How FilmLA Blocks Bike Lanes

...lict of interest. If the choice is between the safety of bike commuters or making production companies happy, you can guess that FilmLA’s likely to opt for the latter. Previous attempts to address unsafe closures of bike lanes by myself and other bike activists have gone nowhere. Call FilmLA to complain and you’ll be greeted with either indifference or outright hostility. Call the police to complain and they’ll direct you to parking enforcement. C...

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Hoshigaki Season

...ime to make hoshigaki, a Japanese delicacy made by hanging peeled persimmons up in a window to dry. Hoshigaki are chewy and subtly sweet. The texture of hoshigaki is different than what you would get if you just put persimmons in a dehydrator. And if all goes right the sugar comes to the surface making it look like the fruit has been dipped in powdered sugar. If you can find them in a Japanese market they are extremely expensive. And the ones I sa...

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Ghee for the skin

...he way it feels. More will follow, I am sure. I’m going to experiment with making body butter and lip balm with it. Do any of you use ghee for medicine or skin care? (Also, I’ll be making my own ghee soon, and will post on that, but in the meantime, there are loads of recipes for it out there. It’s basically just boiled butter–anybody can make it. You can also find it ghee in many “regular” super markets these days, as well as in health food store...

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Earth Building Classes!

...e looking to reprise our popular adobe basics class which will cover brick making, codes and basic adobe wall masonry. We are also looking at having an horno workshop in Los Angeles sometime this summer. Events October 2-4 – EarthUSA 2015, Santa Fe, NM: A reminder that EarthUSA, the premier North American earthbuilding community event is coming up this October. The event brings together expert practitioners, historians and conservation specialists...

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Everything Must Go: Tidying Up at the Root Simple Compound

...ontal storage depot for everything from bags of whole grain to random root vegetables to homeless Mason jars and shopping bags. Cabinets and drawers were all filled to capacity. Cleaning around all this stuff was a huge chore. No matter how much we cleaned the house, it would rebound into un-tidyiness overnight. Then, the other day we had an epiphany, which I call the Junk Drawer Epiphany. We were standing in the kitchen, bickering about the lack...

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