We have a spring in back of the house that overflows into an old clawfoot tub, and after a hike in the woods, Charlie pup runs ahead on the trail and jumps in to this tub. She loves it. What does your pup do like this?
Author: Eric
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5 Minute Chocolate Cake In A Mug Recipe : GF video
5 Min chocolate cake mug cake is a simple easy recipe to make quick chocolate cake in your microwave. mix the chocolate cake recipe, microwave for 2 minutes, and in 2 minutes you have chocolate cake.
Here is the 5 minute chocolate cake recipe:
3 TBSP of vegetable oil
1 egg
3 TBSP milk, or water – milk is better
2 TBSP sugar
3 TBSP flour
2 TBSP cocoa
2-3 TBSP chocolate chips
Pinch of salt
Dash of vanilla
In a pyrex 2 cup container or microwave proof mug, mix the wet ingredients together, then add the dry ingredients to the wet batter. Mix together, but don’t whip it, just mix it.
Place in a microwave on High for 2 minutes. Turn the cake out onto a plate, or if its in a mug, you can dust with powdered sugar. Let it cool a bit before eating, its hot.
Do you have a 5 minute microwave cake recipe? let us know below:
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Mike’s Road Trips GF Radio
Mike tell us about his recent road trips to gaming conventions and Florida. then there’s some viewer mail.
photo by chelle
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What is a colonoscopy? : GF Radio
What is a colonoscopy? how does a colonoscopy work? What’s it like and why you should have one today on GardenFork Radio. Rick, Mike, and Eric talk about their colonoscopy experiences and how its not that big of a deal.
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How To Poach Eggs GF.TV
Learn here how to poach eggs with Eric’s simple poached egg recipe. Poaching eggs is a healthy way to cook eggs with no oil, you cook the eggs in water, hence the name, poached eggs.
A properly cooked poached egg has a runny yolk, i think, but not too runny. You have to experiment with the timing to get the perfect poached egg. There are all sorts of methods to poach an egg, but I think the method we show you in our poached egg video works best. Its not a lot of work, you don’t have to have a fancy egg poacher pan, and it works.
Poached eggs are great on toast, but people also poached eggs for fancy dished like Eggs Benedict, and the Middle Eastern dish Shakshouka, in which eggs are poached in a tomato sauce. I’ve seen a few different versions of this, and its on the to do list in the GardenFork kitchen.Eggs in general are just plain healthy for you. They are a great source of protein, they keep for a long time in your fridge, and they cook up easy. Eggs contain all the amino acids you need, and are a good brain food. Pasture or free range eggs, with the chickens being the free-er the better, are the best eggs to get, i think.
How do you poach eggs? let us know below:
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Honeycomb Surprise during beehive inspection
pulling up the super With spring coming early, we got to do our first inspection of the beehives last weekend. All our hives made it through the winter, which, despite the warm weather, is still a roll of the dice each year.
Hive #1 was re-queened twice last year; the hive never thrived, and I wondered whether it would make it through the winter. It did, thankfully. We opened this beehive up and found the bees to be good, crawling all over the sugar cakes we fed them through the winter – see our winter bee feeding video here.
After removing the sugarcakes, I started to take off the supers, and when pulling the second super, I felt the telltale rubber band pull of burr comb.
Burr comb is honeycomb where you don’t want honeycomb to be. Honeybees don’t like open space, they will fill any void with honeycomb.
What I had forgotten last summer when we re-queened was I neglected to remove the queen cage when we put the 2nd new queen in the hive. The queen is in a small cage to introduce her slowly to the hive, and you have to remove one of the frames of the hive to fit the cage in temporarily.
comb full of honey So I forgot to remove the queen cage after the queen was released by the workers, and the honeybees filled up that open space with a huge piece of honeycomb. Which just happen to be full of honey from last fall when we found it. We removed the honeycomb, put in a frame, and put the hive back together with a sugar feeder on top for the early spring.
The honeycomb tasted great, we brought it to our friends house for dinner.
you can see the space the comb filled in the lower super -
Tornado Safe Rooms, Tornadoes, & Storm Chasers GF Radio
Tyler joins us to talk about building tornado safe room or tornado shelter, his sister built a tornado safe room in the floor of her garage, and safe rooms were discussed at ChaserCon. Safe rooms can be pre-fab or built on site out of concrete or steel or a combination of rebar, cement, and cinderblocks. Storm Chasing comes next, is storm chasing really like how it looks on the cable shows? Tyler talks about what its like to chase storms and the science behind what causes tornadoes, how to tornadoes form?
