The Institute of the Present

April 1, 2019

...while your mouth is full of dental tools. But then I asked myself why am I making fun of people who work with their hands and minds for long hours in order to alleviate suffering? If anyone deserves good pay and days off to golf, it should be dentists. Instead I thought I’d discuss what should be an April Fools Day joke but isn’t. And that is Los Angeles’ mayor Eric Garcetti’s appearance at a party last week with Lyft executives to celebrate their...

Read…

Meet our book & web designer: Roman Jaster

Mrs. Homegrown

March 14, 2014

Miscellaneous

2 Comments

Roman Jaster is the gifted designer who designed both Making It and this very website for us. He recently gave a Visiting Designer talk about his work at his alma mater, CalArts and made that lecture public on YouTube. In it, he talks about his childhood in East Germany, the decisions he made early-on which determined his career, his working methods (which are really interesting, combining coding with design) and talks about the concepts behind s...

Read…

How to be a Tudor by Ruth Goodman

Mrs. Homegrown

August 30, 2016

Domesticus

13 Comments

...craftspeople are rarities now, but imagine the streets of London in Tudor times. Every other doorway must have held a master of some craft: blacksmith, brewer, rope maker, dyer, tanner, painter, tailor, bookbinder. And heck, every good housewife had to know how to do a whole lot of stuff, from sewing to cheese making to brewing, and was a master of those crafts as a matter of course. How wonderful it would be to walk those streets and watch it al...

Read…

060 Eric of Garden Fork Returns

Mr. Homegrown

September 2, 2015

Food, Gardening, Podcasts, Thoughtstylings

...we’ve had Eric on and in this episode he discusses tapping maple trees and making syrup, grilling steaks on coals, crowd funding, pie crusts and meditation apps. Here’s the rundown: Planting crops in a cold climate in the late summer Tapping sugar maples Building an evaporator for making maple syrup Earth Eats Podcast Cooking “Eisenhower” steaks on coals Crowd funding Amanda Palmer Ted Talk Pie crusts Meditation with the Headspace app New anchor D...

Read…

Choosing the Perfect Tortilla Press

Mr. Homegrown

April 9, 2014

Food

17 Comments

...iron press will last several lifetimes. And their heft helps when it comes time to press the masa into discs. And I opted for the smaller, 6 1/2 inch press as small tortillas are used in authentic Mexican street food. Making corn tortillas is much simpler than I expected. All you do is get masa harina (a limed corn flour), mix it roughly 50/50 with water and let the dough rest for a half hour to an hour. Next, you roll the masa into little 2 inch...

Read…