De-Cluttering the Garden

...gangly, trees shade out other plants and things just generally change. Sometimes you have to mimic nature’s floods and fires and make a radical shift. Weeding and thinning. We got behind on this and we’re paying the price. This is a matter of poor scheduling, subject matter for an upcoming series of posts (if I can ever schedule time to write those scheduling posts). Let’s just say there was some cursing while pulling out a robust and thorny Opunt...

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Three Things I’ve Learned About Baking Bread With Whole Grain

...se). Once I shape my dough, I put it in the fridge to proof overnight. The time in the fridge makes wet dough easier to handle and develops the flavor. And that cold dough can go straight from the fridge and into the oven. 3. The biodiversity of grains and the way they behave as bread has been a astonishing and sometimes frustrating experience (note the difference in the photo above between a loaf made with Sonora wheat and a loaf made with Joachi...

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My Favorite Podcasts

...balloon over the North Pole and Victorian children’s author Favell Lee Mortimer’s offensive travel book. In Our Time Host Melvyn Bragg corrals a posse of academics to discuss topics in history, religion and philosophy. When guests drop big words like “hermeneutics” and “teleology,” Bragg always brings them down to earth and makes them explain things in plain English. This show has filled in many gaps in my education and functions as a reminder th...

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Shoemaking Advice?

...The subject matter was usually a mushroom, or a cluster of mushrooms. Sometimes an owl. More rarely a Holly Hobby-type figure. Here endeth the lesson.) Free 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 sho...

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