Car repair comes next, Tyler is having some car repair issues with his Jeep, we talk about what a crankshaft is, a harmonic balancer, and flywheel do.We talk about beekeeping and Tyler’s beginning beekeeping experiences, Eric and Tyler agree that using medium supers, not the large deeps, are the best way to keep bees. Siting your bees is an issue, as you have to keep in mind how you are going to get to your honeybees in winter and summer, you can’t always just drive your truck right up to them, think about where they are going to live.
If you want to listen to our Beekeeping for Beginners Questions & Answers shows, click here.
Car and Truck safety on the highway rounds out the show, a viewer mail asks out loud what will driving be like in 20 years?
photo by cohdra
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Plywood Boat Video by Students in Denmark
I received this email today;
We are a group of design students interested in recording and documenting processes involved with boat building. We modeled our first boat on the one in your video, and would like to know what you thought! Have you changed your boat in any way since you first made it? Do you have any advice for us on how we could improve it? Please could you reply to us as soon as you can, looking forward to your response!
How cool is that? Wow I am flattered. They took the GF Plywood Boat Plan Video and made it their own.
I have to make some modifications to the original How to make a Plywood Boat ,
1. Let the caulk cure more for the clear plastic window in the bottom of the boat
2. Use finish nails ( the kind with a small nail head ) to put the boat together and then seal all joints with fiberglass tape and resin.
This is neat. Thanks to Jeak (Jordi, Ellie, Alex and Kate) !
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Replace the Front Wheel Bearings On Your Car GF.TV video
Yes, you can learn how to replace the front wheel bearings on your car or truck. Eric shows you how to repair your own truck wheel bearings, using his Ford F150. The front wheel bearings of his truck are making that classic wheel bearing ‘whorl’ sound, so we take an afternoon to make a wheel bearing video.Front wheel bearings are usually easy to replace, but can be a bit messy, wear latex or nitrile gloves and save your hands from grease. Buy the new wheel bearings and new wheel bearing grease before you start, and work on one wheel at a time. It helps if you have a car repair manual, we like the Haynes manuals, available here.
You need only basic car tools to do this, it helps to have few wood blocks to prop up the hub while working on it. You might also consider changing the disc brake pads while you’re replacing the front wheel bearings, since you have to remove the disc brake calipers to remove the wheel hub anyway. here is a video we did on how to replace your disc brake pads.
Consider having the disc brake rotors turned, or replacing them also, again, since you have to remove these to work on the bearings.
Be sure to safely raise the front of the vehicle off the ground using jackstands.
Have some suggestions or questions? let us know below:
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No, I will not fix your computer GF Radio
more on road rage and walking away from it.pinball history, mike talks about the influence on pinball by Steve Kordek, Eric reads from Mr Kordek’s obituary in the NY Times http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/24/business/steve-kordek-innovator-of-pinball-game-dies-at-100.html
mike shreds his paperwork and sets off the alarm at work and eric used to have long hair and a mowhawk, photos of which are out there.
more on using baking soda to wash your hair and using hydrogen peroxide, baking soda, water, and few drops of dishwashing soap to get rid of the funky smell of labrador fur
eric has disconnected the camera and microphone on his computer
viewer mail and itunes reviews.
eric reacts to a cranky comment by someone who does not like dogs
iTunes review: ” if you’re looking for a tightly structured podcast, GardenFork is not for you. ”
eric has started to post things on Pinterest.com, its a great way of sharing pictures and ideas from people’s websites. Gardenfork’s page on Pinterest is here: http://pinterest.com/gardenforktv/
Mike goes on cooking: mike tells how to make pizza at home using a super easy way with a large flat pita that you can keep in the freezer. Mike uses spaghetti sauce, olive oil, cheese and vegetables.
Eric talks about things he is doing to lose weight, talking about posting his weight each day publicly would help to keep one focused.
