Dedicated to the holy in nature. The life in the seed. The beauty that feeds the world.
The saguaro (/səˈwɑːroʊ/, Spanish pronunciation: [saˈɣwaɾo]) (Carnegiea gigantea) is an arborescent (tree-like) cactus species in the monotypic genus Carnegiea, which can grow to be over 40 feet (12 m) tall. It is native to the Sonoran Desert in Arizona, the Mexican State of Sonora, and the Whipple Mountains and Imperial County areas of California. The saguaro blossom is the state wildflower of Arizona. Its scientific …
Humans love flavor. Archeologists have found evidence that hunter-gatherers in Stone Age Europe used garlic mustard seeds (a broccoli relative with a mustardy, peppery kick) to season stews 6,000 years ago. For almost as long as we’ve been cooking, we’ve been adding ingredients to our pots that …
Humpback whales in the southern oceans around Antarctica appear to be breeding successfully, recovering their population. CreditEitan Abramovich/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images In a rare piece of good news for whales, humpbacks who live and breed in the southern oceans near Antarctica appear to be making …
courtesy of Bird and Moon Comics and Nature Conservancy of Canada / Conservation de la nature Canada
Sourdough is an excellent way to add air into your dough. At the same time the taste becomes a little sour adding excellent flavour to the bread. A welcome side effect is that you can eat your bread for a longer period of time as it does not catch mold as fast as yeast-only bread. This is because of the anti-biotic ingredients. Good news, it is really easy to make your own sourdough.
Personally I find sourdough amazing as it is an all natural product. It has been there for thousands of years. Mankind uses fermentation for many great products, wine, beer, sauerkraut and sourdough. It requires a little time initially to create your own sourdough, but then after you can re-use the sourdough for every future bake.
Before there has been artificial yeast there was already bread. In order to be able to turn the flour into something enjoyable mankind developed the sourdough. Without the sourdough your bread would have looked and tasted like a big brick.
Did you ever wonder why at some point your food suddenly starts having mold all around? That is because there is natural yeast and other bacteria in the air. Everything the sourdough does is trapping this natural yeast and bacteria. The bacteria releases lactic acid when eating the flour. The yeast is in charge of creating the carbo-dioxide which makes the bread fluffy. The dough gives the bacteria and yeast a really amazing place to live. Both of them live in harmony in a nice balance. As a baker it is your job to ensure that they feel happy and enjoy their home.
The quantities of yeast and bacteria in the air is minimal and thus it takes some time to gather large quantities in your dough. That’s why on your first sourdough it takes up to a week until significant yeast/bacteria entered your dough and reproduced.
The whole process will take you 7 days with around 2 minutes of time per day. Which means you will spend only 14 minutes in total to have your own sourdough ready. I like to call this dough the mother dough, as it is the mother of all my doughs.
What would a werewolf look like… as a baby? That’s the question SFX artist Asia Eriksen has sought to answer in creating a line of life-sized baby werewolves, which she calls WerePups. Each hyper-realistic silicone doll — 18 inches long at “birth” — is handmade …
John Free is a social documentary photographer. John has taught at USC, UCLA, PCC, LACMA and has worked professionally at this craft for more than 45 years. For his personal work he does street photography. http://johnfreephotography.com
Blink and you’ll miss them, but over the course of its 29 seasons, The Simpsons has incorporated a plethora of sly art-historical references into its plots. Some of the best feature in an episode titled “Mom and Pop Art,” in the course of which Jasper Johns makes a stellar guest turn as a kleptomaniacal party crasher. (Less probable: Homer fleetingly becomes a successful artist.)
The episode itself is worth a watch—rarely has the art world been satirized quite so deftly—but there is one scene in particular that sticks in the mind. Visiting a museum for inspiration, Homer drifts off to sleep and dreams of wandering through the scenery of paintings by the likes of Henri Rousseau, Pablo Picasso, and Andy Warhol.
Brief though the sequence is, the idea it proposes is seductive; the notion of stepping through the frame of our favorite paintings and quite literally inhabiting them will always have a powerful imaginative pull. And while we might not envy Homer’s particular experience (he is, variously, beaten up by Leonardo da Vinci’s 15th-century Vitruvian Man; pelted with Campbell’s soup cans by Warhol; and gunned down by Picasso’s Three Musicians from 1921), few would pass up the chance to immerse themselves in a masterpiece.
