Baking Bread with Specialty Malts

...e lead you. In a 2-pound sourdough rye loaf Hadjiandreou’s recipe calls for 20 grams of chocolate malt and 40 grams each of the other two grains. A lighter hand with the dark malts will reduce the chance of bitter bread. To soak or not to soak Usually when I add whole grains or seeds to bread I like to soak them for a few hours in hot water. But when I tried this with the specialty grains I ended up inadvertently starting the beer making process....

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Putting Your Civic House in Order: How the Young Members of the Family Help

...to the kids to make change happen. Work your way through the rambling early 20th century prose and you’ll find some solid advice we could really use to get our present day civic house in order. You can read all of the 1916 Craftsman issues for free in Google Books. by Mary Richards Gray The desire for beauty, health, order is inherent in mankind, is among the deepest and most powerful forces in life. Man’s first consciousness of these desires is o...

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News From Nowhere

...ecause they are needed: men make for their neighbours’ use as if they were making for themselves, not for a vague market of which they know nothing, and over which they have no control: as there is no buying and selling, it would be mere insanity to make goods on the chance of their being wanted; for there is no longer any one who can be compelled to buy them. So that whatever is made is good, and thoroughly fit for its purpose. Nothing can be mad...

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Seat Weaving for Fun and Profit

...for one chair. I ordered two, 2-pound rolls since I correctly anticipated making some mistakes the first time and I’m planning on making more of these chairs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQkE05DD9_Y I found a helpful seat weaving tutorial on YouTube by Ed Hammond a.k.a. Peerless Rattan. Hammond has sixteen videos on how to weave and cane a variety of chairs. Please note that in addition to ladderback chairs there’s a lot of mid-century Scandi...

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I Made an Enzo Mari Table and So Can You

...tempts at revolutionary design within our post-modern age. Everything gets subsumed within a vast parade of styles and one can easily imagine this table on sale at Urban Outfitters at your local mall. Mari, who we lost to COVID in 2020, had the genius and grace to acknowledge the contradictions in his own work while not letting this discourse get in the way of making objects of usefulness and beauty and helping others to have nice things at a reas...

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