A request to the blogosphere… I am organizing a large conference and part of the work we are doing as we sense into the need and purpose of the gathering is to understand the people who will be coming. The conference is a gathering for a large national movement, and although we know many of the people who will be there, the purpose of the gathering may be different this year, necessitating different participants. We have a core team designing the gathering and we’d like to use an effective, relatively quick low tech method to map out and overview of …
This post from Jack is so useful and powerful that I’m quoting it whole here: One of my seatmates from Phili to Boston last night was Portland’s city planner, a gentle giant of an AfricanAmerican man who spent the post-war Bosnian years doing amazing work in economic development and country re-building. He lead the first public school integration in the country, a school where Serb, Croat and Muslim children went to school at the same building in 8 hour shifts in order to prevent any inter-contact. Taking key leaders and school administrators for a month in Geneva, he asked …
As I promised yesterday, here is my recipe for fougasse. Actually this comes from Richard Bertinet’s excellent book Dough: Simple Contemporary Breads. It’s easy and quick and very satisfying. First the ingredients: 1.5 teaspoons of active dry yeast (or one .25 oz envelope) 18 oz of all purpose white or white bread flour. 2 teaspoons of salt 12.5 oz of water. It’s important to measure the ingredients by weight to get the proportions correct. If you don’t have a kitchen scale then use 2.5 cups of flour, but don’t pack the measuring cup full, just scoop it out of the …
Yay. It is the world day of bread. What a great idea to celebrate the human ingenuity behind combining flour, salt, yeast and water. These four basic ingredients are responsible for more comfort in the world that almost anything else. When I return home from a day of working in Vancouver, I will post a recipe for my standbay easy bread: fougasse. In the meantime, enjoy the offerings at my favourite bread site The Fresh Loaf (including this excellent Daily Bread recipe, and perhaps even try a batch of no knead bread. If you start it tonight, you …
Reading Christopher Buckley’s endorsement of Barak Obama reminded me that there was a certain kind of conservatism that used to appeal to me, before the culture wars made it possible for conservatives, formerly the most francophilic of all, to even hate France. It seems as if the prevailing image of conservatism in America at the moment is the loud and brash Fox News/Little Green Footballs/Rush Limbaugh hate mongering. It is a fear based conservatism, appealing to masses of terrified voters who are convinced that their way of life is threatened by Muslims and Mexicans. They are embodied in …