Craig Ponsford Bakes Whole Wheat Ciabatta

November 22, 2013

...use a spiral mixer in this video, he’s incorporating the ingredients with water not kneading them. Developing the flour takes place not through kneading, but instead due to a long fermentation, a wet dough and the folding you’ll see him demonstrate. And you don’t need a spiral mixer. You can incorporate ingredients by hand or with a stand mixer. Just don’t knead! Baking requires a scale. Ponsford is very insistent about this and with good reason....

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Saturday Linkages: Holiday Edition

Mr. Homegrown

December 21, 2013

Saturday Linkages

...ors Superbugs, Consumer Reports Finds http://huff.to/JKYa1W Why LA’s local water strategy is like ‘Superman 3’ http://www.scpr.org/news/2013/12/13/40922/with-water-from-the-delta-uncertain-la-looks-to-ex/ … Bike helmets and safety: a case study in difficult epidemiology – Boing Boing http://boingboing.net/2013/12/15/bike-helmets-and-safety-a-cas.html … Avoid Antibacterial Soaps, Say Consumer Advocates http://on.natgeo.com/18Pptyh Arizona Food and...

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Kelly’s Goals for 2014

Mrs. Homegrown

January 2, 2014

Fitness, Thoughtstylings

19 Comments

...along with everyone else on the beach–watches me flail pathetically in the water, looking like a oddly leggy, chubby seal in my wetsuit.) The last time I was super-fit was when Erik and I took the Sierra Club’s Wilderness Training Course. We had to climb many mountains and do challenging winter outings involving heavy backpacks and snow shoes. I trained hard for the climbs, in morbid fear of collapsing midway up the mountain and having to be mediv...

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Maintaining a Worm Bin

Mrs. Homegrown

July 19, 2013

Composting, Miscellaneous, Vermiculture

31 Comments

...in, nothing goes into the resting side while it’s resting, unless it needs water to keep it from drying out. Below is how it looks with the hay scraped off. See? Nice and dark And here it is close up. The pale things are mostly eggshells, along with a few wood shavings that drifted over from the working side. There’s a soldier fly carapace on the far left, dead center. I ignore those. Eggshells never really break down in a worm bin, but I don’t mi...

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Quick Relief for Poison Oak

Mrs. Homegrown

April 4, 2014

Domesticus, Herbal Medicine, How-to

34 Comments

...til I found one I liked from good ol’ Dr. Weil. He recommended running hot water over the rash, as hot as you can stand it. I don’t remember that he said how long you should do this, but I decided to do it as long as I could stand it, which in my case was probably a minute or so. He said the heat will cause the itching to flare temporarily, but then suppress the itching for hours, and speed healing as well. Results? It worked like a charm for me....

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