How to Make Your Own DIY Instant Oatmeal

March 24, 2016

...oven to 350F Spread oats out on one cookie sheet and toast in the oven for 10 to 15 minutes. It’s a good idea to stir them half way through. You want some color, but no burning. This step is not found in all DIY instant oatmeal recipes, but totally worth it for the flavor it adds. I think it also makes the old fashioned oats more digestible. If using old fashioned oats, remove oats from the oven and grind some portion of them in a blender or food...

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Kevin West’s Saving the Season

Mr. Homegrown

October 1, 2013

Food, Food Preservation, Reviews

8 Comments

...the Institute of Domestic Technology. After my bread demo West does a jam making session and I stick around to watch and, hopefully, filtch an extra jar. Those West jams are coveted items around the Root Simple household. What makes Saving the Season different from other preserving books is West’s masterful use of aromatics and alcohols. As he explains in the introduction, “My goal is for the supplemental flavor to be a faint suggestion–an extra...

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How’s the Sugar Free Experiment Going for Erik?

Mr. Homegrown

June 2, 2014

Food

12 Comments

...as how nutrition interacts with human customs, rituals and beliefs. That said, processed sugar is definitely bad. I have no doubt about that. And I don’t think I need to tell the readers of this blog that processed foods as a whole are what are making us unhealthy. But as I discovered in my own life, it’s difficult to avoid sugar. It’s in everything the big food companies make. Making time to cook from scratch and eating a diverse variety of food...

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Shoemaking Advice?

Mrs. Homegrown

September 13, 2013

Domesticus

62 Comments

...ree People actually seems like a fine book. It basically steps you through making one basic type of shoe that you can modify in different ways. Erik wailed about the horrible hippie-ness of it all when I showed him the illustrations of what I might make, but he wears cheap Chinese martial art shoes, so I don’t think he has moral or aesthetic high ground here. The other book is The Make it Yourself Shoe Book by Christine Lewis Clark. Not so surpris...

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Straw Bale Garden Part V: Growing Vegetables

Mr. Homegrown

June 18, 2013

Gardening, Straw Bale Gardening, Vegetable Gardening

23 Comments

...seedlings. Others, like this cucumber, I sowed directly into the bales by making a little hole and putting in the seed with some home made seedling mix. Again, the vegetables in the bales are doing better than veggies in my two remaining raised beds. The reason, I believe, is that the beds are depleted and the compost I added to them was low quality. While more resource intensive than growing in the ground or raised bed, straw bale gardening has...

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