Craig Ponsford Bakes Whole Wheat Ciabatta

...order to handle dough you’ll see Ponsford use water instead. He also wets containers that he puts dough into. It’s a lot neater and less flour gets incorporated in the dough. Whole wheat doughs need to be wet. When he does use flour, as in the end of the video he’s using it strategically–in order to keep the loaf from getting to dark in the oven. Baking bread is actually fairly simple as long as you realize that the devil is in the details. Use a...

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How do I keep squirrels and rats from eating my grapes?

...hing on grapes. I decided to see if either paper bags or plastic clamshell containers would deter the daily and nightly mammalian fruit buffet. Preliminary results: Clamshells don’t work. The fruit fermented, and not in a nice way. Paper bags seem to work, but probably only because I left a lot of the fruit exposed in the hopes that they would eat that first and leave the bagged fruit alone. It’s also hard to tell when the fruit is ripe when it’s...

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Saturday Tweets: Pre-Peeled Oranges, Fine Fiber and the Dome Revival

...) March 4, 2016 If you’re outraged about packing peeled oranges in plastic containers, wait until we tell you about using giant metal boxes to move people. — Bicycle Lobby (@BicycleLobby) March 4, 2016 Wool fans: Check out the Wool & Fine Fiber Book slash traveling exhibition from Fibershed: https://t.co/DB689iJN3J #fibershed #woolbook — Root Simple (@rootsimple) March 5, 2016 #relatable pic.twitter.com/8nYPhJALaM — Xeni Jardin (@xeni) March 4, 20...

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Counterintelligence

...he climbing grades used by mountaineers? In a parallel cognitive leap, the cats also figured out how to explore the cabinets and remove lids from Tupperware containers. Looks like we’re going to have to give up cooking and eat all our meals out....

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Flipped Out: The End of the American Bungalow

...he teens and 1920s gave us a great example of multi-unit housing called the bungalow court. Kelly and I lived in a spectacular one, the Egyptian Court Apartments, while we were in grad school in San Diego. Every morning you woke up, looked out the window and found yourself in a cheesy 1920s King Tut movie. How cool is that? Now the investors who have turned our housing into an investment deem that all apartments must resemble stacked shipping cont...

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