves for the feet. We crafted custo...

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Worth Doing From Scratch: Corn Tortillas

Mr. Homegrown

June 3, 2014

Bread, Food

12 Comments

...f that’s easy and economical. Now you should be suspicious of any tortilla making advice dispensed by a gabacho. Let’s just say it’s easy and the results are way better than those dry tortillas you buy at the store. Some things I’ve learned: I have a cast iron tortilla press that works great but my Mexicano friends in the know suggested a wooden press. Making masa from scratch is a huge amount of work and I’ve done just fine with supermarket masa...

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Earth Building Classes!

Mr. Homegrown

January 27, 2015

Events

...nterested in presenting? A call for papers is out… submissions due on April 10th. Elsewhere in California: Buying Adobes in California: As a reminder, San Tan Adobe and New Mexico Earth are both shipping bricks to California. If you need adobe bricks and can’t make your own, both adobe yards will be happy to help! San Tan’s adobe are also available in some San Diego area masonry yards. We are also hearing tell of a new possible source near Joshua...

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