Mike and Eric talk about the diplomacy and social etiquette of asking a friend to fix your computer. its summed up by: “No, I will not fix your computer”
photo by mconnors
Finally, Eric likes the word ‘ somnolent ‘
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Maple Syrup Season Update GF Radio
Eric talks with Bill of Maple Knoll Farm about tapping Maple Trees for sap, making maple syrup, and how this warm winter is affecting the maple syrup season. Bill can be seen in our GF Video Make Maple Syrup here. Bill has about 150 trees tapped, using metal buckets. He and his family collect the maple sap, and boil it down in the evaporator in the family sugar shack. This warm winter weather has thrown a wrench in the usual maple syrup making process. Sap runs in sugar maple trees when the nights are cold and the days are warm. This year we’ve had just warm weather for the most part.In the sugar shack, Bill and his family fire up the evaporator and boil down the sugar maple sap to syrup. Its very cool process to watch. There are several maple syrup operations in our town, and we visited another one recently and made this how to make maple syrup video there. Each sugar shack is different, reflecting the interior design sense of each sap house owner.
Some additional maple syrup posts on Gardenfork:
How to make Maple Syrup at Bill’s Sugar Shack
How to make maple syrup at the Norfolk sugar shack
Summer Salad with Maple Blue Cheese
photo by earl53
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Winter Bee Check & Sugar Feeding – Beekeeping 101 Video
Getting your honeybees through winter is a challenge. We feed our bees sugar in the form of a sugar cake, (sugar cake recipe below video) and show you in this video how to feed your bees sugar in the winter.
Note: I know use the Mountain Camp method of winter sugar feeding, but the video below is a good visual on checking your bees in winter.
Another benefit of sugar cakes on top of the hive is that they sugar absorbs moisture, reducing the chance of condensation forming on top of the hive and raining down on your bees, killing them.
We use these insulated inner covers in the winter, which help greatly in reducing condensation. So the combination of a winter cover and sugar cakes, I believe, really helps with moisture buildup in the hive.Many books talk bout using fondant in winter, but I’ve found it is hard to make, and I’m not sure what the exact benefits it has over just plain sugar cakes, which are super simple to make with re-useable foil pans you buy at the store. We add a homemade essential oil mix to the cakes.
Read more of our beekeeping posts here and watch beekeeping videos here. Thx!
Do you use sugar in your hives in winter? let us know below:
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How to find a new job, Rich Gee talks GF Radio
Wondering how to get job in this economy? You’ve just been downsized, and you’re thinking to yourself, how do look for a job? How do I market myself?
I met Rich Gee, executive and business coach, at a great diner for breakfast, and after we had eggs, hash, toast and coffee, we recorded an impromptu GF Radio show about how to look for a job. Rich gives some great suggestions on marketing yourself and how to talk about yourself in the present, not ‘what you used to do’.
The diner we met at, The Laurel Diner in Southbury, CT is neat. Michael Stern of RoadFood.com says:
A vintage diner with terrific corned beef hash and even more terrific hash brown potatoes. Dine at the counter and watch the cooks juggle a dozen orders as breakfast perfume fills the air.
When Rich and I sat down, I knew I was in a New England diner, as kielbalsa was on the menu. I had the hash special and it was good.
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Sugar Cake Recipe Winter Beekeeping 101 Video
Here’s a video on how to make sugar cakes to feed your bees in winter. Overwintering your honeybees is challenge, here is one way I help the bees overwinter, feeding them sugar cakes with this recipe. You can make these at home. I use foil pans you can buy at the grocery store.
Note: I know use the dry sugar aka Mountain Camp method of providing sugar to honeybees in the winter. Watch our dry sugar Mountain Camp video here.
The sugar cake recipe:
- put 5 pounds of sugar in a large mixing bowl
- add 7.5 ounces of water
- add a teaspoon or two of essential oil mix if you choose
- mix together and then spread out in a 9×13 or similar foil pan
- allow to dry overnight
- take off the inner cover of the hive
- carefully turn the cake upside down onto a thin plastic or wood board
- slide the sugarcake onto the top of the hive, and either put on either a shim or an insulated inner cover, and then the outer cover.
Here are some photos of how to make sugar cakes for bees.
You can add a homemade honeybee essential oil mix to the sugar cake recipe, you can see the essential oil recipe here. Update: I know buy the pre-mixed essential oil mix, its not that expensive and saves time.
