More on How to Make Clear Ice

June 2, 2017

Food

...amper English has done my work for me and carefully tested every clear ice making method and documented the results in painstaking detail on his entertaining and enlightening blog Alcademics. The winning method he suggests is the one I wrote about: freezing ice in a cooler (also known as “directional freezing”). The distilled water and hot water methods don’t work, according to English. I also learned that the enigmatic David Rees (author of a boo...

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2014: The Year in Review

Mr. Homegrown

December 29, 2014

Thoughtstylings

5 Comments

...eatly reduced my sugar intake overall and I’m more conscious of sugar when making decisions at the grocery store (it’s in everything!). Personally, I plan on revisiting the sugar issue. My new fresh, homemade muesli habit (thanks to the Komo FlicFloc) has allowed me to completely eliminate sugar for breakfast. June Hipster Compost and How to Make Stock In June I pondered local sources for compostable materials (but did not compost hipsters, as som...

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The Year We Gave Up Our Smart Phones

Mr. Homegrown

September 3, 2018

Thoughtstylings

19 Comments

...ve to eat is freeze dried Beef Stroganoff in a Martian prison of their own making. We used their stranding as an opportune moment to rid our culture of the things that were holding us back. My own personal smart phone addiction recovery path began back in 2018. I was building the most complex project I’ve ever attempted, a chest of drawers. It required intense concentration and I kept getting interrupted by the ping of text messages, junk phone ca...

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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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Shoemaking Advice?

Mrs. Homegrown

September 13, 2013

Domesticus

62 Comments

...ave any of you made your own shoes? I’m looking for good resources on shoe making: books, videos, etc. I’d also love to hear stories of successes or failures or lessons learned. I’d like to make leather, soft-soled shoes as first project perhaps moccasins, perhaps something more structured. I have two books right now. One is Shoes for Free People, by David & Inger Runk, published in 1976 in Santa Cruz. As you might expect, it is highly groovy. And...

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