To put these cakes on top of your hive, you must use a spacer – shim, or an insulated inner cover.
There are many opinions on how to get your bees through the winter, this is one way we make sure our honeybees have enough food to get through the winter. What I like about sugarcakes is that the cakes absorb moisture in the hive, which reduces or prevents condensation in the hive.
Many beekeeping books say you should open the hives only when it is 45-50F, but I’ve found if you act quickly, you can pop the top of the hive to slide in sugarcakes when the temperature is in the 30s. Obviously you aren’t going to do a hive inspection at 30F, but you have a few seconds to open the inner cover an add sugar above the supers.
Again, I think the dry sugar method is much better now, check it out here.
Do you use sugar in your hives in winter? let us know below: -
Frozen Brake Calipers & Haybox Cookers GF Radio
Mike tells us how to buy used truck, buying a used car or truck can be an un-fun experience, Mike talks about how to avoid the pitfalls. Frozen or stuck brake calipers are discussed, what causes a frozen brake caliper? how to fix a broken brake caliper and how disc brakes work are covered.
Haybox cookers are next on GF Radio, what is a Haybox Cooker? Listen as eric describes how a haybox cooker is constructed and how it works. The history of these cookers is interesting, and we found several neat blogs while researching this thing.
We found a great self sufficiency blog, Growing Things and Making Things, that talks about the haybox cooker
Also on that blog was post about using only water to wash your hair, and Sarah tells us how to wash your hair using only baking soda. [ i can attest that Sarah’s hair looks great ]
Yet another viewer has discovered our No Knead Bread video and No Knead Bread recipe adapted from Jim Lehman, and the viewer has some suggestions:
“Now, you ought to do a video on ALL the possibilities available for the Sullivan Bread. I do
a garlic/onion, onion, onion and Italian seasonings, garlic and Mediterranean seasonings,
sun-dried tomato and black olive, and pepperoni and cheese besides the standard recipe.
My wife wants me to try a roasted red pepper (chopped) with garlic, onion and Italian or
Greek seasonings. My son is after me to try a bacon/onion and sharp cheddar cheese one.
At first I had doubts if ANY of the “flavored” Sullivan breads would turn out, but they did and
BETTER than the expensive bakery Artisans. Of course almost all the add-ins are dried
or not refrigerated and added with the base ingredients and let rise over night. The cheese is
added just prior to the two hour “rise”. “We then move onto to Steven, of Tiny House Listings‘ photos and plan for brick pizza oven that uses no mortar or rails, you can see the photos here
Love to get recipes and photos from you all.
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Seed Starting How To & Email Reminders GF Radio
How to start seeds using a heated seedling mat starts the show, using plastic sheeting to build a hoop house within a greenhouse, and using a heating cable buried in the ground starts GF Radio this week. You can watch our seed starting videos here.
Eric has a healthy respect for electricity, and despite Eric reminding everyone to change the batteries in the smoke alarms, he forgets himself. You should change your smoke alarm batteries every 6 months.
You can use the calendar in your computer to email yourself reminders to do these things, like flip your mattress, clean your fridge coils, etc.
The buildup of dust in your computer starts us on a tangent talking about how to clean your computer, Mike gives some computer cleaning suggestions. Keeping your computer on your desktop instead of on the floor will keep the insides of the computer cleaner.
USB powered outlets are new on the market, and for home offices this might be a good idea. Eric wonders how much vampire power is used by these USB outlets, and you need a deep outlet box to accommodate these USB outlets.
Valentines day comes up, and mike wants to know why can’t he be romanced. Having Valentines Day at home is a theme at GardenFork.
If you don’t have enough time, stop watching TV is a quote from this Holstee.com Manifesto poster that Eric likes. “This is our life, do what you love, and do it often”
The website redesign comes next, be prepared for more changes as we redesign the site.
Mike is going to buy a used Ford F150, and Eric gives tips on buying a used car or truck. -
How to make homemade pasta GF TV Video
Home made pasta, aka fresh pasta, we show you how to make a home made pasta recipe in the GF cooking video. Pasta from scratch is not hard, there’s just a few steps to get it right. Homemade pasta tastes different from store bought pasta, and when you make it yourself, there are infinite variations possible. neat.
There’s a good chance you have a pasta machine in the basement, an xmas gift from a while back that you never got to, so you’ve got the equipment. If you don’t have a pasta machine, check out these pasta machines
or the links at the bottom of this article.My technique for making home made pasta is based on a method Jamie Oliver shows us in his book, Cook with Jamie: My Guide to Making You a Better Cook
– a book I really like, BTW.Home Made Pasta Recipe ©2012 Eric Rochow
100 Grams all purpose or Italian “OO” flour
1 egg
For homemade pasta, you can use either all purpose flour or an italian flour labeled “OO”, i believe its a finer grind flour, but if you can’t find it, all purpose flour works fine.
The ratio that I’ve found works best is 100 grams of flour to 1 egg. If you are making fresh pasta for 4 people, I’ve found 300 grams of flour and 3 eggs works well.
Put the flour and eggs in a food processor, and pulse until the flour comes together and looks like small pebbles.
Dump the pasta dough mixture onto a floured board, and collect the flour into a ball.
Now knead the dough by stretching the dough out and folding it over on itself. Its best to watch our how to video to see this. Knead for 5-8 minutes
The dough is kneaded when you press your finger lightly into the dough and the dough fills out the dimple you’ve made again, the dough bounces back.
Shape the dough into a rectangle, wrap in plastic wrap, and put in the fridge for at least 30 minutes, longer is better.
Take the dough out of the fridge and cut into square pieces about 3″ x 3″, 3/4″ thick. how many pieces you will have depends on how much flour and eggs you mixed together.
Take one of the dough squares and run it through your pasta machine at its widest width. Fold the dough back over on itself in thirds, like folding a letter into an envelope.
You will now run the dough through each width setting on the machine, holding the dough so the folds are on the sides. You may need to flour the dough when rolling it through the machine to keep it from sticking.
After you have run the dough through the machine at its smallest width, take the dough and fold it back on itself until it is about 4″ wide or so, you want a width that is small enough so you can run the dough through the machine again.
Run the dough the machine again, starting at the widest width and progressing through to the narrowest setting. Note: some machines have a real narrow final width, you may not want to get the dough that thin, it depends on what kind of pasta you want to make, and how thick you want it to be.
You can cut the dough in half if it gets too difficult to work with. And you can flour the dough as needed.
You are now ready to run the pasta dough through the die cutters to make various kinds of pasta, or you can hand cut it on a board, or you can make ravioli with the dough. I’ve found it works best to let the pasta dough rest under a towel for 10 minutes or longer before running it through the pasta cutters, you may need to flour the dough again, you want it quite dry.The flour you use for dusting can be whole wheat or semolina or just regular flour. I’ve used whole wheat thinking it gives a bit of a nutty taste to the pasta, but maybe i’m just fooling myself.
Once you cut your pasta, you can drop it into boiling water or let it dry on a dowel or broomstick set between two chairs. Fresh pasta can take 3 minutes to cook, or 8 minutes, it all depends, you’ll have to keep an eye on it.
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How to remove your name from catalog mailing lists
We’ve been getting multiple copies of numerous catalogs, and then there are another bunch of catalogs that I don’t want to receive. Its been in the back of my mind to clip out the address label from each catalog, write ‘unsubscribe’ on the label, and mail it back to the catalog company. But with postage costs rising, I thought, what if I just type:
remove my name from abc company mailing list
into a search engine? Well here is the answer:
Type the company name and hit go Brilliant! and i saved a bunch on postage. The average person in the United States receives 41 pounds of catalogs and mailings a year, and while I like and buy things from many of the companies that send me catalogs, I don’t usually use the catalog, I go to their website and shop for what I need.
website form to remove your name from catalog lists According to 41pounds.org, junk mail produces more carbon dioxide than 9 million cars. They offer a service where for a $41, they will remove your name from mailing lists for 5 years. This is a great way to keep all those credit card offers from flooding you mailbox.
I also called my credit card company and told them to stop mailing me those balance transfer checks and offers. It might not be a rational fear, but I don’t want those blank checks they mail me to end up in the wrong hands. And its one less thing to shred and jam our paper shredder. Neat.
So there you go, type in the name of the catalog company and you will probably find a link to a page on their site to remove your name from mailings. A few of the companies required an email address when filling out the form, I typed in a made-up email address.
How to you reduce mailings and paper in your house? Let us know below:
