Ramping Up the Garden

Anyone still out there?

2011-10-26T23:38:00.003-04:00

To all the folks that used to follow this blog (if anyone still has me in their feed reader) - I am starting a new blog. Probably not so different from the old one. Still food, gardening, preparedness, thrifting, household craziness. Lots of new stuff to talk about.

Feel free to add me to your readers at: City Peasant

Independence Challenge - July '09

2009-07-26T18:49:00.004-04:00

Whew. Mom spent another week in the hospital after a string of "episodes" that culminated in what looked like a big TIA in the doorway of her doctor's office. After a lot of testing, they basically don't know what is wrong, but it's probably not more TIAs. It might just be the blood pressure meds they had her on after the first June TIA. She has a history of sensitivity to medication, and she hasn't had another episode since she stopped taking the Vasotec.

It did delay our move by two weeks - the landlord agreed to give us an extension. I was spending a lot of time at the hospital and we were not getting packed.

There is another factor influencing my preparedness - harder to wrap my head around. With DH gone at grad school, and my self-employment dissolved, I have no income while I care for Mom. I've had to apply for food stamps, Medical Assistance, and welfare. I don't like it, but it does help quite a bit. It's the first time I've had medical coverage since DD12 was born - I hardly know where to start.

We get $529/month in food stamps, far more than I expected - and far more than we spent on food with our own cash. But we don't eat like a lot of families do, and I have food storage. My mother technically does not live with us, but I also feed her from our food stamp budget. Several effects on our food patterns:

We eat in more variety. We can afford more than the cheapest protein. I can afford some fish, organic chicken, organic store-brand milk. We can afford more fresh fruit and vegetable variety. I can take advantage of seasonal sales on a more efficient scale. I can't be a spend-thrift, and we still eat a lot of rice, beans, oatmeal, eggs, and potatoes.
I can re-build our storage. I didn't have enough money to replenish what we were using, which was worrisome. Summer should be the time we stock up, not eat down.
We eat far less locally. Almost no vendors at the large farmer's markets take food stamp cards - none of the produce vendors. None of the orchards or producer markets take the cards at all. Not only are we unable to spend our food stamp largess locally, the local vendors are missing that whole market of clients. So, we cannot buy local milk, produce, meat, seeds, or baked goods (except the stuff that makes it into the grocery stores). We do shop at the most-locally-focused grocery stores, Weis and Redner's. I really miss the producer markets and the pick-your-own orchards.

It's been hard to get much done regarding the Independence Challenge. I've been trying to wait until we get fully moved and organized at Mom's house. But I did mange to get a few things done:

Planted: I bought a slicing tomato start on clearance and put it in a big pot on Mom's front walk. It's got a number of tomatoes. I am planting at least basil, cabbage, peas, and carrots for a fall garden.

Harvested: Mint for tea. My chocolate mint died over the winter, so the mint is my less-favorite spearmint. It dries poorly, I discovered last year - almost no flavor from dried leaves. We also used the dill from a small volunteer plant in the backyard. Mom has peppermint and apple teas in her yard, so I look forward to experimenting.

Preserved: Not so much. I hope to make pickles, pesto, and more jam in August.

Reduced Waste: Oh, not. The problem is my Mom's house. Her approach to reducing waste was to simply save it. And to bring in hundreds of cardboard boxes to organize it. And now years of paper, plastic, metal, cardboard, and glass must go, in one extended outpouring. We recycle as much as we can, with the municipal program and at various scrap buyers. We will also have yard sales, freecycling, and ebaying. But still, we have been putting out 16 large bags of trash each week, plus a bulk item.

We are have much stuff for the county's fall hazardous waste collection. Decades of expired medication, nail polish, mercury thermometers, old oil-based paint, batteries, pesticides, herbicides, anti-freeze and motor oil. I have a pick-up truckload of metal scrap, and am hiring someone hourly just to flatten cardboard for a truckload delivery.

On the positive side, Mom has an established composting area that we will expand. There are some elderly canned goods that we will eventually empty into the compost stream when I get more worms. Some, I will just flush or dump in the sink. For instance - she had a dozen cans of Hawaiian Punch from the 70s. Apparently, it can eat through metal, because the contents leaked from some of them. The rest must be full of dissolved metallic elements - I am dumping that into the sewer system.

We could compost some of her paper and cardboard, but not most of it - it would exceed the capacity of her 1/3-acre yard. We put out 20 bags of paper for the recycling pick-up this past Monday alone. I am looking for a place to take wood scrap - maybe a biomass generator. There are lots of wooden odds and ends that I won't burn in a home fireplace - painted, varnished, poly-coated, particle board, soft wood, etc. A biomass generator will have a scrubber stack.

We did a bunch of plumbing work - new hot water heater, new bathroom sink/faucet, toilet guts, and a pressure-reducing value. Mom's split-level was built in the 50's and the builder was cheap with plumbing and electrical work. My parents did almost nothing to improve on that. By simply adding a pressure-reducing value, we have already solved years of plumbing fixture abuse, wasted water, and wasted water-heating energy. We couldn't have a tankless heater without seriously upgrading her natural gas lines, so we just went with a more efficient heater.

Electrical work is next - new 200 amp service (she has a 60-amp fusebox), more lines for outlets in the basement, and GFI outlets for bath and kitchen. I need to be able to plug in my freezer safely. I realize now that Dad spent his whole garage workshop life using only an extension cord plugged into an outlet screwed into the ceiling fixture. WTF, Dad? He was not nearly as handy as I thought he was when I was a kid.

We are also planning a DIY kitchen upgrade that starts with stock base cabinets, surplus counter, and maybe a vintage cast iron sink. We need to stretch Mom's funds to cover as much renovation as we can, so we will do the kitchen in stages. I hope to post photos after we have done enough clean-up not to embarrass Mom. The girls are old enough to learn to use tools, and I have a lot of renovation experience. My hands are wrecked, but I can instruct and demo, and they can be the hands.

Preparation and Storage: I stocked a case of assorted canned beans, canned tomatoes, peanut butter, bulk popcorn and split peas we stored in juice bottles. These food stamp benefits will run out, maybe within 6 months, so I hope to do a lot more stocking by then.

I am still skimming Craigslist out of habit, and I saw a pressure canner go by. I just had to email, and I got it! Only used a few times, for $20. I am planning to start by canning some chicken stock as soon as we get settled.

We have also found more things at Mom's. Old comforters that can become window quilts, lots of fabric for quilting, Lots of kitchenware, even more canning jars. I will have to buy new rings and lids by the case. I also found a few older organic gardening books that I had intended to buy. Mom must have gotten them years ago, with good intentions, but never really grasped what "organic" meant, judging by the amount of commercial fertilizer, pesticide, and herbicide in the garage. She saved a billion articles about using vinegar and baking soda, but still bought dozens of chemical cleaners. We will help her get back on the greener path.

Build Community Food Systems: No. But I am collecting ideas for future activism. My food stamp experience alone gives me ideas for things that need changing. If food stamps are our society's temporary family safety net, they need to be spendable in the local food economy, not shut people out of it.

Eat the Food: We were eating too much convenience food at first. We were working for 8-10 hours a day at Mom's house, and cooking just seemed impossible. But we have now fallen into better patterns. We make oatmeal, yogurt, and fruit for breakfast, then spend the mornings doing email and phone work, or packing at our old house. We have lunch, often soup and sandwiches, and leave to work at the house for 4-5 hours. Then we come home and make dinner. Mom usually naps at home with one of the girls in the evening, and I take the other one back to work at the house for another 2-3 hours, usually leaving around 9:30pm. I try to go to bed by 10:30, and get up at about 7:30.

Having Mom around does keep us on more of a schedule than usual. She has had a loss of appetite, so she doesn't ask for food, although she will eat and enjoy it if I bring it. I have to remember to feed her so she can take her medications on time (and not get loopy from lack of food). I'm not used to that - if the kids are hungry they either demand a meal or go rustle up their own food. We usually only ate dinner together. Now, I am preparing three meals a day.

I gave up making yogurt, for now, but we do make crockpots of soup, and often something else for sandwiches, like roast turkey or meatloaf. Dinner is usually some form of boneless chicken with vegetable, salad, or side dish. DD16 might make chicken curry with green beans over rice. Or I might make chicken Caesar salad. There is often fresh fruit at every meal. The four of us can go through most of a watermelon in a day, a whole cantaloupe or pineapple in one meal. Cereal, bananas, and leftovers fill in the gaps.

By my next Independence Challenge report, I hope to be able to say I have my new pantry set up, my kitchen renovation underway, and our composting expanded.

An Update from the Trenches

2009-07-13T08:34:00.006-04:00

I've been quiet, blog-wise, for a long time, but busy "off screen."

This week, we are in the final push to move into Mom's house by July 21st (which is when we've told our landlord we will be out). The house is not quite ready, so I am a bit nervous about whether the plumber will have the essential work done in time. And by "ready" I mean just able to physically accommodate me, the girls, and our bare necessities. We need to be able to sleep, cook, use a bathroom, hook up a computer, have room to sit down. It will take many months for the house to be fully re-organized and repaired.

On top of her cognitive issues, Mom had a mini-stroke in June. She has recovered well, but now takes a lot more medications than she once did. Her license to drive has been taken, and her independence much reduced. It is a sad time for her. We now think she does not have Alzheimer's, but that she may have had a number of small strokes that were not recognized. That is both good and bad news. I feel even more sharply the urgency of writing down more of her stories.

Once we are moved in, I hope to start blogging again, as we begin to completely reorganize a house filled to the brim with stuff, some useful, some not. It raises interesting questions of what needs stocking up for an uncertain future, and how much is enough. My mother's OCD/hoarding tendencies made her stockpiling ritualistic and excessive, but her urges are very similar to the things we talk about wanting to accomplish with our Independence challenges and our various prepping activities.

Jars, for instance. We've recycled vast amounts of saved glass and plastic jars. Possibly thousands, in carloads to the township recycling center. We've kept the canning jars (maybe 150), freezer containers, the larger glass jars with intact lids. We've recycled the rest - too many different sizes, all with different lids. I want to have only 2-3 lid sizes to manage.

There are still dozens of jars of hardware to look through - many dating back to my father's workshop days - but he's been gone for 27 years. Some will end up with the metal scrap. There is a huge metal scrap pile in the backyard, along with a large wood scrap pile, and a mountain of cardboard to be flattened - all bound for various recycling destinations. Hundreds of cans of old oil-based paint and house/garden chemicals will go to a hazardous waste collection event in the fall. There are also many 4-5 gallon plastic food buckets with lids, round and square. My mom used them ineffectively, but I am keeping them for now - future food storage.

Some things were more of an artifact of her hoarding disorder. Onions skins, for instance. Bags, bottles, and boxes tucked in everywhere. Long ago (40 years?), she did a craft project that involved dying eggs with onions skins. She's been saving them since, wanting to do more of that, but not able to do anything at all in her disordered house. The phrase "disordered house" is so apt in this situation. Onion skins can be useful, but there is no danger we will run out, since we grow onions.

Lest it all seem grim, we have also found many interesting things, some of which will be blogged later. My teen daughters were fascinated by a pile of Seventeen magazines from the 70's. I kept some Boys Life to give to my brother. Funny lists I made when I was in 7th grade. My mother's wedding shoes. Negatives from my father's darkroom. Jars full of seashells from our beach trips. Things my father and grandfather brought back from WWII.

There are also useful things. Lots of tools, books, lumber, plastic sheeting, fire wood. The many buckets and canning jars. (Oddly, I never recall my mother canning - I think she stopped when I was very young). A vintage croquet set and other games. Clothing, sheets, towels. Envelopes, stationary, wrapping paper. Hundreds of gloves (another item of obsessive focus for Mom). No need to go to yard sales this year!

And... we have only done the very-densely-packed cellar, garage, hallway, part of the living room. We still have the rest of the LR, a dining room, most of the kitchen, 4 bedrooms, 2 attic spaces, an enclosed back porch, and a crawl space. There is a collapsing garden shed to be emptied and torn down. We've been putting out 8 bags of trash twice a week, plus bulk items, and trips to the recycling center. We already have a very large "yard sale" department growing in the garage.

We have been using a rented storage unit to pack up our old household until there is room at Mom's. We got rid of a lot of our own stuff. Mom's situation has lead us all to examine our own habits of acquisition and disposal. I wonder if DD16 will now ever keep anything she cannot make digital.

A few weeks ago, I did manage to make small batch of strawberry jelly at our house. Two pints plus a half-pint. Nothing like the 18-24 pints I had intended to make, as DD12 will only eat strawberry. But, better than nothing. I suspect I will be doing few of the things I really want to be doing, until the major sorting effort is done.

Much more to tell another day. We canceled most of our TV cable and are making media adaptations. DH is off at grad school, working hard in a completely different way. DD12 is adapting badly to the changes in our life and we are seeking family counseling with her. DD16 is making choices about how to do high school. We are all facing a possible move to a new city when DH comes out of grad school next fall.

What a whirlwind we live in, right now.

Independence Challenge - Year 2 - Week 2

2009-05-11T00:52:00.002-04:00

I had a great Mother's Day. I picked up my Mom on Sunday morning and took her to my church for Flower Communion, which she enjoyed. Then we went home, where DD12 had made us brunch waffles from baking mix I made in advance, breakfast sausages from the market, orange juice, tea, a cut-up pineapple, giant strawberries for garnish, and a pan of brownies. Then we watched a movie together, the funny-but-forgettable Bedtime Stories with Adam Sandler.

Saturday, DH and I went out and saw Star Trek, followed by late lunch in a new Mexican place that we liked a lot, the Plaza Azteca near the Berkshire Mall. I had carnitas, and the roast pork was to-die-for.

DD12 gifted me a recipe book. She took down all the frequently-used recipes I had printed out and taped up on the cupboard doors, punched holes in them, and put them in a binder for me. She gave my mother some marigold starts they planted at school. DH gave me a bag of very good Australian licorice he got in Philadelphia at a stand in the Reading Terminal Market. We all gave my mom dark chocolate in various forms, her favorite.

DD16 sent me a Mother's Day greeting via Facebook, which included a coupon for 4 hours of yard work, or 3 hours of Attic Cleaning. Poor girl, I will be taking her up on that pretty quickly.

Planted: I feel deprived of gardening. My backyard is a mess. I've basically ignored it completely since last fall, not even doing a complete fall clean-up. But Mother Nature doesn't depend on human intervention, happily, and the perennials are coming up nicely. If I would just cut the grass, you should even see them. And I will do that, as soon as I remember to pick up the grass shears from the sharpening place - where I left them last fall. ~sigh~

Harvested: Nothing yet. The alley is full of shiny new plantain I could harvest for medical use, but I am restraining myself. Focus, focus, focus.

Preserved: Nothing. I made a big batch of whole wheat baking mix, but it got used pretty quickly.

Reduced Waste: I bought a watermelon - what was I thinking?! It's too early. They came from Texas. Not sweet at all. Composted most of it. That will teach me to ignore my "in season" rule.

I am trying to save my favorite 4-quart saucepan. I fell asleep a couple weeks ago, while applesauce was cooking on low. I woke up in my chair a few hours later, to the smell of burnt sugar. No smoke, but the blackened apples were carbonized to the pan bottom. I managed to chisel it out with a putty knife and a screwdriver, but there is still black stuff burned on after scouring with a Brillo pad and trying oven cleaner. I still want to save it, but I don't know what else to try. Anyone have suggestions?

There is massive paper and cardboard recycling. Sorting is going a little faster at Mom's, where generates lots of paper trash and empty boxes. We are also sorting here at home as we pack to move this summer. I put out 10 bags of paper recycling last week. I know I can shred and compost it, but I am not starting that until we get moved and I can set up a workable shredding station.

Prepped and Stored: The packing is getting us more organized and de-cluttered, which I think of as preparation. It's easier to evaluate what you really need to keep when you know you will have to move it to a storage unit, and then later move it again.

Community Food Systems: A family from church had a house fire, and the mom of the family recently had hand surgery. We are trying to pitch in with gluten-free meals for a family of three. I am making 2 quarts of curried split pea soup with ham. Interesting how many of my recipes involve gluten, when I start looking at them. I think I will ask if they like yogurt, too - I could make them some of that.

Eaten: We continue to eat from the freezer and pantry. I do buy dairy, cheese, bread, and produce each week, plus odds and ends like pretzels and crackers. That turkey last week made a lot of meals, but we are now sick of turkey. Turkey sandwiches, turkey curry, turkey and gravy with mashed, etc.

Last week, I took Mom to the doctor, to talk about her various issues. It was revealing. She had forgotten the things the doctor said last time, and lost two prescriptions. He also had the report from the pyschiatrist visit. She is going to have some testing to see if we can narrow down the source of her memory loss and confusion. I take her to get a lot of bloodwork today, and an MRI on Wednesday.

I feel a little bit of hope. If it is not Alzheimer's, there is a chance that she will continue on in her current pleasantly-vague condition, with the capacity to enjoy things, instead of descending more quickly into the less pleasant stages of dementia. Maybe there is time left for some happiness, after we clean up her house. We are going to start a new medication this coming week, Luvox, to see if it helps her anxiety and compulsive behaviors. Wish us luck.

Starting Year 2 of Independence Days Challange

2009-05-04T11:36:00.002-04:00

I've been absent as a blogger for months. I am very occupied with the tasks of packing my house, helping my mother sort through her house, and coordinating our busy family shedule around our one-car lifestyle. For a few weeks, I was barely even cooking.

But I really want to keep feeling like I am still working toward Independence, even if I am mostly overwhelmed by current events in the family. I need to hang on to some little piece of sanity. The 10-11 months of solid IDC posting I did last year made me feel like I was really making progress.

So, inspired by Sharon's announcement of IDC Year 2, I am going to try to post an IDC update every Monday, even if it is piteously meager. Even if I don't have any photos. Here we go:

Planted: Nothing. Since we will probably leave this house with a month or 2, I didn't plant anything. I will clean up this yard, and move all my stuff to my mom's house, where we have yet to establish a veggie bed with real soil. I may be able to plant a fall/winter garden there. But the work on her house gets priority over everything else, so maybe no garden at all this year. At least perennial flowers are coming up on their own.

Harvested: Nothing. I do have a planter full of perennial garlic chives. For this growing season, I think I will use this "harvest" category to talk about locally-produced food.

Preserved: Nothing.

Reduced Waste: I get a negative score this week. I fridge disaster forced me throw away a lot of food. A thawing package of beef shin accidentally got hidden behind things on the top shelf, and leaked blood all over the produce. I had to throw it away and clean the fridge.

Prepped and Stored: We are getting more prepped in the sense that we are packing up labeled boxes of our possessions. I am getting less prepped because I am not buying new bulk, so that we don't have to move it this summer. I will re-stock after the move. We should have more pantry space at Mom's.

Community Food Systems: I still shop at the Farmer's Market and the local grocery that I have found to be most-local (Weis). I got eggs from a friend from chruch - they have more eggs than they can eat.

Eaten: We are definately eating out of storage. I am trying to thaw and eat everything from the freezer before we move. It saves me from having to do much grocery shopping right now. We had started eating too much convenience food when I started being at Mom's house a lot, but I spent this weekend stocking the fridge. I cooked up burrito filling, made curried split pea soup, thawed a chuck of ham we used in pasta, and roasted a turkey to make lots of leftovers. I just need to make yogurt tonight, and re-stock our veggies.

Bloom Day - March 2009

2009-03-17T16:47:00.005-04:00

Does anyone know what this little weed is?
Edit: Cardamine hirsuta (Early or Hairy Bittercress)

I did take these photos on the 15th. Just didn't get time to post them for the official Bloom Day.

There is not a whole lot happening here, yet. In my yard, some bulbs are pushing up, but only a weed is blooming!

I am happy to see that all the sedums I rooted last year are coming back. The Vera Jameson (at 10 o'clock in the photo) has loads of buds - I need to get that in a bigger pot.

Tulips are coming up in the grass.

And where I left them last year. Might be a Crown Imperial at the bottom.

Random daffodils near the rick path we built last year. If I had been sure I was staying at this house, I would have put in a lot more bulbs along the path. They would work out well with the herbs I will plant later in the season. Lots of basil grew here last year.

My Mom's yard has more going on.

Does anyone know what this purple flower is?
Edit: Unknown cultivar of Iris Cristata (Wood Iris)

Mom has always been more patient with bulbs than I am. One of many clumps of daffodils:

Crocuses and hyacinth:

Winter Aconite:

Happily, the goundhog looks like it has not yet stirred from the burrow. Leaves are still stuffed under her "decorative" boulder, as they have been all winter. Unless, there is a second burrow entrance they are using.

Monday Cooking Day

2009-03-17T00:20:00.004-04:00

This quiche turned out particularly well.

I seem to be developing a pattern of going to market on Saturdays and doing weekly cooking on Mondays. Our weekends are often busy, moreso now that spring soccer started for DD12, so Monday seems to work as a day that I can hop back and forth from working at the computer to tending things in the kitchen.

This afternoon I baked off sweet potatoes to puree, white taters for home fries, and one of the last butternut squashes from the basement. I made pumpkin streusel muffins with the squash. I made bread pudding with stale rolls I got for $1 at the market. I also cooked off some bulk sausage and bacon ends, to use in quiche. I zested lemons, made fresh lemon juice, made hummus. I am thinking about try to make my own pita bread or some other flatbread. The recipes don't look too hard.

The muffins were from a super-healthy recipe with whole grain flour, egg whites, no fat, and skim milk. Kinda scary, so I used whole milk and whole eggs. They next batch needs more streusel, too. But DH and I thought they were pretty good! Especially with a dab of cream cheese. (I suck at fat-free.) I am eager to see how well they keep, and freeze.

I put the muffins in a Tupperware thing I got at a yard sale last summer, for the freezer, so we can just take out a few each day. I have a lot of ripe pears to use up, so ginger-pear bran muffins are next. I took a family survey about muffins, to see what everyone would eat. Everyone can agree on blueberry, and fortunately I have some summer-picked blueberries in the freezer. DH likes plain bran muffins, like his father made, so I need to do some experimenting with recipes. I hate scrubbing muffin pans. I want to use paper liners, but it seems wasteful to create that trash. Must be why I normally like making quiche bread loaves - loaf pans are easy to wash.

I didn't get apples peeled for sauce today, so that means we will all be peeling in front of the TV some other night this week. I think I have enough apples for 4 quarts this time.

I inventoried the leftovers in the fridge - DD15 is leaving a lot of half-eaten veggies in there. She is doing pretty well with her "no meat for Lent" commitment. I am not doing as well. I keep forgetting - I made rice with stock instead of water, so she couldn't use the same rice. I mixed the refried beans with the turkey taco meat, instead of keeping the the beans separate to share with her. Is it some sort of passive-aggressive resistance to vegetarianism? Hmm.

In other food news, DD12 is Eating Better, making progress like I haven't seen in years. I don't know if she had some sort of personal epiphany, or if a couple years if watching us eat has produced a change, but things are happening. Bread, for instance. For years, she would only eat commercial Italian style bread and the cheapest hot dog buns. Then we introduced her to a local Italian bakery, and she expanded into fresh Italian bread and Kaiser rolls. Never would she touch a whole grain bread product. But suddenly she asked to try a loaf of whole wheat Italian. Still commercial bread, but she crossed the whole grain Rubicon. She does also eat whole grain waffles we make ourselves, so I am feeling much better about her fiber intake.

She is also eating a lot of my homemade applesauce with, drinking Concord grape juice, and accepting chicken in more variety. She used to live on chicken nuggets, and likes the fried chicken legs at the farmer's market - but she will now also eat plain baked chicken.

Whew. She was so inflexible about what she would eat, down to specific brands. I was really worried she would have trouble as an adult. People have been saying, "She'll outgrow it" since she was 5, but she is heading for 13 now! Long ago, I said "I am not running a diner" and made her start to cook her own food, so I was neither forcing her to eat our food, nor "caving in" and making two different meals. I'm trying not to do the forced-eating stuff that my parents did, and which resulted in my own weird food dislikes. (The thought of green beans makes me queasy.)

But finally she seems to allowing herself to try some new stuff again, for whatever reason. Yay!

Fabulous News

2009-03-16T17:30:00.008-04:00

Out on the porch are two boxes of apple seconds that I bought for only $2 at the market on Saturday. I see a lot of applesauce in my future. I am the Queen of Market Scavenging: apple seconds, cheese ends, ham and bacon ends, day-old bread and rolls, bones, wilted greens.

March is more than halfway gone, and I am so far behind in my blogging. I have half a dozen unfinished posts in the pipeline. I'm gonna catch up with a series of quickie posts about things I don't want to forget.

First, Fabulous News today: DH was selected to be a National Urban Fellow in the 40th Anniversary year of that program. It's an intensive graduate program with two semesters of coursework and a 9-month mentorship that will result in a Master of Public Administration and admission to an incredible network of Fellows. The program runs a total of 14 months, pays a stipend and other expenses, and even includes health insurance. It's a wonderful , exciting opportunity and I am so proud of him for being selected.

But (isn't there always a "but"?), it means he will leave us for most of that time. We've had other times in our long relationship when we did not live together, so we will be okay, but I am not looking forward to his absence, even with all the digital means of staying close.

A huge clock just started ticking. He leaves the last weekend of May, and will be in NYC until August, then I get him back for 3 weeks before he goes to an as-yet-uknown major city for the mentorship. I hope he gets assigned to the Eastern seaboard, so I can visit him. We have a lot of work to do to be ready, and he will barely finish his EMT certification in May. Tick tock!

The Great Clean-up is Under Way. DH and I rented a garage for storage, and today my mother and I had our first clean-up session at her house. I took away two bags of trash and a 'donut' tire to Freecycle. I took photos of an old school desk and a child's bench to sell on Craigslist. That made just a small dent in the front porch junk, but it was a good warm-up. I hope to establish a schedule of working from 8AM-Noon four days per week, with some afternoons reserved for taking her to appointments and such. Now that we know DH is going to grad school, the pressure is really on.

Planning to Move. The current plan is to move to Mom's house in June. I have discovered that makes me really disinterested in doing things in our current house. "Is is worth doing when we will only be here another 3 months?" So far, "no" to new bathroom curtain, rearranging the living room furniture, and planting potatoes.

I've stopped buying for the freezer and pantry, and we will try to eat down our stores to avoid moving heavy canned goods. But I am keeping a list, so we can restock after the move. I'm also working on packing up things I can stash in the rented garage to reduce the size of the move - extra books, the fabric collection, and assorted boxed memorabilia.

I'm not going to plant anything at our house this year. Not even the early peas and lettuce. The clock is ticking too loudly, and I need to stay closely focused. I might try to get stuff in at Mom's if I can get rid of that groundhog, and score some compost to put in large containers.

We are planning an Easter weekend trip to DC. Tentatively, we'll visit DH's family there, visit the Smithsonian on Saturday, and attend at All Souls Unitarian Church on Sunday. We haven't been anywhere as a family since August, so a little road trip will be nice, and we seldom see DH's aunts.

Look for more posts shortly. I have things to tell you about the worm farm, a birthday trip to the Historical Society, and an Independence Challenge Update.

Independence Challenge - February 2009

2009-03-03T15:30:00.000-05:00

Pear Butter, with cardamom, has been lovely on toast and waffles.

As you may recall, I took a blogging break for most of February. During that time, I did lot of research about Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia, in preparation for taking my mother to her doctor for an evaluation. But, one way or another, we will start cleaning out her house in March, so we can move in with her for the year that DH would be away at grad school. Right now, I am hard at work finding a large storage space to rent.

In other news, DH goes to NYC ths week, for interviews about his fellowship program. He is officially a semi-finalist for the program. By the end of this month, we will know if he makes the final cut. I am trying not to jinx it, not to feel too excited for him, knock wood. Fingers crossed.

Planted/Harvested: DD15 grew mung bean sprouts. She likes sprouts, but she didn't like these. We are going to try other sprouting seeds. I also harvested seeds from an organic squash that stored well from September to February.

Speaking of seeds, I won a blog giveaway from Kathy Purdy at Cold Climate Gardening, and got to pick out 6 packs of seeds from Botanical Interests. That was a nice pick-me-up in a dark month! I ordered mostly early spring planting:

Beets - Detroit Dark Red
Peas, shelling - Progress #9 Organic
Carrot - Baby Little Finger Organic
Lettuce - Romaine Little Gem Organic
Onion - Ringmaster (long day)
Pumpkin - French Cinderella

I am applying for a community garden plot; more than one if we can sign up the kids - gonna need space for pumpkins and squash. I hope to plant at my Mom's house, too, but getting it cleared out gets priority. I am not going to plant at our rented house except in moveable containers.

Preserved: I canned 3 more pints of Meadowlark's Sunshine Jam, a quart of Pear Butter, and many quarts of apple sauce. For the freezer, I made 3 pints of pizza sauce and 6 quarts of roast pork stock. Dried citrus zest and froze 2-tablespoon juice cubes from some lemons and limes.

Cooked: Wow, a month of cooking flies by. A few things stand out, among the usual curries, bread puddings, bean soups, roast chicken, and sausage.

I've been the only one eating real oatmeal. DH will eat the instant packettes of flavored oatmeal, and I found out it's because he doesn't like all the extra fruit and yogurt I put in mine. I got some other kinds of hot cereal to try, and I am working on developing a homemade quick oats mix with sugar and spices. Once I get it to pass the taste test, I will post the recipe. I want him to be able to scoop out a half-cup, add hot water, cover, and be able to eat it in 5 minutes.

I made a really good, versatile Tandoori-style Chicken I found on my fav recipe site. I made 5 chicken breast halves with it, intending to have leftovers, but it all got gobbled up. It was great with my favorite green tomato chutney. I was between yogurt batches, so I used sour cream which worked out fine. This will be a good grilling recipe, too.

DH doesn't like being commercially pressured to be romantic on Valentine's Day, especially since he is a thoughtful man every day. He actually got me a card this year, and it said, "You know I hate Valentine's Day, but I sure do love you." We went to a matinee of Slumdog Millionaire, and got Chinese for lunch. Not any different from the "date" we have once a month or so, but since it was VD, the restaurant give me a free rose. When we got home, DD12 had vacuumed the living room, baked us a chocolate cake, lit candles in the living room, and served grape juice in wine glasses. Then she made dinner of baked chicken, and dyed the mashed potatoes pink and shaped them into hearts! Nice day, no excessive consumption.

On Fat Tuesday, we made Buttermilk Pancakes for dinner, and the recipe made extra batter, which stored nicely in a jar in the fridge for easy pancakes later in the week. I like them with applesauce spread on them, and I like when they are so easy to make from leftover batter.

DD15 decided to give up Facebook and meat for Lent. We aren't Catholic, but I think she wants to test her willpower. I'm not sure which will be harder to avoid! We warned her that her stepdad and I would not be avoiding meat on her behalf, but we should be fine, since she often cooks her own food anyway. We will have to adjust the family shopping a bit - more eggs, more veggies, more curry powder. Good thing we already have a lot of rice, pasta, and beans. Frankly, it should save us some money; teenagers eat a lot! I need to make her some vegetable stock to use in rice and grits. She makes "Kick-You-in-the-Face-Good Tacos," at least according to her. Add more avocadoes and cheese to the shopping list.

Stocked: At the beginning of the month, 10# of hot chocolate mix, of which more than half is gone. That makes more than 30# this winter. We don't drink coffee, but with the house cold, we have been looking for warmth by the cup. Lately, that seems to be hot chocolate more often than a pot of tea. I looked into making our own mix, but the ingredients cost more than the prepared mix.

From the grocery store loss leaders: butter, freezer bags, saltines, frozen peas, dish soap, decaf Earl Grey tea bags, pinto beans, egg noodles, laundry detergent, adobo, bean soup mix, cooking spray, cheerios, strawberry preserves (DD12), BBQ sauce, paper towels, sea salt, concord grape juice.

We spent $300 stocking up on toiletries! We need to look closely at some of our habits. At a combination of BJs, Target, Aldi, and Weis supermarket, we stocked: cotton balls, cotton swabs, toothbrushes, toothpaste, 2 kinds of bar soap, acne face soap, dandruff shampoo, regular shampoo, conditioner, hair gel, disposable razors, 3 kinds of deodorant, flushable wipes, Dr. Bronner's soap, tampons and pads. Some of that will last much more than 3 months, but I sure hope it does not turn out that we spend $100/mo on non-food supplies. We bought DH 10 bottles of ProHealth mouthwash for $30, which was a great deal. We don't have dental coverage, and he goes the extra step with a dental rinse.

DD12 took a big liking to Concord grape juice. I was restricting her to one 64oz bottle a week, but DH though we should let her drink what she wants, since she will eat few vegetables and doesn't drink enough water. We bought 8 bottles at the warehouse club, and she has gone through them in a month. She can down a whole bottle in one day, and she doesn't seem to suffer any intestinal upset from it. But it's so much sugar, even if it is 100% grape juice. I am going to have to find some why to throttle that level of consumption, and look into whether frozen concentrate is cheaper.

Prepped: We are having a "Bug Out Bag Packing Day" this coming weekend. We've been collecting stuff for months, but have not assembled it properly into bags for each person. Time to get cracking!

Managed: Inventoried the bath closet, and saw that we had gone through most of what we bought back in October. I failed to keep track of what we bought, what we used and restocked, so I still don't really know what we actually use in a 3-month period. DH and I went on an expensive stock-up run. My toilet paper supply did hold up well, at least. This time, I will track everything and set quarterly pars. We hope to move into Mom's house at the end of another 3 months, so that will be a good time to inventory.

I finally managed to get an appointment for DD15 to get teeth filled. There is a high school vocational program near us, that trains dental assistants. The dentists themselves are experienced professionals that volunteer at the school. DD15 had three molars filled for only $30. DD12 and I don't need fillings, but we get our teeth cleaned in March, and DD15 goes back for more work. DH is too wary of trainees to go there. (Ok, really he's just a dental chicken, but I let him cling to his excuses.)

After much debate, we replaced our battered nonstick skillets, the 8 and 10 inch pans. We don't like the potential for off-gassing at high heat, but the cast iron is too heavy for DD12 and she routinely burns things the get stuck. The small pan is exclusively for eggs, and no one is allowed to cook on high heat in either one of them.

I inventoried the small and large freezers. The small bags of things float to the bottom and don't get rotated - frozen veg, boxes of butter, bags of soup bones. I need to get some baskets or something to contain them better. We have eaten a lot of it - saving the whole turkey for sometime around Easter.

Worked on the worm farm, battling a mite invasion. I will post more about the worms shortly, but the bin looks healthy now, and I see a lot of nice composted stuff. I finally found someone local with a worm farm and worms to share. I am going on a road trip to Phoenixville, about 45 minutes away. Can't wait to see their worm set-up. I want to make another new bin (or two).

Reduced, Reused, Recycled: I was over-feeding the worm bin, so I started keeping kitchen waste in a bucket on the back porch, where it has been mostly frozen. As the ground thaws, I will bury it in the garden. We stopped getting free newspapers from the neighbor, so my paper supply is way down. I need to find new sources.

I did save all the clear grape juice bottles. Washed out, they are good for storing rice and beans. A 2-pound bag of beans fits in a half-gallon bottle. The bottle are sturdier and more bug-proof than the plastic bags that beans come in. I keep the in-use supply bottles under the sink now.

I picked up a dozen quart canning jars on FreeCycle, but I notice that they are more often found on Craigslist for $5-10/dozen now. The GoodWill store has lost it's fool mind - they are .97 per jar! Since I can buy new jars that come with lids and rings for $7/dz at Walmart, I am not paying for old jars unless they are under $5/dz. It's not worth the time and gas money to drive all over to collect small lots of jars. I do still pick them up for 25 cents at rummage. I do like the look and feel of the older heavier jars.

Community Food: I had to delay some things when my Mom's situation blew up. I pushed back the food group to March, and delayed starting the bulk buying club. My low energy from the thyroid problem is really hindering me. I have another doctor's appointment soon.

I did do a February teen conference where I gave a 90-minute "Intro to Ethical Eating Issues" workshop (twice). We did an energetic exercise that asked people to take a step forward or back if they were familiar with various issues. The kids were really very aware of food issues. Unitarian-Universalists are often involved in gardening, healthy cooking, food activism, and health professions - and that is very visible in the kids. Lots of lifelong vegetarians. The workshop I did would work better for a less educated group. I need to do something more advanced for the UU teens. I am thinking about Food Waste as a topic - worms ahoy!

I recycled a big stack of egg cartons to a church friend that has chickens, and she brought me eggs the next week. I hope to make a regular arrangement with her, instead of the man at the market that brings them from another county in foam egg cartons.

I trained at the United Way as an interviewer for the national Hunger Survey going on in shelters, food pantries, and soup kitchens all over the country right now. I've visited four sites as an interviewer, so far, and it has been sobering. The stories of the elderly were especially striking, to me. Most are blue collar folks who worked hard and still find themselves with few resources and failing health. There is a need for some kind of "caseworker" or ombudsman to help people who need to be hooked up with other services they don't know about.

It is also time to sing up for a CSA. I'm trying to decide which one, and whether to get a whole or half-share. I am concerned we will get more greens than we can eat, so I leaning toaward a half. Then I can add more fruit, eggs, and preferred veg by shopping at the producer market all summer. Maybe I will feel inspired to find some dish we will all eat regularly, that uses loads of greens. Perhaps some version of Cream of Green soup.

Learning: I've been researching dementia and eldercare. DH has been continuing with his EMT training course, which is seems to be enjoying. DD15 started volunteering at the local art center on Fridays, so she can earn a free art class. DH is looking into Taekwondo for DD12, in his search for a martial arts class she will stick with. She also starts spring soccer soon, so Taekwondo may get pushed back.

Library: Found Needlecraft, from the Reader's Digest Home Handbook series. Looks like a good general reference, for 50 cents from the church bookshelf.

We have also started to support a particular library branch. I know the librarian from church. The city cut the library budget, but the county picked up some of those positions, including my friend's job. She was moved to a branch, the smallest branch in the "worst" part of town. She worries that the next cut will be closing a branch, and that hers could be the one - but this branch is essential to the very poor children and adults in that neighborhood. A number of us from church are supporting her by moving all our library activites to her branch. I order most of my library books online during the week, so I can just stop in and pick up all my holds on the weekend. Now, I have them sent to her branch, where I also pay any fines I incur, increasing her circulation and revenue.

More photos next time. I wanted to spew out all this saved up IDC stuff and then settle back into a regular blogging pattern again. I missed it!

Giant Vegetable Man

2009-02-22T22:26:00.006-05:00

Howard Trivelpiece (97), grower of giant vegetables

My family is descended from an old Pennsylvania Dutch family on my mother's side, the Drebelbis (dry-bell-BIS) family. There is big fat book that traces our roots to the 1732 arrival of John Jacob Drebelbis as a colonial settler from the German Palatine region. There is a reunion on an ancient family farm every summer. There is an old photo of my mother as a little girl at the 200th anniversary in 1932, and she appears again, with my kids an I, in the 275th anniversary photo.

Anyway, my mom has always been on the lookout for the Drebelibis name in the news. The name has been spelled many ways as people moved to other parts of the country. Many years ago, my mom spotted a man named Howard Trivelpiece in a magazine article about gardening. My mom wrote to him in California, to tell him about the Drebelibis Cousins of America reunions, should he wish to attend.

Howard has never come East for a reunion, but my mom has been exchanging letters and holiday cards with him ever since. At 97, he is still raising giant vegetables in his northern California backyard. He has a radish, a beet, and a 3.25-pound head of garlic in the Guinness Book of World Records. This past year, the Siskiyou Golden Fair gave him an award for 80 (!) years of competing at the fair, and they named a building for him: the Howard Trivelpiece Ag-Hort Building. He first entered rabbits, in 1928, as a 4-H member. In his best year at the fair, he won 67 ribbons!

His wife Velva is 94. Isn't her name cool? Velva. You don't often hear of a couple where both live into their 90s. They must eat their vegetables.

Howard raises a lot of vegetables and gives them away - except for the best of the crop, which he saves to enter in the fair. Every year, he says he has to save his best veg for what might be his last fair. He credits his success to careful soil building, using lots of rabbit manure, although he is also a Miracle-Gro fan.

I think it's fun that my mom has been writing to him all these years. I'm going to send him a card and a photo of Mom in the garden this summer. I want to know if Velva was a canner. Maybe he'll want to swap seeds!

Winter Comforts

2009-02-21T18:47:00.008-05:00

Fresh applesauce, Sunshine Jam, and a Faschnacht with molasses to dip it. What's a Faschnacht? It's a Pennsylvania Dutch potato donut, made for Shrove Tuesday. They call it Donut Day in some places, and local fire company Ladies Auxiliaries make huge batches that the volunteer firemen hawk at stop lights as fundraisers. My mother brought us a dozen today, apparently so we can pratice for Tuesday.

Y'know, even 'tho things are a little crappy lately, I am finding comfort in our new food routines. I wondered if we would want to stray back to packaged convenience when stressed, but it looks like the new patterns are really becoming set.

I indulged in a carrot muffin at a Wawa convenience store the other day when I filled the gas tank. I didn't like it. It was too sweet, too oily, and didn't have raisins or nuts or good spices. The fake cream cheese icing was heart-burn sweet. Bland. I've done nothing but think about good carrot cake muffins ever since. Today I peeled and grated the last of the fall carrots, and I'll make muffins tomorrow. I also made pear butter, applesauce, and Sunshine Jam today.

I can't wait for spring, but I really have been enjoying the winter food.

We are now good at making yogurt, stock, pizza and pasta sauce. We make a weekly pot of bean soup, and we are eating more cabbage and potatoes. I've added a weekly batch of applesauce, and a batch of sweet potato puree to have on hand for biscuits. I keep meaning to try other biscuit recipes, but the sweet potato biscuits are so good, and we get extra beta-carotene, too.

I find I am finally getting into the swing of putting together routine meals that come mostly from staples in our pantry. We make a weekly trip to the farmer's market for milk, pasture-fed eggs, cheese, apples, and greens. We hit a grocery store to stock up on a few loss-leaders every other week or so. I have a good idea of what I need to can/plant/store more of for next winter.

The supply of squash and sweet potatoes (all local) have held up well in the cellar this winter, and we still have a few left. The carrots, parsnips, and cabbage did well in the fridge (also local, but now gone). The white potatoes did not do well. There are a few sprouting ones I will plant. I ended up buying 10# bags of taters every few weeks. I didn't grow even a fraction of our onions, and none of the garlic, nor did I find local sources for those.

I have been making 2 quarts of applesauce almost every week. We've used massive amounts of eating and cooking apples this year. I guess that means I would have to make 100 quarts for a year for my pantry, if I went strictly with local apples in the fall, in addition to eating apples. The local ones I bought got eaten before we could test their cellar storage longevity.

But, there is this thing at the market. I've been going on Saturdays and asking one of the produce vendors if there are apple seconds. He usually gives me a box of bruised apples and pears for a few dollars. This week, I got about 10# of apples and 5# of Bosc pears for only ONE dollar! I have discovered that I need to go right home and make applesauce and pear butter, or the fruit flies go nuts. I brought fruit flies home on a pineapple, and they found the worm composting bin, and we have had trouble keeping them down ever since. I've been freezing the peels in a bucket out back instead of composting them, until we get the flies under control. When the ground thaws, I will trench-compost the thawed peelings.

(I found a recipe for apple jelly that boils the peels to
make a pretty rose-colored jelly. I also want to try
making my own vinegar. Then I would *really* be
getting all I can out of an apple.)

These apples and pears are mostly not local, a mix of whatever gets culled each week, many from Washington State, a mere 2500 miles away. But they would be discarded if I didn't use them, I think. So, on one hand, I am not buying local, but on the other, I am reducing waste while saving loads of money.

I think the middle ground might be to make some local applesauce in the fall, and supplement it with the weekly throw-away apples. At least until that time in the future when shipping becomes so expensive that Washington apples don't come here anymore.

Anyone have arguments for a different solution? I do buy local produce regularly, and devote part of my grocery budget to doing so every week, directly from producers whenever I can. Should I be turning down produce from afar, as a point of principle? The dollar-stretcher in me would have trouble walking away from this apple deal.

Hiatus Update

2009-02-18T19:21:00.005-05:00

Ring bologna, with heart-shaped
mustard, from Super Bowl Sunday.

It's been a few weeks since I posted. It has been hard not to give in to the blogging urge. But I have so many things to do, that I am sticking (mostly) to my plan not to blog in February. I have been reading other people's blogs - I couldn't stand not knowing how everyone is doing. I really miss blogging! It keeps me feeling like I am making forward progress.

My mom is back in her home for the moment, and we've gone round-and-round about what the next step should be. My first urge was to move us all into a bigger house, and just make her come live with us. But after looking at a lot of rentals, we can't find anything we can afford that is big enough. We pay $600 to rent a 3BR house, and it's hard to find even the same thing at the same price. Anything we can afford is in a noticeably worse neighborhood, anything in a decent neighborhood jumps right up to $1000 for 4BR. We live in a city, and urban landlords know they can get good money from larger families with public housing vouchers. There is a decent house with 3BR/1.5BA plus a finished basement that could be a bedroom for the girls, with a big yard and a garden shed - but it's $950. As DH heads toward grad school, this is not the time to sign up for higher rent. I could buy a house for that (as if we could get credit).

So, we are back to the fact that Mom already lives in a 4 bedroom house now. We need to figure out how to make it shareable. It will be harder, but it's what we can all afford. If you've been reading here, you might recall that my mother is a compulsive hoarder. There are no cats or garbage bags, but her house is filled to the brim with stuff that will be hard for her to let go. I'm talking every room up to 5-6' high, with little paths. She sleeps curled up on a love seat. Isn't that sad? Changing it will be a physically and emotionally wrenching process for everyone.

My current plan is to find a large storage space. DH has been renting one for $200/month. He sold a house to move in with us, and has a whole house worth of stuff stored closer to Philly, where the storage prices are higher. He has resisted moving it up here, because he hoped we would move back to Philly when he finished his bachelor's degree. That just didn't happen in this economy, and now he has the opportunity of a year-long paid graduate fellowship. So, it's time to get a truck and a bunch of friends to move that stuff up here. It will save him $1200 a year! I am looking for a large enough space that I can also start emptying part of my Mom's house.

I hope that once we get some momentum with storing and donating things, Mom will find it easier, and we will be able to get some repair work and painting done in her house. It's a terrible thing to know that your mom lives in a house full of non-working appliances. We look like we are neglecting her, but she insists on staying - it's part of her compulsive disorder. Now that her decision-making skills are eroding, she will have to be forced. I just keep thinking that a year from now, she might be living in a functional house, doing fun things with family, without the burden of utility bills or unmanageable chores. If she doesn't have a nervous breakdown in the process. (Or maybe I will!)

There is one big fly in the ointment. My thyroid medication isn't working as well as it did when I started it 3 years ago. I am constantly exhausted, falling asleep in my car in front of the house or in a chair every afternoon. My joints ache and I'm often cold, and when I get a chill I feel immobilized by it - not good in February! I need my medication dosage increased - but my doctor is a clinic practitioner that doesn't know how to read thyroid tests. I've gotten a copy of my test results and am trying to get into a different clinic. The stupid medication is only $4 a month - it's not like I am asking for narcotics, dammit. I need all my energy right now! I have another call in to the doctor tomorrow.

I know that I owe emails to a dozen supportive friends and fellow bloggers. My desk is overflowing with things that demand my attention - if I could just stay awake. I will catch up as soon as I can. I am hoping to have rented a storage space and planned the storage move by the end of the month, and then set up a work schedule with Mom.

I did get some good stuff done: freezer inventory, a 3-month stock-up of the bath closet, and we have been doing well at cooking from our pantry. I even cleaned the oven, after a quiche bubbled over and left the kitchen smelling like brimstone.

I just wanted to let everyone know I am still chugging along, and I hope to be back soon.

Hiatus

2009-01-27T17:25:00.003-05:00

I'm taking a little blogging hiatus.

My mom's gas furnace stopped working last week, filling her house with smoke. Nothing was actually on fire, but she handled the situation poorly. It could have been very dangerous. She stayed with us for a few days while it was mostly fixed, but the whole process revealed new problems with her living alone. We need to dramatically speed up the process of moving her in with us, which will be challenging for everyone.

Right now, the kids take turns sleeping on the floor while she sleeps in their beds. We may be moving - very soon - at a larger rented house. Her house has 4BR, but is in no way ready for anyone to move into it, even with all the elbow grease we could bring to bear. It's not a solution to the immediate problem.

Our current house is so small that we don't have room for a sofa - we have two armchairs and the kids sit on the floor when we all watch a movie. We literally did not have room to add another adult. The single bathroom is a considerable choke point - we seriously need another half bath. All that makes mom feel even more like she is a burden -which we are trying to combat. The feeling that she is a burden or an interruption is one of the things that makes her fail to ask us for help when she absolutely needs to do so. She is actually harder to help because she waits too long to get help with things we could quickly solve.

I will be back soon, maybe just a week or two, maybe longer. I'll try to keep reading most of my Indy blog roll, but I probably won't comment much. I'll keep some notes, so I can return with a big fat Independence Days Challenge Report.

I'll miss you guys!

Independence Challenge - Week 36

2009-01-19T23:32:00.003-05:00

DH was going to run errands and he asked everyone if they needed
something. The kids needed chapstick. When he came to me, I joked,
"Can I have a pony, Daddy?" And he got me one! Awww!

I went to the PA Farm Show this past Wednesday. Agriculture is the state's biggest business, so it's like the state trade show. I went on a $16 bus trip arranged by the Extension office. It's nice to get dropped off at the entrance instead of parking and driving. I walked around for a solid 6 hours. I checked out the Alternative Energy section, and the various state and federal agencies. People rave about the food, but I was not too impressed. Too bland, too deep-fried, too over-priced. I surveyed all the food purveyors, ate all the free samples, and collected some brochures from associations that might prove useful, like the PA Nut Grower's Association. There was a commercial market, where I kept expecting to see a Sham-WOW guy. Then a horticulture section, and finally the "Family Living" exhibits where the actual canning, sewing, and baking entries were found. I spent some time in there, looking at what gets a blue ribbon. I watched the Sheep-to-Shawl competition for a little while, and saw a really cool $45 knitted alpaca neck warmer I couldn't afford. Oh, and I saw a lot of exceedingly clean animals!

I enjoyed the day away from home with no kids. I could spend as long as I liked looking at things and talking to people. I spent a long time talking to a woman that works at Old Bedford Village near Pittsburgh. She is an educator that can teach 127 old-fashioned skills. She was threading a loom, with her blacksmith daughter, at the Show. I also found some graphics and activities I can use for my youth food workshop.

But overall, this Show was all about Agribusiness. Big machines, big farms, conventional technology. It didn't have much to do with local food or small family farms. I can't wait for my 4-day trip to the PA Sustainable Agriculture convention the first week of February.

Planted: I decided on seed vendors, but didn't place my final orders yet. I will use Baker's Creek, mostlybecause the catalog is so freakin' cool. I will also order from Amishland, a small veggie seed grower in next-door Lancaster County, since her varieties ought to be good for my region. I am up in the air about where to buy potato and onions sets. My favorite local greenhouse orders them from somewhere nonlocal.

Harvested: Nada.

Preserved: DD12 zested lemons, limes, and oranges for me. I dried the zest, and DD15 juiced them all for the freezer.

Cooked: I moved applesauce from the "preserved" to the "cooked" category because I stopped canning it. Why bother? We go through it as fast as I make it. I found a produce stand at the market that keeps a box of apple seconds under the counter. I got a whole lot of bruised apples for $3. DD12 had stopped eating commercial applesauce, but she seems to like the super-smooth kind that I make. I need to buy one of those apple-peeling machines. Next year, I will buy lots more local apples up at the Kutztown auction.

I had another I-feel-like-cooking spell today. I made chicken corn noodle soup, sweet potato biscuits, chocolate chip cookies, hummus, and a pasta bake. All of it came from storage - yay! I also made yogurt that will be ready in the morning. More applesauce will be cooked tomorrow. My Mom is coming over tomorrow to watch the Inaugration with us, so we'll have plenty of food.

Stocked: Curry powder; I bought 3 ounces ($1/oz) at a Farm Show booth, one hot, 2 mild; I mixed them to get moderately-hot. That gave me a half-pint jar for everyday use, and most of a pint in the pantry. I also stocked pickle relish and decaf Earl Grey tea that was on sale.

Prepped: DH got flashlights and a first aid kit. After our recent mini-power outage, we realized we only had 4 small LED flashlights in our purses and backpacks. The solar lantern we bought a few months ago had to be returned when it would not take a charge, and we never replaced it. DH bought a four pack of traditional flashlights with D-cells, which I might ask him to return. I'd rather spend the $20 on LEDs. He did buy one hand-crank LED flashlight that has an alternate charging cord. That will do for short-term emergency lighting and bug-out bags.

We still need to do work on longer-term low-energy lighting, but probably not in this rented house. I do collect free and cheap candles at yard sales in summer, to remelt into votives. We have used votives to cook, wash dishes, and play Scrabble during outages in the past. We also need to get a rechargeable battery station, and replace that solar lantern.

Managed: I got a few more free 4-gal buckets from the Weis bakery. They throw them out on Mondays and Thursdays, so I have to stop on Sundays and Wednesdays. I did better at preventing food waste this week. Did find a tiny shriveled head of cabbage under all the carrots. Worm food, now.

Reduced, Reused, Recycled: I was planning to order more red worms for the compost bin, but when I checked on the little guys this week, they were doing pretty darned good. The level of bedding and food is way down. We added more bedding and a bunch of apple peels. I think maybe they are finding their groove. There were a whole lot of little white egg-like things that don't look like the worm egg case photos on the internet. That bears watching.

Local Food: We shop weekly at our local farmer's market, which is not all local food, but is all local small businesses. We visit a locally-owned grocery liquidator about once a month. We sometimes visit Aldi, which has good prices on case goods, but is owned by a European corporation. We sometimes buy things at BJ's Wholesale Club (Masschusetts company). But I still need a regular grocery store for some items, and I have been trying to decide where to spend those dollars. When I am doing a big stock-up, it is worth shopping the loss leaders of all three local chains. But not worth driving around just to pick up a few things. All of them have similar loss-leader prices. I decided to research and compare the three:

Giant: 148 stores in the Mid-Atlantic. Founded in Central Pennsylvania, they are now owned by a supermarket group HQ'd in the Netherlands. They've opened new suburban upscale stores, recently. They are one of two chains with locations in the City of Reading, on Rockland Street. DH likes their layout, selection, and upscale feel. They have a growing organic section.

Weis: 155 stores in a market area similar to Giant. Founded and still owned by a Pennsylvania corporation, with food processing plants in central PA. Bill themselves as one of the largest buyers of PA produce and dairy. They also have a store in the City, on Rockland Street, but it has not been updated in a long time. They used to have half-off day-old bread that I liked for bread pudding, but they stopped doing that, which annoys me. They have also reportedly stopped donating to food banks, which really annoys me.

Redner's: 39 stores in the Mid-Atlantic. They have a "warehouse" theme, are employee-owned, and are HQ'd here in Berks County. They would seem like the localest, even though they do not have a city location. But, my mother slipped in a puddle of Coke in front of a broken soda machine; her back still hurts. After dragging their feet for 2 years, Redner's finally sent an insuffcient check for her medical expenses, leading us to an attorney and a lawsuit. After another 2 years of foot-dragging, she still got an insufficient settlement. She'd been a customer for 40+ years. So, on one hand, they are the most local use of my food dollar. On the other, there's Mom, and they have no city location.

My Pick: Weis. They employ the most people, buy a lot of PA produce, the money stays in the state, and they have kept their city store. DH notes that I will never find a store that doesn't do something that ticks me off.

I also found a local spring water company, Great Oak, that has fill-your-own kiosks for .25/gallon. The fluoride level is .5mg/L, half the level in the city tap water. I am trying to avoid fluoride for my thryroid.

Learned: We had our first few Tai Chi classes. Turns out, I am also taking Kung Fu. The folks at the studio were glad to see us back, and since I have to wait for DH ad DD15 during Kung Fu, I thought I might give it a try. I suspect they will not let me stop trying. I feel too "breakable" for this, but they are very supportive. Even though I was mostly sparring with teenaged boys, they took my efforts seriously, which was kind of them. If fat middle-aged women ever attack them on the street, they will be well-prepared. The return to Tai Chi feels good - it is coming back to me quickly.

Library: I found a bit of fiction on the church book sale shelf, and a big photography book about the 20th Century. DD12 likes those, and I like them when they are a dollar. But mostly I am reading research materials about Ethical Eating issues and food coop management right now.

Behavior: I found a replacement for that Burger King fish sandwich I liked so much. There is a fish stand at the market that breads their own haddock filet. No seafood is local to me, and I don't know if this is Atlantic hook-and-line caught. It's still deep-fried fish, but it didn't come from a fast food chain. I think it's a good occassional indulgence.

We did well with our fast food challenge this week - I don't think any of us had any at all. DH took leftover lasagna to his class, and DD12 packed lunch nicely. Not as good on the 5x oatmeal challenge. I need to take my thyorid pill before 9 AM (you have to wait an hour before eating), or I get busy and don't remember to eat until lunch.

Best New Pantry Recipes

2009-01-16T00:05:00.001-05:00

In 2008, I entered over 500 recipes into my collection at WeGottaEat.com. Many of them were my own tattered recipe cards, or recipes I had tested from my cookbook collection. But many were also new entries from TV shows, blogs, cooking websites, and email lists. I haven't even tried all of them yet. Among those that were new to us, some have become family favorites. Each one of these introduced us to a new pantry staple:

Slow Cooker Pinto Beans - This one came from Paula Deen, at the suggestion of a listmate on the HealthyCheapCooking list on Yahoo Groups. The butchers up North don't have streak o' lean, so I use other smoked pork goodness - ham shanks are my favorite, but I also also get smoked ham ends and smoked sausage. We've eaten it as a main dish, and as a side with other meals. It really expanded the use of pinto beans for me - I had only really used them for refried beans until I tried this. I live in a city with a big Hispanic population, so I can get large bags of dry pintos inexpensively.

Cheese Grits - It was about this time last year that I watched Alton Brown cook grits on the Food Network, and decided to give it a try. Until then, the only grits I'd eaten were tasteless gruel at diners. But these were to-die-for. DD15 didn't like them at first, but has now become a grits machine, especially with her sage-flavored peppery milk gravy. I store supermarket grits now, but I'm looking for artisan stone-ground grits to try.

(Ignore those crumbs under the toaster over.)

Sweet Potato Biscuits - These were my first scratch biscuits, and I was so happy with them, especially with pineapple jam. This recipe gave us both a new bread product and another way to use leftover sweet potatoes. Now I keep a jar of sweet potato puree in the fridge. I found several sources of local sweet potatoes this year.

Green Tomato Chutney - My new favorite condiment. I only just started canning jam this summer, and I'd never ever eaten chutney before, but I saw the recipe on a blog around the time that a neighbor pruned a lot of green tomatoes from her plants. I love it with roast meat or poultry. I'm very happy with the jam, chutney, and pickles I made this summer, and I plan to do a lot more canning next summer.

Parsnip Spice Cake - I've taken this to several potlucks with good reviews. I like the versatility of adding whatever dried fruit or nuts I want. I'd never tried parsnips before, but now I regularly buy and use them to flavor stock and make this coffee cake. When I don't like a vegetable on its own, I tend to turn it into a quick bread. I like that I can grow parsnips and store them in the ground all winter. I can't recall where this recipe came from, but I want to make it whenever I see parsnips.

Cuban Inspired Pork Chili - Hominy was another first for us. I store it dried and canned. The local Hispanic grocery stores always stock it. I like chili, but not as hot as DH does - and he doesn't like beans in it. But this chili comes across more like a pork stew, and it gives me a good place to use more black beans, and fresh or frozen corn. I found this recipe at the cooking blog Coconut & Lime, and substituted regular tomatoes and cheap country-style pork ribs for the fancier ingredients.

Spelt Waffles - DD12 used to be addicted to Eggo toaster waffles. We got her a waffle iron for Christmas 2007, and tried a few recipes with all-purpose flour. But when I found a local source for spelt flour, I went looking for a waffle recipe. DD12 likes to whip up the egg whites for this one. We double the recipe, so there are lots of leftovers to freeze for reheating in the toaster. I like to dip pieces of waffle in fruity yogurt or homemade applesauce.

Yogurt - Not so much a recipe as a technique. I heat two quarts of milk and 1/2 cup non-fat dry milk to about 190F. Then I let it cool to 120F, whisk in a half-pint of yogurt I set aside from the previous batch, and pour it into quart containers. I bundle it into an insulated lunch bag with a hot water bottle, and it's lovely by morning. I haven't purchased yogurt since June. I love it in oatmeal with a dab of honey or homemade jam. When I first thought about making yogurt, I thought I needed a yogurt maker, but when I advertised for one on the local Freecycle list, a Lebanese woman answered me with instructions to make it in a blanket-wrapped crockpot liner. I adapted that to my insulated lunch bag.

So, have any of you found recipes that have become new favorites at your house?

Independence Challenge - Week 35

2009-01-12T17:11:00.000-05:00

These little bakers fit right in the toaster oven, but I need
to rotate them during baking to avoid the hot spots.
Still, mighty tasty apple bread pudding.

The most valuable thing I control is how I spend my time, so I am working on wasting less. For many people, TV and computer time are a waste, but I value our controlled family TV watching and discussing. The Planet Earth series has been spectacular and inspiring.

Not a Waste: cooking, eating, sleeping, reading, talking, listening, networking, tai chi, foot massage, snuggling, walking

Waste: bickering, negative people, useless ranting, bad movies, clutter, perfectionism, being so tired I fall asleep in the bathroom and wake up freezing

I would rather spend time with family than accidentally waste it on dumb stuff. I am trying to avoid some of the obvious "interesting time wasters" that can cause an hour to speed past. For instance, no more writing long snarky blog comments in places I don't normally read (usually because someone has irritated me). I don't consider blogging and commenting itself to be a waste - I have gotten more done since I started blogging. But I need to be careful about reading the New York Times headlines that arrive in my email. If I click on articles, I can spend an hour on the news, in what seems to go by in the blink of any eye. I will save my newsreading for evenings, after a day of doing things on my to-do lists.

I am also looking for things we can do while watching TV. DD15 is making felt cozies to sell on Etsy. DD12 is drawing paper doll kits. My mom peeled apples for sauce while enjoying I Love Lucy. There are limits to what my hands can do, but I am trying: cracking and cleaning nuts, sorting seed, giving myself a manicure. I have a circular knitter to try making a neck warmer, in hopes that my hands allow that kind of knitting. I can also sort papers and photos.

DD12 and I went to a monthly local scrapbooking group on Friday. It's $5 and you get to use all sorts of fancy die-cut machines. I am a little concerned that it will turn into a time and money-sucking hobby with lots of things to store, but I will combat that. It think it was a measure of my developing "independence eye" that I reacted differently than I once would have to the hostess's huge scrapbooking basement full of supplies. I once would have envied it. I still lust after that kind of space - but I envisioned shelves full of food storage, not paper supplies! I kept thinking about how much money these women were wasting on this hobby. Not that there is anything at all wrong with scrapbooking - we plan to continue doing it. But the "toys" and over-priced supplies - oy! One advantage of the group "crops" is that everyone contributes to paying for and using the expensive machines.

I would like to do as much as I can with things in everyday newspapers, magazines, ads, and with vintage paper, books, and old photos. Not to mention our own everyday stuff, like ticket stubs, birthday cards, and fortune cookie slips. I lean more toward book arts and altered art, rather then pre-made paper cutsies that require trips to the craft store. I only want to buy the most basic tools, blades and adhesives. I really want to develop an activity to do with DD12, especially since the rest of us are going back to martial arts classes (you'll see, below), and she liked this.

Planted: Nothing, but I made a planting timeline for spring. I am working my way through the seed catalogs. Wow, it's hard not to want to buy more seeds than I can possibly use in my small gardens.

Harvested: Naught.

This giant Dutch oven full of apples cooked down to a little over 2 quarts.

Preserved: Made two quarts of applesauce to split between Mom and I. She peeled, I cooked. There was a bit more that we gobbled up immediately. Just apples, water, and a dash of lemon juice. I burnt my tongue tasting it too soon. I made it very smooth with a hand blender, and it even passed muster with super-picky DD12, who now takes some to school for lunch. Gotta get more apples, pronto. Also froze 8 quarts of lovely dark pork stock, a monthly task, this time from New Year's pork bones I got at market.

Cooked: Once in a while I have a day where I just want to cook everything. I think it was the new silicon baking mats. I made Sweet Potato Biscuits early on, and then DH was going to meet friends for a 'Guys Night Out', so I had 'Girls Night At The Stove'. I made a big batch of mincemeat cookies, baked sweet potatoes, and tried a tomato lentil soup recipe from the NYT (blah). DD12 made tortilla pizza. Mom peeled all my apples and I made applesauce to split with her. We didn't can it, since we are sure we can each eat a quart in a week or so. Fed the worms under the table. Mom crashed watching Wall-E, so we tucked her in DD12's bed for a sleepover. She says she doesn't want to stay the winter, but I think she likes coming over if she doesn't "have to."

I've said a couple times that I want to learn making biscuits - no time like the New Year to get started. I started with an easy drop-biscuit recipe. The Sweet Potato Biscuits were very good, but they freakin' ROCK with Sunshine Jam! It's a great way to use up leftover holiday sweet potatoes. DH also made a Roast Pork for New Year's Day, that was great with the Green Tomato Chutney I made this summer. I looove having jam and condiments I made myself!

Stored: Made a trip to the grocery liquidator, which is always fun. I feel like a total hunter-gatherer in there, since the merchandise changes all the time. I replenished a bunch of what we used in the past few months: a bale of toilet paper, 3 boxes of Total and Wheaties, 3 boxes stuffing (for DH), 2 bottles olive oil, 2 bottles balsamic vinegar, 6 big cans tomatoes, 6 cans paste, 6 cans cranberry juice concentrate, 2 big cans refried beans, 2 cans chick peas, 6 cans pumpkin, 3 cans turnip greens, cream of coconut, 2 lbs. raisins, 2 boxes of saltines, 5 boxes dehydrated mincemeat, 1-lb canisters of cinnamon and ground black pepper.

DD12 is packing her lunches now, so I picked up some small bottles of 100% juice and 3 boxes of chewy granola bars. She has a reusable water bottle, but I only want water in there, so I plan to reuse these small bottles. I need to figure out how to make chewy granola bars for her, although for now, the $1.50/box at the liquidator may be less than I would pay for dried fruit and nuts.

I found a box of Kashi puffed whole grain cereal, which I want to turn into some kind of snack bar, like better rice crispy bars. I found one recipe on the Kashi website, but if anyone has other recipe ideas, please let me know.

Prepped: I guess this could be consider preparation, since it increases our health and self-defense capacities. DH signed us up to go back to Tai Chi and King Fu classes. DH and DD15 take Wing Chun kung fu, and all three of us do Tai Chi. DD12 doesn't want to do any of it, which bugs me, but she is old enough to stay home alone, so it is not an obstacle to the rest of us. The Wing Chun and Tai Chi classes are slightly different times. I will try to go 3x a week for an hour: Mon, Thurs, and Sat. DD15 and DH will hit different weekday classes around their work schedules, and we all go together on Saturday mornings - they do Wing Chun @ 10 while I warm up my joints, and we all do Tai Chi at 11. We all got a lot out of this when we did it for 9 months. We had to quit a year ago due to money constraints. It is on my wishlist, when we have a different house, to have space dedicated to tai chi and martial arts. DH wants a heavy bag and a wooden dummy, and I want a wall of mirrors. It would be also a good space for dance, indoor games, and to set up tables and chairs for events and gatherings. But, that's getting ahead of myself.

We had a snow storm Saturday, and the power went out briefly after dark. Just long enough for me to go "Uh oh - do I really know where the flashlights are?" It would have gotten cold fast, because we keep the house so much colder now. Less residual heat. I thought about the gas oven as a short-term solution - but it has an electric ignition. We are moderately well-prepared to leave in a hurry, to bug-out, but less prepared to stay than I'd like to think. We need to make the flashlights handier, and think about back-up heat in a rented house we cannot change dramatically.

DH added a few more items to our emergency bug-out kits: 6 decks of playing cards, all-weather notebooks and mess kits. I don't know if I would have purchased kits; I could have assembled them from used stuff. But I gave him a task and he is hard at it. We are missing the easiest part of the bug-out kits, simply putting a change of clothes and some toiletries in our four bags. Discussion revealed that none of us had pants that we could take out of our weekly rotation to leave in a bug-out bag for a whole season. We are short on pants, apparently. We decided to each chose a set of worn-but-serviceable clothing, and replace it by buying pants. I wear the same "uniform" all year - khakis and t-shirts. I add a sweatshirt in the winter, and wear a button-down shirt for meetings. I have a few dresses, but seldom have occassion to wear them. I've become quite utilitarian in middle age. I wear mostly the same brand of pants all the time - Denim & Co, sold on QVC, so the size is very standardized, and there are always returns available on eBay. DD15 is taking mid-term exams this week, but when she is done, I think we need to have a Bug-Out Packing Day.

Managed: I read an article about spoilage from Matron of Husbandry, and checked my squash more closely. I have two with bad spots at the stems. Time to make something. We don't like just plain squash, so I usually bake with it, but I keep reading that I should use canned to bake, for consistent water content. Guess it will be soup!

Saved two spoiling apples by making apple bread pudding with stale whole wheat bread. In the fridge, we lost a partial jar of apple butter to mold. I should put it in half-pint jars from now on, since we don't eat it fast enough. I found a chunk of blue cheese between the tortilla bags. So, is extra mold on the outside of moldy cheese bad, or not? I saved it for research purposes.

Reduced, Reused, Recycled: DD12 proposed a family fast food challenge that will hopefuly reduce our family's contribution to plastic in the world. I turn down plastic bags everywere. One market produce vendor wanted to put each veg in a separate baggie, and seemed resistant to just putting them naked in my canvas bag. The spinach comes in a plastic clamshell. I must grow my spinach next year.

Local Food Systems: I was offered a free place to stay in State College for the PA Sustainable Agriculture conference in February. That makes it so much more affordable for me! I am planning to network and gather resources for my food discussion group, bulk buying coop, and youth food workshop series. I went to Penn State in the 80's, so I am looking forward to seeing how it has changed. My hosts heat with a wood stove, so I will get to see what that is like in the depth of winter in the Pennsylvania mountains. I keep running into these solutions for my little problems; I must be going in the right direction.

Learned: DH started his EMT training course. He already updated his CPR skills and got certified for that, in the first class. One of the trainers said, "I'm 73 and I can tell immediately who will make it and who will not. I see 9 in this class of 48 that won't make it - you are not one of them." Although, I have to quietly snicker when I see on his schedule that there is an OB/GYN segment. DH grew up in a house of only men. The discussion of anything menstrual squicks him, unless it benefits him directly - as in warnings like, "Look out! It's PMS week!". He says he will have to "do some growing." Hee hee!

Library: I will be busting my butt to finish reading Hot, Flat, and Crowded by Sunday morning for the church book club. I have not been buying books much lately. I need to get back in the habit of working on my list.

Behavior: I am making a new Challenge category for myself. Sharon recently added "Regeneration" but I haven't been able to wrap my head around that. But my family is engaged in several behavior changes, so it seems more useful to track that. I am doing OK, but not great with oatmeal. I have to take a pill when I wake up, and wait an hour to eat. The problem comes when someone else wakes up, and wants to make breakfast. I end up saying "Sure, I'll have what you are making." I am the only oatmeal eater. Maybe I can have oatmeal for lunch on days when that happens.

The fast food challenge went OK for everyone but DD12, who is the one that proposed it. That raised the problem of her very picky eating again. She didn't pack a sandwich for that scrapbook thing, and I did. She wanted a burger on the way home, and I bought it for her. I have to deal with my own issues about letting her experience "starving" if I want her doesn't plan and eat better. On the plus side, she tried eating raw spinach and liked it. That's pretty big.

Video Round-up

2009-01-11T13:51:00.004-05:00

TED is an annual conference that "brings together the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers." They film the conference speakers and make video available to those of us that cannot afford the thousands of dollars it costs to go to this sold-out event. The clips typically run about 20 minutes. I love Sir Ken Robinson talking about how school kills creativity, the amazing insights of brain researcher Jill Taylor's during her own stroke, and the fabulous demographic animations of Hans Rosling.

Here are three food-related segments from my favorites:

NYTimes food columnist and cookbook author Mark Bittman calls attention to the lop-sided USDA food pyramid, the contribution of industrial food animal production to climate change, and gives a pretty good recap of how the American diet has changed in the last century.

Ann Cooper has a frontline view of the daily battle to keep kids healthy -- and of the enemy, the processed-foods industries that, it sometimes seems, want to wrap every single thing that children eat in a fried coating and then a plastic bag. As the director of nutrition services for the Berkeley (California) Unified School District, she's an outspoken activist for serving fresh, sustainable food to kids. Her lively website, LunchLessons.org, rounds up recipes, links, and resources for food activism.

Most of us have read at least some of Micheal Pollan's books or articles, but most of us don't get to see him speak live, so this TED talk is a great 20 minutes slice of him talking about gardening, bees, and Darwinism. We forget he is a naturalist, not just a food guy.

Family Eating Challenge

2009-01-08T23:57:00.000-05:00

Did you know the BK Big Fish sandwich has its own Wikipedia entry?

DD12 proposed a family eating challenge, and we took up the gauntlet. I'm proud of her for having the idea and defending it in discussion.

Background: DH and I grew up with fast food being an occasional, but regular, part of our diets. Visits to the McDonald's to get free hamburgers for A's on my report card. The brand new Arby's in 1970, when employees wore western-themed uniforms. A first date in Pizza Hut. Ordering Domino's in college. I grew up with the taste of fast food. I know exactly what the food in each place tastes like, and that it will taste the same every time. I think the consistent taste is what trains your palette. I will *never* forget what a McDonald's Double Cheeseburger tastes like, just as I will never forget what smoking a cigarette is like - I quit 3 years ago.

Food Habits are Hard to Break: As a young adult, I was seriously addicted to Diet Coke, at least 12 cans a day. I got heartburn that felt like it was killing me. I figured out it was the carbonation and switched to diet iced tea - by the gallon. Eventually, between the all my drinking of Earl Grey and diet iced tea, the caffeine and tannins irritated the hell out of my bladder. I decaffeinated, which seemed harder than quitting smoking, in some ways. I am now addicted to herbal iced teas (Red Zinger with a touch of honey) in summer, and hot decaf Earl Grey (black, no sugar) in winter. God, I hope those don't do anything bad to me. I also drink a lot of water and a good amount of milk.

Kids, Not Terrible: My kids were born to a financially-challenged life. We seldom had fast food (or any other dine-out meal). We did eat pizza. We never had soda at home, just milk, water, and 100% juice in limited amounts. They were allowed to order soda if it came with the kid meal in a restaurant, and they drank it at other people's houses. Soda didn't become a highly-desirable forbidden food for them, and they seldom choose it as a treat. But fast food - when we had a little more money, we indulged. Not all the time, but once a week or so. We had one period where we had "Take Out Friday" and took turns choosing between pizza, fast food, Chinese, or hoagies. Fast food started looking like an affordable treat, something we deserved to have when there was a little spare cash. Coupons and Dollar Menus made it look like a Good Deal.

That Was Then: We knew it was full of fat, but we were not yet aware of the environmental impact of this ultra-industrial food, nor did we think about the quality of the food-like ingredients. It's not like we eat it every day....

This is Now: Today, we are wracked with fast food guilt. We've seen the films and read the books. We still want fast food, but now we feel guilty about it. For the past few years, while DH was finishing his degree, money was very tight and we almost never had fast food. Since May, things loosened up a bit, and we started noticing that nearly every time we ran errands, someone would suggest a "little snack" from the Dollar Menu. We boycotted Burger King during the tomato-picker crisis, but recently went back, and realized with some dismay that we missed the fish sandwich (me) and the Whopper (DH).

We were eating little fast food meals 3-4 times a week - while I ran all over the county buying local organic food in bulk to can and store! I think part of me was thinking, "Better enjoy the last of the fast food, before the industrial food complex falls apart in the world economic collapse."

Plastic Turning Point: But, we all started noticing, and talking about it. I had a key conversation with my kids, in a Chik-Fil-A, just a few weeks ago.

We had gotten hungry while shopping. I looked at our tray and thought of the blog Fake Plastic Fish, which I had recently started reading. I told the kids about the trash in the Pacific Gyre, and how the plastic elements on the tray in front of us had been useful to us for only a few minutes, but would exist in the environment and in the ocean for centuries. DD12 talked about the trash generated in her public school's lunchroom, where 87% of the kids qualify for free lunches, and all of the food comes in plastic and tinfoil. Even the paper milk cartons have become platic bottles. We calculated that 72,000 plastic sporks are thrown away each year, at her school alone.

In that conversation, the kids became more aware, and DD15 is working on an article to post to her hundreds of friends on FaceBook, and we are working together on a youth food workshop. She encountered a little resistance when she could not find a satellite photo of the Trash Vortex - but she is assembling reliable reports from various sources to overcome disbelief. Some sources report the size of the Trash Vortex as "twice the size of the US" and some as "the size of Texas" because there is no good way to measure it and it is generally not visible in satellite photos. That makes it look like an urban legend to some folks.

Anyway, we agreed that when we eat out in the future, we will only buy the parts of meals that don't come in plastic. Sandwiches and fries tend to come in paper. We already have reusable bottles that don't require straws, so we can use them more.

That conversation started something. We already use canvas shopping bags, and stopped buying bottled water. Time for another step. We know that recycling is not the universally-green action it once seemed. Asian children on 60 Minutes harvest heavy metals from shiploads of illegally-traded electronic waste. Recycled materials from municipal programs now pile up in warehouses, since the Chinese stopped buying so much of it to make new plastic crap for us to buy. Even biodegradable plastics and paper from fast food joints does not biodegrade - composting doesn't occur in landfills sealed off from UV rays and oxygen.

So, we stopped taking the plastic lids and straws that come with cups. We started noticing that some bread comes with double plastic wrapping. We bitched about the plastic that packaged our (reduced) Christmas loot. And the youngest of us finally proposed that we seriously limit our fast food intake.

The Family Challenge: DD12, the one that counts French Fries among the most beloved of her picky-eater habits, said, "Mama, I think we should only eat fast food once a week."

We discussed why and came up with 4 major reasons:

it's healthier for us
it's better for the environment
our dining-out dollars should go to local businesses
it will save money for real treats

But, we still needed rules. DD15 said, "They say, if you need rules to control your behavior, you have a problem." Of course we have a problem! So, what counts as "fast food?"

franchise chains are always fast food
anything with a drive-through window is fast food
pre-made food is fast food (school lunches!)
sit-down restaurants with servers are OK
small local food vendors, like stands at the market, are OK
pizza and subs are OK if they come from local shops, not chains
each person can use their weekly meal independent of the rest of us
at an event that limits food choices, do the best you can
do more planning to take food with us when we might get hungry

This whole conversation took place in the car on the way to pick up DD15 from work - and then they both used their weekly choice immediately! DD12 got Wendy's nuggets and fries, and DD15 got pizza.

But the biggest hurdle was still to be faced: DH needed to be approached at home. DD12 wanted me to do it, but we coached her through the proposal, and he agreed! She felt very good and I am proud of her.

This will be a good group effort for us, and well-timed. We just added a lot of new classes, meetings, and jobs to our schedule. That would normally tempt us to eat more fast food to save time. But none of us wants to, so we will do the work to avoid it.

Maybe someday we will stop eating fast food altogether, but that feels like a promise we can't keep, yet. Too big a step, too undo-able. Baby steps are easier to think about.

(Edit: DD12 packed her lunch to school this week. No more plastic sporks.)

2009 Planting Timeline

2009-01-06T09:11:00.003-05:00

Much, much thinner lettuce planting. Make seed tape.

Inspired by Skippy's Vegetable Garden, I made a timeline to use for my spring planting, using May 15th as a last frost date. You may recall the garden plan I made.

I sow very little indoors, since I don't have room to keep seed trays warm and lit. Indoors, I will only be starting cukes, squash, pumpkins, and sunflowers, close to when they can be set out. Plus, the few cabbage I got from the seed swap. I need to research how to grow the 10 Egyptian Walking Onion sets.

I am sure this timeline will get tweaked before spring:

Winter: Order seeds. Collect winter sowing containers and potting soil. Make SWC's out of 5-gal buckets. Keep worms busy making fertilizer. Make "seed tape" out of paper towels for carrots, beets, greens, onions. Scavenge more fishboxes.

March 7: Winter-sow basil, thyme, oregano, annual flowers in milk jugs.
March 14: Buy onion sets at Glick's and plant at Mom's.
March 28: Sow romaine, greens, and spinach in fishboxes. Sow peas in home garden.

April 11: Get hay bales set up at Mom's yard. Fill raised bed for sweet potatoes and screen from groundhogs. Spring clean-up. Talk to neighbor about mushroom soil for Mom's.
April 18: Sow beets, carrots, greens in home garden. Sow onion seeds at Mom's.
April 25: Sow cucumbers, sunflowers, squash indoors. Transplant herb and flower starts to pots.

May 2: Buy transplants of eggplant, zucchini, celery, peppers, parsley at Glick's. Buy brassica transplants and sweet potato sets at Kutztown auction. Look for calendula transplants, and chocolate mint. Try not to be seduced by tomato plants.
May 16: Set out cucumbers (in hay bales) and sunflower plants at Mom's. Sow more romaine and greens in fishboxes.
Memorial Day: Set out eggplant, zucchini, celery, peppers in SWCs at home. At Mom's: transplant watermelon, pumpkin, and winter squash in hay bales. Plant sweet potato sets in raised beds.

Edit: I just found out that June 3rd is called "Bean Day" by local farmers so that is when we will plant all our beans.

June: Sow more basil in pots. Sow beans in home garden. Plan fall planting timeline. Watch for more herbs at transplant clearance sales.

Note: SWC = Self-Watering Container.

Consider this year: Depending how things are going with the food coop, take orders for vegetable transplants from Glick's, close to Memorial Day.

Contact my 4 neighbors that have neglected the concrete planters in front of their houses, and ask if I can plant them with mint or other herbs and flowers.

Consider next year: Order bulk seed, onion sets, and potato sets to resell through coop. Have workshop to demo building SWCs, worm farms, and make seed tape.

Just one zuke, in a SWC, covered in nylon netting to
thwart the squash vine borers, with manual pollination.
Maybe a second plant at Mom's.

Offbeat Storage Item: Mincemeat

2009-01-04T22:20:00.002-05:00

We like these easy mincemeat cookies, which store well in a canister.
In our small kitchen, the cooling rack fits over the dish rack.

I store something you don't see mentioned often: mincemeat. None Such is the only commercial brand I am familiar with. It comes in condensed boxes or ready-to-use jars. The manufacturer says it has a shelf-life of 3-4 years, but I have kept it much longer. The boxes cost $3-4 dollars, and the jars cost $7-9 at full retail. You can buy them by the case through the Smuckers website, too, but I never pay retail for this.

The condensed block is sealed in plastic inside a
cardboard sleeve in a wax-sealed foil label.

It's a seasonal item that is only stocked during the holidays, so this is the time to find it on clearance sale. I live near a grocery liquidator that buys seasonal leftovers from grocery stores in bulk. By spring, I will be able to get the little boxes for 35 cents, and the jars for 75 cents - a 90% discount.

What is mincemeat? It's an old-fashioned 15th century British pie and pastry filling made with chopped fruit and spices, with a bit of beef suet, preserved in sugar. The commercial kind is not for vegetarians, but there are recipes for green tomato mincemeat and other meatless versions. The label on the condensed box has straight-forward ingredients: raisins, brown sugar, dried apples, dextrose, water, salt, beef, dried citrus peel, apple concentrate, spices, distilled vinegar.

The cookies do not taste like beef in any way!
See my new silicon baking mats? I love them.

Mincemeat is high in carbs calories, but not fat, and it has fiber. Besides, we don't store treats for their nutritional value, we store them for their emotional value. If I were living through a difficult time with monotonous food choices, I would like being able to occasionally open up a box of this and rehydrate it for a pastry treat, or make cookies using the crumbled dehydrated block. We like the recipe for Prize Cookies on the side of the box. Everything in the recipe can come from pantry storage if you store powdered eggs. There are lots more recipes on the None Such website, but I have not tried most.

If the beef turns you off, there are recipes for green tomato mincemeat, and you could can your own, but I think that kind is more like a chutney, and less like the dense, sweet traditional British mincemeat. It will take a lot of dried fruit and sugar, which is why I like buying the deeply-discounted clearance product.

Battle Plan 2009

2009-01-01T23:47:00.001-05:00

I don't make resolutions in January; I usually do that on my birthday. They tend to be short-term goals.

But this New Year, I am making some major life changes. There are a number of things happening in our lives that are leading me to change direction.

My 80-year-old mother is physically healthy, but is getting forgetful and indecisive. I do not think it is Alzheimer's, but she shouldn't live alone anymore. We want her to be living with us within 2 years. Her house can be rented out, which provides income, and leaves it available as an asset if she ever needs nursing care. We gave long thought to living with her, but it creates too many family issues.
My 39-year-old ex, my daughters' father, has now been formally diagnosed with a fatal incurable brain disorder that could strike my girls in their 30's. If you watch the TV show House, it is what the character 'Thirteen' has. I am not typing the name if it, because I don't want it to show up in Google searches. We have always known they were at-risk, but his diagnosis officially raises their risk to 50%. I want to be free to spend time being involved in their interests, like youth conferences and art exhibitions. I am also giving deep thought to planning for the future, which could include supervising my daughters' home care when I am in my 70's. I am no longer involved in my ex's care, but the girls will see his decline, and it will be hard to watch.
I am 47 years old. Reality says I have 18-23 good years of productivity left. I think of the saying from Horace Mann: "Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity." I am drawn back toward urban planning, the discipline in which I have a Bachelor of Science, but have not practiced since about 1992. It is my food security concerns that are drawing me. I have been thinking about going back to grad school to revive my professional chops, and get involved in urban food policy. I will start with community involvement, to support future grad school applications.

DH is looking for a professional path after he graduated with a degree in professional writing this past May. He went after a lot of government jobs, but there are hiring freezes at many levels now. He is interested in the Emergency Management field, which I think is a good application of his investigation and security background, his practical personality, and his writing strengths - there is a lot of report and plan-writing in most government jobs. He is going to pursue further education to increase his marketability.

For DH: He found a part-time job tutoring writing at the local community college. It's a very short commute. He also signed up for an EMT training course that will improve his chances of finding work in Emergency Planning. It only costs $125 and ends in certification. Between job and EMT class, he will be at RACC four days a week. So - his next 4 months are laid out. Job, class, work on freelance writing.

Then, we hope to send him to grad school. He is applying for a one-year intensive fellowship program that would get him a Master of Public Administration. He would have to leave us for most of that, which would be hard, but we have many ways to stay connected. It would start in May, and he would again seek a state or federal job in Philadelphia or Washington DC, where he has family.

For Me: First, I am closing my existing web hosting business. I will keep a few long-time clients who would have trouble moving; they will help offset the cost of keeping a server for myself. I spent a lot of time in doctor's offices and court rooms this past year, and I am too often out of touch to stay in a technology business. I have not had good luck finding reliable hired help. A recent offer to buy the business fell through when the buyer lost his business line of credit in the banking crash. It will be better for my clients, and for my family, for me to turn most of my clients over to another hosting firm. My technical experience will undoubtedly continue to be useful, no matter what I do next. I invested a lot of myself in that business, and it is hard to let go, even when it is well past time to do so.

What will I do for a living next? I have a big list of ideas. I am not going to try to plan for more than a year or two ahead - the economy is too unstable to make predictions. I want to be adaptable. My plan is to tie together all my volunteer, church, and professional work under the heading of "urban food security." We are city people, and our future lies in finding new ways to live in urban areas.

There are three areas that interest me most at the moment. I've picked a project for each:

Supporting Urban Food Gardening

Urban gardeners need many things - containers, plant starts, clean soil, community, etc. But free water is a big factor when the cost of water is so high in our city. Our monthly water bill is $85-100, without any summer watering. Free water is pouring off every roof. In January, I will start producing rain barrels and barrel conversion kits. I will sell complete rain barrels locally starting in February, and sell kits on the internet. I attended the first breakfast meeting of an entrepreneur support group New Year's Eve morning.
Discovering Urban Foodsheds

I've spent the past year finding local sources of various foodstuffs, and bulk sources of things we don't grow here. I am ready to start a bulk buying coop. I am shooting for a monthly order cycle, with the first delivery in March. I'll start a non-profit with a paid administrator position, so I can turn it over to someone else if I leave this area. It will need to break even out of the gate, but I don't expect it to pay much in the beginning.
Relearning Traditional Food Skills

I want to organize a series of events that provide opportunities for people to learn about cooking, food storage, seasonal eating, kitchen gardening, and preserving. I already have a list of films and a local film distributor, and a list of potential speakers and demonstrators.

I am organizing my activity by quarters. The barrel business will be my primary livelihood - it comes first, gets the most daily attention. In the first quarter of 2009:

Attend weekly entrepreneur group for start-up support
Rent barrel storage, shoot demo video, launch website
Networking: PA Farm Show - Jan 14
Present youth workshop about sustainable eating - Jan 23
Networking: PASA conference - Feb 5-7
Lead a monthly church discussion group about Ethical Eating
Start a simple monthly bulk buying group - first delivery March

In March, we will know if DH is leaving, and the rest of my year might look like this:

promote rain barrel business
prepare to single-parent for a year
help my mother clean out her house
continue monthly bulk buying group
present workshops at more youth conferences
lead monthly discussions about food security
plan a film/speaker/demo series

For DD12 and DD15: Both are happy in the school. Both are old enough to be left alone periodically, and to take responsibility for chores. DD15 wants to quit her job and go back to her internship at the community art center. It's good for her youth programming resume, and it reduces my taxi-driving. DD12 just wants to work on her computer graphics, and play spring soccer. They are ready for me to be home less, and it may surprise them to see what I can get done outside our household.

For my mother: She and I had a long talk over the holidays. She doesn't want to stay here over the winter. We agreed that she needs to check in with me daily, visit weekly, and I will be more involved in her doctor appointments. We will start getting rid of stuff at her house, at an increased pace in in the spring. She is worried about being poor, and I showed her that she would not be if she were not trying to support a 4BR house. If she lived with us, even if she contributed to food, she would have her Social Security, her small pension, and rental income from her house. Her new motto is, "I've got to get out of here." She is concerned about being a burden, and I explained that trying to help her maintain her in her own home was a far bigger burden that having an extra bedroom for her.

Beyond 2009: If this all goes well, when DH comes back from his fellowship, we will move to a larger city in 2010. We want a city with universities and good hospitals, that has a smooth tax sale process, so we can buy property. We will start looking for a site to start our city compound - like a warehouse with a lot or parking area. DD15 will soon be ready for college, and DD12 will be in junior high school, and my mother should be living and gardening with us. Somewhere in the future lies grad school for me.

To get all this stuff done, I am going to have to be more disciplined about several things:

reduce my news reading
reduce my TV watching
better sleep routine
avoid interesting time wasters
stick to my daily action plan
DH and kids do more chores
engage everyone in decluttering

Interestingly, this Chinese New Year will start the Year of the Ox at the end of January. I was born in an Ox year, so maybe that is auspicious. I am not superstitious, but I enjoy the rituals of Chinese New Year - cleaning, paying debts, bribing the household gods, thinking of ancestors, gathering to celebrate family unity. I better make a bigger offering to the Kitchen God this year.

Independence Challenge - Week 33-34

2008-12-29T20:40:00.001-05:00

Roast Beast (lamb) from Christmas Day, now starring in lamb curry.

It was a weird two weeks, with assorted holiday celebrations, so I have ended up rolling two weekly posts into one.

I am feeling conflicted about our celebration of Christmas, not sure if it was practical or self-indulgent. I may post more about those thoughts later, but for now I am going to just move on to what I am feeling more sure about.

I had some bloodwork done for a check-up on my thyroid disorder. When I got to the doctor's appointment, the test results were missing. After some tracking, it turned out that my vials of blood had not been labeled properly, and the safety protocol called for destroying them. So, I had to get the blood drawn again. Upside: not only did they cancel the charges for the original bloodwork, they gave me the second round for free. I got $200-300 worth of uninsured bloodwork for free. Merry Christmas to me! I am still pretty healthy in important ways - normal blood pressure, normal blood sugar, lipid profile not bad for a fat girl.

Planted: Nothing, but I worked on a garden plan for next year. Participated in a seed swap.

Harvested: Thyme, still usable under the snow.

It just might really taste like sunshine!

Preserved: Made 3 half-pint jars of Sunshine Jam with a pineapple and a lemon. Very nice marmalade-type texture for my first citrus preserves. Thanks for that recipe, Meadowlark! It makes a great holiday gift.

Now, I just have to perfect some biscuits to go with jam. DD12 got me two new steel half-sheet pans and silicone baking mats to go with them, so that biscuit-making might just have gotten easier. I can use a sheet plan as a work surface, to contain the flour and rolling-out mess, and maybe for kneading bread, too. Having only a 2'-square counter surface (that familiar yellow Formica in all my photos) has really been cramping my style.

Cooked: DH made pasta sauce for us while we were at Christmas Eve services. He made quiche for us Christmas morning. Lamb is DH's family tradition, so he also cooked a juicy roast leg-of-lamb for Christmas Day. He made a new cornbread and sausage dressing we didn't like - but that's what cooking experiments are for. DD16 made mac-n-cheese that we re-heated in slices for days. I guess part of my Christmas joy is that other people do lots of cooking!

I'm doing pretty well with my oatmeal challenge. I have been eating oatmeal 4 out of 5 days, skipping only the morning when I fasted for bloodwork, and Christmas morning. Made oatmeal for Mom, too, when she was here for a few days.

Tried my first batch of granola, full of nuts and dried fruit from a recipe in Vegetarian Times. Tastes good, and I put it in a jar for sprinkling on hot cereal or yogurt. It is too loose for eating out of hand. I need to experiment with recipes until I find a version that can be snacked on more easily, either by acting like trail mix, or being cut into granola bars. Note to self: no peanuts in the next batch - they taste weird with yogurt and oatmeal.

Stored: Whole almonds, sweet potatoes (only .49/lb). One of my mother's friends passed to us a frozen turkey she was given at work. Pork was on sale at the market stalls: ham hocks, a smoked ham end for soup, a lot of pork bones to freeze for later stock-making. Everyone buys pork for New Year's Day, so the butchers have cheap bones.

Visited Redner's Market for a few things: saltines, clementines and butter on sale, potato smilies for DD12. Found a new local brand of smoked kielbasa from Schuylkill County. At $3.50/lb it was a little more than my usual $2.29 store brand (probably private-label Hillshire). Not pastured, but it's a step in a better direction, a local product from a local biz. We like all sorts of sausage. A pound is a good amount for 3 adults with pasta, beans, etc. It has been an adventure looking for local stuff. The ideal would be sausage from pastured or game animals, nitrate free, from local producers. Oh, and affordable enough to buy bulk for my freezer. Dreaming!

Prepped: DH bought another cider bucket, a dozen re-usable ceramic-cap bottles, and a bag of corks for us to reuse wine bottles for our hard cider project.

We bought a sleeve each of plastic pint and quart deli containers to make our fridge and freezer storage work better. Our quaint collection of tupperware and yogurt tubs runs out regularly, and poor labeling results in waste. We hope the clear containers of uniform size will help with all that. I use jars a lot, too, but they don't stack safely.

Look at this old bread bag! When did bread cost 35 cents?

I picked up a big box of pearl cotton crochet string from Freecycle, along with a bag of embroidery hoops. Some of the spools of cotton where wrapped in plastic bags. One bag was a blue-printed bag for Harbison's Sandwich Bread from Texas. It had no UPC, no nutritional information or ingredient list, and a sticker for 35 cents! The girls immediately started braiding friendship bracelets and cell phone fobs.

We drained the top bucket into the bottom one with a rubber tube.

Managed: Down in the cellar, we moved the cider from the primary fermenting bucket to a secondary fermentation bucket. We tasted it, and it was more like apple wine than the bottled commercial cider we used to drink. We are not sure if we let it ferment too long, or if this is what real hard cider is like, or if it needs to mellow. I will do more research in the homebrew forums online. It sure has a kick! There is no doubt that we have produced an alcoholic beverage. We will let it mellow for a month, and start a new batch with brown sugar, to see how that affects the taste. We immediately got ideas about using it like cooking wine. A friend from church is saving empty wine bottles for me, which will make it easy to share. We will reserve the new reusable beer bottles for household consumption.

Reduced, Reused, Recycled: DD12 made a batch of colored play dough for three of her friends at school. That last-minute play dough recipe on Women Not Dabbling in Normal was a really timely reminder for me. DD12 said everyone was impressed that she knew how to make play dough. She also made bundles of cookies she baked herself, to take to teachers, wrapped in reused tissue paper and cotton string with handmade gift tags.

Local Food: Found a guy at the Fairgrounds Market that has pastured eggs from Lancaster County, but they are $4/dz. I only have room for 3-4 dozen eggs, max, but eggs are a big protein source for us and we can go through 1-2 doz a week, more during the holiday baking season. Since the summer producer market closed, I have been pressed to find a source that is not "too far to drive for eggs." I need to learn more about how long I can store fresh eggs, and how to freeze them, so I can make a larger purchase from a source I want to support.

I answered a Craigslist ad giving away a banana box full of hundreds of greeting cards. I send cards to church members who are sick or bereaved. But here's the really great part... it led me to a thrift shop I have not visited in a few years, since I thought it closed. The new owner has had it for about a year as a non-profit, taking donations and regularly giving free clothing to city folk that need it. She has regulars that she saves clothing for. We can work with her at our near-by church food pantry. It turns out she used to run a local organic warehouse, and still has connections with bulk food sources. I can't help by think I was meant to run into her as I plan to start a new bulk-buying group. She gave me some new sources for pastured meat (omnivore!), but even she drives to the Philly area to visit Trader Joe's and Whole Foods stores. She is savvy enough to use Craigslist and other online tools. And she runs a thrift shop! My favorite thing. It's my new place to take clothing donations. I am going to ask at church for people to gather the men's socks, belts, boots, and pants they need most.

Learned: Signed up through Meet-Up for a local entrepreneur support group that meets for a weekly diner breakfast. I plan to get help with the business and marketing plans for my rain barrel business. I know what I am supposed to do - I've had three small businesses that worked out pretty well - but it's too easy to skip the written-plan steps that help you later. I hope the group will help keep me on-task.

I volunteered to be an interviewer for a hunger project:, which I hope will both help policy-makers, and provide me with more personal knowledge about local food security:

Starting in January, Berks County will be participating for the first time in a nationwide study, Hunger in America 2009, sponsored by Feeding America, the national food bank network. The Greater Berks Food Bank and the United Way of Berks County are partnering to manage the research study in Berks County to get an accurate and more in depth understanding of how many people need help getting enough food to eat, what their circumstances are, and what parts of the county they come from. The research results will help in future planning efforts to help those who are hungry.Volunteered at the local United Way to be volunteer interviewer for a Hunger Survey to be performed at food pantries and shelters in our area. The goal is to gather statistics about the hungry in our community.

Gratuitous silverware photo: I like this old grapefruit spoon that
I keep in a jar of House Seasoning (salt, pepper, and garlic powder).

Winter Thoughts for Independence Beginners

2008-12-28T17:11:00.002-05:00

We didn't have all these jars in April. We didn't even have that
cupboard. Or the homegrown onions in the fruit basket.

Judy over at My Freezer is Full was on Week 3 of the Independence Days Challenge, and felt a little unproductive. I've been doing that challenge for something like 8 months, and boy, does that sound familiar!

She felt better once the Holiday Spirit took hold a bit. I feel better, too, after having the funeral of an old friend put me in a funk for a few days. But I got to thinking about how it would be to start this Challenge in the winter. So, I am directing this post to anyone that is just getting started.

I started the Challenge in April, and Sharon recently encouraged newer readers to join in, to get more folks to prepare for the bumpy economic times ahead for many of us. I think it is harder to do this "independence stuff" around the holidays, especially if you just started tracking it. It would be easy to feel discouraged. I found it much easier to get started in April, when local lettuce was appearing in markets, nurseries were setting out veggie plants, and the stores were stocked with seeds and canning jars. On the other hand, I very much felt the pressure to learn to can, and to store bulk food, and to expand my garden, and to transition to new energy use patterns. That's just crazy-making.

After 8 months, I am not an expert about anything. But we have made good progress, and I had a few very energetic months. I am still a beginner in my first year, and I know what that feels like, which might not be the case for someone that is a 5th-generation farmer and canner.

I have begun to wrap my head around food storage ideas - the annual cycle, the establishment of new routines, the re-organizing of the kitchen and pantry. I've found a lot of recipes that work for us, and found local sources of much of what we buy. We are working on a pattern of reasonable eating from stored food. We've made a lot of changes, as a family.

Just the other day, my DH was going out to run errands and I gave him a list of things to buy on sale. He looked at the list and raised his eyebrows, "Frozen orange juice? Really?" Puzzled, I said, "Yeah, it's good in marinades and other recipes. Why?" "Oh, I just thought you might be growing orange trees and squeezing them yourself, instead of using something as convenient as frozen concentrate!" We all laughed - even the kids got the joke. Notice, we have all come to expect that we will examine almost everything we buy, eat, and do, to see if it still makes sense from our new perspective.

But in the beginning, it all seemed so urgent, and there was so much to learn that I felt like I was not finishing any one task. It was overwhelming. You simply cannot do everything you want, not all at once. I still can't seem to bake bread that replaces all of our purchased bread. But instead of commercial brands, we now buy bread from an Amish family at the market and from local bakeries, instead of brand-name bread at supermarkets. DD12, who once thought she wanted to bake bread, now doesn't, and has a lot of trouble adjusting to the new bread regime. But that's OK for now. Not every one will adjust at the same pace.

DD12 responding to changes in our family food habits.
We call this her "angry guinea pig" look. She is normally cuter.
(She edited the photo using the tools at Picknik.)

We still eat some prepared food, and we don't have a local source for unprocessed milk, yet. We still buy too much industrial food, because local organic is often expensive and hard to find. We even eat fast food once in a while. But, we eat more local non-industrial food, make more of our own from scratch, buy less plastic packaging, and use less energy than we did 8 months ago.

What counts is that we got started on something, and are methodically taking steps in a new direction. You may change directions once in a while, but if you keep moving, you can't help but make progress. It's hard to not to compare yourself to other people, but don't. Compare yourself to who you were a week ago, a month ago, a year ago. I guarantee you will feel good about the progress.

The whole thing is about taking baby steps, one day at time. Figuring out how it will work for your own family. Whether you are involved in Riot4Austerity, a garden project, a local food challenge, retrofitting your house, or reducing your plastic output - it's all about breaking things down into small steps and making small changes your family can handle. None of the popular bloggers were where they are now, in the beginning. Fake Plastic Fish, a blog about reducing plastic waste, has been doing it for over 2 years. Over at 'Safely Gathered In,' they blog about Mormon/LDS food storage practices encouraged by church leadership. They live in a culture where food storage is expected and homes are built for it - but a recent post talked about low-income families saving rice by the handful. Even Sharon might seem like she has always been living the life she has today, but she simply started sooner than most of us. Tiny changes add up. You don't go from Chicken McNuggets to raising your own chickens overnight.

Expect to hit walls and enjoy turning points. I was very frustrated a few weeks into the Challenge. DH was not completely on board, and he was the major breadwinner. I made some headway with him by talking about buying bulk to save money, and by cooking tasty meals. Everyone likes to save money and eat well. It took a conversation with one of his family members - who wants to start keeping chickens - for him to have a real change of attitude. Hmm, maybe I wasn't such a nutty doomer building a basement bunker, after all. He agreed to buy a freezer and allocate $1000 to buying a 3-month supply of food. I was ready - I had been biding my time by looking for local sources of cheap food. Now, with the economy clearly in big trouble, he is fully on board, even if he does not think it will get as bad as I think it might. He even reads Sharon's blog, even if he doesn't always agree with her.

After I started seriously storing food, I hit several walls. One turning point for me was the realization that I had to completely re-organize my kitchen and cellar pantry to accommodate new cooking styles, new food preparation processes, and the transfer of smaller amounts of food for immediate use from my bulk stores. My kitchen had become a confusing mess. I emptied and re-organized all my cabinets, and added a lot more shelving, bins, and buckets to my cellar. I no longer needed cupboard space for prepared food, but I needed a lot more room for seasonings and the raw materials of cooking. Consider flour alone - I now use four kinds regularly: bread flour, white whole wheat, unbleached all-purpose, and local spelt. Plus, I have oatmeal, flaxseed, and wheat germ I add to things. I used to have just one flour canister.

And the labeling! You don't need to label when everything comes in a package. But when everything is in a glass jar, and the house has multiple cooks, you have to make sure no one confuses salt with sugar, and that anyone can find the chicken thighs in the freezer. I now have a little bucket with label paper, packing tape, markers and dedicated scissors, so I can label at will. (Do scissors "walk off" in your house, too?)

Another turning point came from reading Morman food storage blogs. They have a recommended minimum structure for storage: 72-hour emergency kits (which we call "bug-out bags"), 3-months of family food storage, and one-year of stored bulk staples like rice, wheat, and oats. For some reason, I suddenly felt like I understood better what I needed to buy for storage. I had been just buying a lot of whatever I found on sale. Once I had my 3-month supply, I just replace what we use, and then buy a big bag of one of the staples for longer-term storage. I can see that the next leap I want to take (storing 6 months of food) will require me to do more about air-tight storage than I do now. Lesson: You don't have to mimic the Mormons, but you need a structure and plan for your buying and storing.

At first, it seemed like I was reading a lot of conflicting advice from various sources. What to eat, how to cook, how to heat my house, how panicked I should be, whether I should plan on being able to send my kids to college - on and on. Many years ago, when I was in Al-Anon meetings after I left my alcoholic ex, they had a saying, "Take what you need, and leave the rest." It's been a useful philosophy ever since. I may not be a Mormon, but I can still admire their community systems and supports. I may not live in a refugee camp, but I can learn how they produce safe drinking water. I'm not a vegetarian, but I have gotten a lot of great frugal recipes from vegetarian sources. I am not stocking ammo and living in a bunker, but I can think about who I want in my "community" when there are challenges to face. Lesson: Don't ignore sources of info that don't completely jive with your worldview. Cherry-pick the stuff you can use, and plug it into the structure of your own plan.

If you are starting a food storage challenge now, keep in mind is that this is winter. I am already feeling a definite annual cycle in food storage. Spring is about planting, and being creative with the last of the winter food stores. Summer and fall is building your stores through preserving and canning as different crops become locally seasonal (read: cheap in bulk). Winter's focus is on cooking out of storage, managing your stores, taking advantage of sales on spices and staples at stores, and resting.

When nature rests and recharges for the next growing season, so I think it is important for me to do the same. I am not trying to store food at the same pace I was this summer. I am paying more attention to establishing family patterns, reading more, doing more relationship-building in my food community, planning for the next growing season. Sometimes I read a news article that makes me feel anxious, and I want to run out and get more food. Right now! But I try to resist the urge to buy out of season and break our budget.

Don't forget that the accumulation of knowledge - whether through research, taking classes, talking to people, reading books, or as lessons learned the hard way - all counts. In fact, since you've started in the winter, you have the luxury of working on the knowledge end of things without the spring and summer pressures of planting, harvesting, and preserving. I am planning to go to my state's Farm Show, a state Sustainable Agriculture conference, and start a food discussion group at my church.

I don't feel the depth of winter at the same level as someone that suffers from SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder). Some people think that SAD maybe an adaptation to winter, a natural urge to sleep away the dark days. But I have never liked winter in the Northeast US. It means shoveling, heating bills, dry skin. My joints ache, and I have a strong fear falling on icy pavement and getting hurt. The new bifocals I got this summer don't help at all - they make my vision blurry at the edges. My thyroid problem makes me more sensitive to cold. Seriously, I would stay indoors all winter, if I could, only going outside if the temperature was over 40F. I'd be reading, writing, cooking, sewing, taking online classes, watching movies, planning my gardening year, working on scrapbooks and art projects. I'd need some kind of indoor gym and room to do tai chi. I really envy all the bloggers that are posting about wood stoves, as I huddle around my oil-filled radiator. I used to dream of being a snow bird - leaving the Northeast for some temperate place in December and coming back at the end of March. I have books about retiring to Belize.

But the economic future makes this region look better to me, now. Whether climate change makes my region a little colder or a little hotter, both are workable. Water is good here. We are in the middle of a rail, road, and water nexuus. My particular town is surrounded by rich farmland full of frugal, practical Pennsylvania German farmers and Hispanic immigrants with good, simple food traditions. Instead of wishing I was someplace else, I'd better start thinking of winter as a welcome break from frantic food storage. I better switch to dreams of wood stoves, instead of tropical beaches. Most of the Independence Challenge seems to be in my head, not my pantry.

Howling Hill Seed Swap 2008-2009

2008-12-27T15:48:00.007-05:00

This was one snapdragon plant, that bloomed from July to well after frost.

Yay! I got the envelope for the Howling Hill Seed Swap today. It starts in New Hampshire and goes out full of non-GMO seeds, circulating from person to person on a list. Each of us chooses some seeds, then replaces the seeds with new ones, and sends the evelope to the next person on the list. I am the 4th person. It will circulate to 16 addresses before it goes home to Howling Hill.

It came to me from Rebecca Cameron in Ithaca, NY, and I will send it to Melissa Thompson in Woodbridge, VA, on Monday.

I took a packette of Oregano, 10 of the Egyptian Walking Onion sets, 20 Detroit Dark Red Beet seeds, a pinch of Pink Double Poppy seeds, 10 White Cleome seeds, 5 Cabbage Buscaro, 2 Yellow Squash, and a pinch of the Mustard Greens.

Good-bye seed swap envelope! It says on the back, "Reuse this envelope until it falls apart." I wonder if it will make it back to Howling Hill?

Closed Four O'Clock flowers open in the afternoon into little yellow trumpets.

I put in seeds for yellow Four O'Clock's I collected from a neighbor, Melampodium from a swap, a packette of Roman Chamomile, Asian Tiger Melon from an organic farmer this summer, heirloom Brandywine Tomato seeds, rose-colored snapdragons from my yard, Italian basil seeds from my prolific plants this summer, and seeds from pods I let dry on my False Indigo.

The color isn't ideal in this photo, but the False Indigo (baptisia) is in the pea family and has attractive blue-green foliage that gets about 48" high, with lovely purple-blue flowers that bloom at the time of peonies and iris. The flowers turn into nice pods. Plant needs circular staking or some other prop by mid-summer.

Plan for Food Garden 2009

2008-12-19T23:36:00.002-05:00

Fish boxes with lettuce and spinach last May.

What do you do when there is sleet pelting the windows and cars skidding down the street? Stay home! I did some garden planning for next year.

Once again, I am not sure I will be at my current address all of next summer's growing season. Depends on many things: Will DH get into grad school? Will we be able to prepare my mother's house for habitation? Will we move to another city altogether? Will the collapsing economy have us all sharing a cardboard box under a bridge? The future is murky.

I am going to plan for a combination of my yard and my mother's. I will put most things in containers here at my house, so I can take them to Mom's if I need to move. My yard has the advantage of soil built up for a few years. Mom's soil is awful and thin in the sunny places, so I will have to build beds and use containers there, too. She also has groundhogs that will need trapping.

Another option is to get a community garden plot. I am still thinking about that. But then I would be tending three gardens. Maybe I could get a plot for just a few crops, like sweet potatoes, corn, onions, and cabbage. We'll see.

Lessons learned in this past year's garden:

I don't have the patience for the many challenges of tomatoes, so no tomatoes next year. We always know people with excess tomatoes that we can have or buy cheaply, so I will put my energy into other crops.
Consistent watering is not my strong suit. There always comes a time in the summer when something takes me away from the garden and things get too dry. I need to automate watering, using Self-Watering Containers (SWCs) and/or driplines.
The potatoes were a limited success. I can buy them cheaper. I will just grow sweet potatoes, which did very well with little care in 2007.
I liked the winter-sowing of herbs and annual flowers. I will do that in milk jugs again in late winter. Lots more basil.

Various herb sprouts in milk jug greenhouses in May.

I plan to use several growing methods. I like my fish boxes for for lettuce and other greens, raised high off the ground to avoid pests that munch and cats that spray urine. They are easy to cover with nets. I will sow the fishboxes around St Patrick's Day, when I plant onions at Mom's house.

I planted some big containers last year, and will do it again but make them SWCs. I got some recommendations from my container-gardening list, and I think I will plant peppers, eggplant, chard, zucchini, and celery in big SWCs.

I want to try Straw Bales at my mother's house. They will be good for a year or two, and will break down into her soil. I thought I would try the vining veggies there, cucumber and squashes.

What to plant in the ground when I might move? I was thinking lots of peas the mature early, and then beans if it looks like we will be here through the summer. Several rounds of basil can go in at my house and Mom's. Onions and other roots go in at her house, if I can get a decent raised bed prepared. I liked the carrots and beets this year. I am very tempted to buy "seed tape" for carrots and beets, which I spent a lot of time thinning.

I enjoyed growing my first onions this summer.

The herbs can go into portable clay pots again. Basil and parsley will come from seeds, but I think I will get another thyme, some sage, and some rosemary from starts at Glick's greenhouse.

I experimented with basil in pots and in the ground. Both worked,
but I need more of it. What looked like a lot of pesto in July,
is almost gone in December.

I want to grow larger amounts of fewer veggies, sticking more closely to what I know we will eat. I already have some seeds, from seed-saving, and from catalog orders this fall:

Corn, Ornamental Indian
Cabbage, Copenhagen (heirloom)
Pea, Mississippi Silver field pea
Pea, Tall Telephone - needs trellis
Pea, Black-eyed (saved)
Lentil, French Green
Basil, sweet Italian (saved)
Bean, Commodore Bush Bean (red)
Bean, Taylor Dwarf Horticultural Bush bean (saved)
Bean, Pole bean, Romano (Italian Flat)
Lettuce, Romaine, Parris Island Cos
Spinach, Bloomsdale Long Standing
Cucumber, Lemon Apple
Squash, Burgess Buttercup
Squash, Waltham Butternut

There is a Seed Round Robin coming in the mail from one of my lists, eventually. It might have things I am still missing. Otherwise, I will put in another catalog order. I still need:

chard
kale
sunflowers for seeds
pickling cukes
pie pumpkins
carrots
beets
thyme

Some things, I like as starts from Glick's where I can buy just one plant for less than 50-cents, for my small yard or container. Things I will get from starts at Glick's:

onions sets
sweet potato sets
one zucchini
one eggplant
celery

My cabbage and broccoli starts this past year were savaged in flats that were given to me when they were half-dead. I got a lot of veg from those free flats. I know that they originally came from the Kutztown Produce Auction. I am going to check that out in the spring. If I can get starts very cheaply, it will be a more efficient use of my time than nursing and thinning seeds. And, I can share extras with neighbors.

So, that's my plan, so far. I wish I could grow some fruit, but everything takes time to get established, so I will probably keep buying at markets and visiting u-pick places until we are settled someplace more permanently.

Independence Challenge - Week 32

2008-12-16T00:46:00.001-05:00

De-fatted pan drippings from baked ham, to use for braising cabbage
from the garden. Aren't those teeny little cabbage heads cute?

My recent posts have been rather food-centric, but the next few will be more about about organizing. I absolutely must have room for my mom to move in by New Year. DH wanted to claim this weekend as a family "DVR Clean-up Weekend" where we watch a bunch of saved movies and TV shows. Tempting. But he saw my increasing distress that the attic is not cleaned and insulated as the earlier-than-usual ice and snow start, so we changed it to Attic Organizing Weekend.

HA! We made a decent start on the cellar on Saturday. Wait... wasn't it supposed to be the attic? Yeah, but I need room in the cellar for some attic stuff. I did some cellar organizing, and started to sort the clothes barrels. Then DD15 got called in to work early, and DD12 is just about useless at times. If she whines at me again, I swear I will give her something to whine about. (I've been waiting for a while to use that line, and it's not an empty threat. I could shave her head.) I guess she is "at that age," but it just annoys the hell out of me.

And the weekend just continued to fall apart from there. DD15 back to work Saturday, DD12 taking hours to tidy her room, church with committee meeting on Sunday. DH sits in his chair and reads, pretending he is just waiting for me to tell him what to do. DD12 needs to be given step-by-step instructions. "Please take this upstairs and put it on my bed. Then COME BACK." "Why-y-y?" "So I don't slap you silly. Now move it!" No one wants to clean the attic, including me, but it's not like I just made up a new chore for the hell of it. We need insulation, and we need the room.

It's hard to do this during the week. DD12 is at school, and then has homework and chores. DD15 is at home, but we want her to stay focused on school, and then she often goes off to work into the evening. DH works three days and has been finding odd jobs lately. He is helping an art installer friend move some things between galleries this week. On weekends, everyone wants to do fun stuff, not clean the attic. Tough! We need it done!

Planted: Nothing. Cleaned up the garden a bit more. Buried some kitchen garbage that was too much for the worm bin. Dumped rotting walnuts in the alley for squirrels but far enough away not to kill my plants. We'll take another shot at walnuts next year - maybe I was meant to have them on hand for squirrels.

Harvested: Nothing.

Preserved: Nothing.

Leftover Chicken Corn Noodle Soup

Cooked: Almost nothing! We had so much leftover food in the fridge that we bought and cooked almost nothing this week. Lots of reheating, toasting, and making hot chocolate and chai. Just bought milk, cheese, lemons, and bakery rolls. Made yogurt, baked peanut butter cookies and gingerbread. DH made two quiches on Sunday night.

Banana Gingerbread. Yum.

Found a nice Ginger Lemonade recipe, and made a batch to heat up for soothing my throat. The dry indoor air is killing me. I wake up with my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. I must be snoring like a chain saw. I already hang wet laundry on a rack in my bedroom to add humidity. I tried a humidifier last year, but it just seems to make my bedside table wet. I'm drinking more hot tea, hot chai, and now hot lemonade to hydrate my poor throat tissues.

Stored: Nonfat dry milk, large canister of garlic powder, chili powder, yeast. Found 2-lb tubs of lard at the German-style butcher at Fairground Market, from John F. Martin & Sons, the nationally-known pork butcher in Lancaster County.

Prepped: DH bought a bucket of ice melt for the winter sidewalk. He also got us car emergency tools, a gadget that goes on your keychain and has a blade to cut a seatbelt and a spring-loaded spike to break a car window if you were trapped inside.

Managed: Dropped off our grass shears and a big old Wiss pinking shears to be sharpened at Standard Grinding (214 Lancaster Ave, if you are local). The guy is only charging me ($7) if the shears come out right. He whipped out a piece of fabric to test them, and it was evident that lots of pinkers come through there. I got the shears for $1 at a yard sale, and they would cost $30-50 to buy new. Standard Grinding is obviously a local biz for decades, full of mysterious machinery and unidentifiable pieces of metal. The proprietor seemed like the perfect guy to ask where to find sandblasting to clean my secondhand cast iron. Sure enough, he yanked out the phone book and gave me the number of a place that makes cemetery headstones - they are all about sandblasting.

I did inventory this week, inspired by the cool GoogleDocs spreadsheet posts at the Chez Musser blog. So far, I counted all the dry goods in he cellar pantry - I will do the cupboards and freezers this weekend. It was very instructive to count everything. I found 6# of forgotten oatmeal in the bottom of the cornmeal bin. I think I have a lot of good basics, but I am weak in some areas, like canned greens and pumpkin. I plan to try to inventory once a month, at least until I figure out how to set 3-month pars. How much pasta DO we use in a month? We'll see!

--> My inventory spreadsheet, so far.

There is a big difference between intending to eat oatmeal, and actually eating it. I have tons of oatmeal, and I need to eat it and make granola. I think I only eat it about once a week right now. Yes, we still have other food for breakfast, but establishing the oatmeal standard will save money and be good for me. And maybe someone else will also start eating it. I make it with wheat germ, dried fruit, whatever fresh fruit there is, and a big dollop of homemade yogurt. It only takes a few minutes to cook.

Oatmeal Challenge: I want to start eating oatmeal for breakfast five days a week. On the weekends I will have other stuff, because I love an egg sandwich, too. If I feel like eating chipped beef or waffles, there is always lunch.

Reduced, Reused, Recycled: The over-stuffed fridge hid a few items that spoiled and were wasted: a half-pound of scrapple, a bag of green beans, and a pint container of creamed chipped beef that I love. I'm kicking myself. This week gets a FAIL for reducing waste.

In our cleaning, I found an unopened set of Dora the Explorer checkers and card games. I took them to church, where I found a librarian friend that took them for the children's department at the library.

Scavenged a huge piece of heavy cardboard to use for our attic project.

DD12, as the modern hoodie-clad Winter Angel

We went to a church kids event, a sort of labyrinth walk where they followed a spiral of evergreen roping laid on the floor, to light a candle from the winter goddess/angel in the middle. The kids carved apple tealite holders. The little wiggly kids could hardly wait for their turns to walk, then marched very seriously around the spiral, and then set their lit apples on gold doilies around the spiral. It was cute and just the right length for littles. My older girls had fun carrying around babies and playing with toddlers. After, I split the used apples with another woman - she will feed them to her chickens, and I to our worms. I took some slightly used tealights for our emergency candle box. I also took some of the pine roping, to decorate our porch rail, since it was going to be thrown away. I will add some holly from my mother's house later this week.

We have been diluting our shampoo, conditioner, and liquid hand soap. I water down the Tresemme conditioner by at least 4X, making more of a creme rinse. We make our own foaming hand soap by cutting 1 part regular hand soap with 10 parts of water, and reusing (many times) a container for Dial foaming hand soap. We like that is rinses so easily, using less water. We made a reusable soap mixing container by marking out the levels of soap and water on the side, so DD12 can mix up batches.

Local/Family: I am going to the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture (PASA) conference in February. I am going to find a ride to State College (where I graduated from Penn State so many years ago) and attend for 3-4 days. There is programming about all the things I want to get involved in: youth programming development, food distribution systems, and backyard farm gardening. Who Hoo! It's not terribly expensive at $170, and I will ask at the UU church congregation if someone has a spare bed, instead of a hotel room. I plan to also check in with the church's youth group to promote DD15's youth conference series. First "business trip" I have been on in ages. I am excited already. It feels like the perfect way to kickstart the new things I want to do.

Learned: There was a fascinating discussion about salt on the Women Not Dabbling blog, especially as it concerns the many of us that are hypothyroid. I am looking for sources for Celtic Sea Salt and Redmond RealSalt. Put a salt mill on my wishlist, too.

Lots of recipes "on deck" for holiday baking next week.

Library: Wanna to hear about my recipe system? I juggle computer recipe management with a fear of grid-crash; I'm a weird combo of geek and Luddite. I love technology, but don't quite trust it not to leave me stranded just when I need it most. I have over 500 recipes on the recipe website WeGottaEat.com. When I plan to cook a new one one, I print it out and tape it up on the cupboard door over the counter I work at. If I need to make changes to the recipe, I can jot them right down. If not, the recipe goes into a binder I keep as a hard copy (in case the power, the internet, or the computer goes down). Recipes that I use frequently go into my "favorites" - that means I tape them on the inside of the cabinet door. So high-tech. LOL

Frequently-used recipes taped inside cabinet doors.

Independence Challenge - Week 31

2008-12-08T10:15:00.002-05:00

The turkey stock bagging operation.

My mom gave me this huge lidded 6-qt container that is low and wide. It just fits on the bottom shelf of my fridge. I chill stock overnight to make it easier to skim most of the fat, then I dip out quart measures of stock and pour it in baggies. I had 8 quarts in this batch, and jarred two in glass for the fridge. I see stock in those paper quart boxes for $2.49 in the store - this batch would cost almost $20 to buy. It probably cost me less than $2, with turkey backs on sale Thanksgiving Week. I feel so thrifty when I make this stuff.

I fold the air out of bags as I seal them. Six quart bags fit in this cardboard box, which corrals them on a wire shelf in the freezer. To thaw, I usually just slit the frozen bag, peel off the plastic, and put the frozen block in a saucepan over very low heat until it melts, about 15 minutes. One bag of stock and two cups of rice gives me 6 cups of cooked rice, enough for dinner and a leftover lunch.

Planted: Nothing.

Harvested: Seven little heads of cabbage. Ooooh, it's cold now. The top inch or two of soil is frozen.

Preserved: Nothing. But I have apples to peel for sauce this coming week.

Cooked: Ever since I won that Bacon-of-the-Month last December, I have been Blogging for Prizes. Haven't won anything yet, but my latest effort was an attempt to win a dutch oven or a stand mixer over at Pioneer Woman Cooks. I was entry number 3219 of many thousand. It's a random drawing out of all the entries, so really there are no points for content, but we had to comment on our favorite pasta dish. Here's what I wrote - and then made for lunch!

I grew up on boxed Kraft Mac-n-Cheese. I needed to find an adult substitute that was just as fast and easy to make. I boil up about a cup and a half of macaroni in salted water. Then I drain it, and put it back in the pan with a lump of butter. I stir it around to melt the butter, then I sprinkle a bunch of grated Parmesan cheese on it (s’ok to use shaker cheese, really). Then I get out a blob of the pesto I make and freeze each winter, and mix it in. Done! You can also use purchased pesto, obviously. Don’t fuss too much about the quantities of mac, butter, cheese, and pesto - it’s good every time. And it really takes no longer than the boxed kind. Yummmm!

I was the Queen of Leftover Turkey this week. Turkey sandwiches, turkey vegetable sautes by DD15, turkey curry, turkey stock. All turkeyed out, for the moment. This is such a good time for hot savory food. I made crockpot BBQ chicken, chicken corn noodle soup, a new recipe for crockpot pinto beans adapted from Paula Deen. On Sunday, I baked a 12# ham, which freed up a lot of space in the freezer, but stuffed the fridge.

Crockpot Pinto Beans

DD15 made two quarts of her Alfredo sauce at home and lugged a big pot to Virginia, to make penne for 20 people at a youth committee meeting. It used 5 pounds of dry pasta and a lot of butter, parmesan, and half & half. She also brought back two gallon-size ziplocks of leftover sauced pasta. Fortunately, it goes well with the ham leftovers, since we will be eating it for days!

Some of what you can see: On the top, a pot of soup that needs to go in quart containers, a pan with the dwindling ham carcass, containers of leftovers, two kinds of chai mix, yogurt, baked sweet potatoes, a little scrapple, bagged spinach, a lonely leek, wheat germ. Middle: more leftovers in sourcream and yogurt containers, cranberry sauce, bagged pasta, green beans, crockpot pinto beans, spelt flour. Bottom: buttermilk, more bagged pasta, turkey/bean burrito filling, 8 blocks of cheese.

I cannot believe how much food is in our fridge right now! I need to find a source for freezer tape and a grease pencil to do better labeling. *I* know what's in there, but no one else can find anything. I am still swinging back and forth between having nothing in the fridge and having too much. But, I think I have learned some new lessons:

Instead of planning something for each day, I list the things I want to make, in the order of ingredients that need using. Then I just make the next thing on the whiteboard list.
It's starting to look like making one "big" meal per week works, if it is big enough to produce leftovers. Like a turkey, a ham, a large chicken, a pan of lasagna, etc.
I really like Chris Musser's 10 Meals ideas. She has about 10 basic go-to meals that she rotates through - many of them are things we make, too. They all use stuff she keeps in the pantry and freezer. I need to mash that idea into my 6-week cycle idea to make sure I keep using the pantry staples.

Stored: 8 gallons of water in recycled cider and milk jugs. Four pounds of cheddar cheese that was "buy one, get one free." Cornmeal, nonfat dry milk, boxed cereal. I am feeling a little anxious after reading about various agricultural crises, so I bought 15# of rice, 25# sugar, and a block of yeast - and ordered 50# of wheat berries from a local source. Is that "shopping therapy" or prudent preparation?

Prepped: Found two crappy windows that will not stay completely shut, in DD12's room and DD15's room. I need the landlord to fix them, but I need the girls's rooms and the attic to be more presentable before I call him in. I want to nail him down about insulating the attic. So, we spent time on Sunday doing some cleaning and organizing. Gotta do more of that this coming week.

A piece of filling popped out of one of my bicupids this week. That worries me, since I have no dental coverage. We were using a very affordable dental clinic at a local technical school, but they are unreliable with appointments. I'm not in pain, and the tooth doesn't seem sensitive, but I worry that food will get stuck in the gap and cause a lot more decay. Rats.

Managed: I baked a pan of sweet potatoes that were getting dried out in the cellar. I think I learned that larger potatoes keep longer than small ones, and that I should label my potatoes according to which farm I got them from, so I know whose tater variety stores longest.

I have quite a number of projects to check on lately. The worm bin is.... wormy, and smells fine with a scattering of peels and tea bags. I might need more worms. The cider fermentation bucket is bubbling merrily through the airlock. The yogurt is culturing and the bread machine is plugging away.

The one project I have failed to finish is the box of walnuts outside. I gathered a large nuber of black walnuts, and put them in a plastic recycling bin to wait for me to have time to hull and clean them. But I kept forgetting about them, as black plant-killing sludge leaked out the bottom. Now they are half rotted, and frozen to boot! I think I will dump them out back in the alley for the squirrels, and the juglone in the wanuts kills the weeds. The poor squirrels would probably love them, since the acorn harvest is almost non-existant this year.

Reduced, Reused, Recycled: DH was ready to yell at the kids for not taking out the recycling on pick-up day. But I told him there were only three tin cans to put out - we reused the rest, or avoiding bringing it home altogether. Buying bulk, and the use and reuse of canning jars and other containers makes a real difference, especially reusing milk jugs. The worm composting will also help. If we had a wood stove, we could also use up little bits of wood (like citrus crates) and non-recyclable paper. Considering the huge slump in the market for recycled materials, reducing the output has suddenly become even more important.

I started a Tattoo Fund. I want to get a tattoo when I turn 50 in a few years. I've never gotten one because the expense seemed frivolous. But I think it's OK to do something frivolous on my 50th Birthday. Will I have the cash? Magic 8-Ball says, "Answer Unclear." I decided to save all my change until then, starting with a blue plastic piggy bank I got for free from a bank branch opening. I'll just empty my change purse into it once a week.

Local/Family: I collected two grocery bags of donated food at the annual soccer award banquet, and took it to our food pantry along with cereal, applesauce, and hot cocoa from us. I have an idea to run a raffle at the next youth conference, where you can only "buy" a ticket by bringing a food item to donate; need to figure out what the prize could be. Ooo, I know! DD15 can hand-paint one of her coveted art t-shirts.

People at church are getting excited about the food group I said I would start. New people are asking me about it all the time. I think that ramping up our food pantry efforts will be a first project. The number of people served by our monthly distribution has tripled in the past few months. We all recognize that the canned goods we get from the county system are not enough, and don't always suit the needs of our clients, many of whom are Hispanic or have health issues like diabetes. We need more rice, beans, dry pasta, cornmeal, fresh food. And maybe to start providing recipes to use the food we give out.

I follow a couple of LDS/Mormon food storage blogs. Their structured storage program makes sense to me: 3 months of pantry, 72-hour emergency kits, and 1 year of staples in long-term storage. They have an emphasis on canning dry staples in #10 cans, which appeals to me for wheat, spelt, sugar, oats, rice, etc. The LDS church supports that by having regional church canneries that may also often be used by non-Mormons. Alas, there is no regional cannery near me. But I just read that some regions have canning machines as loaners. I am going to contact my local Mormon church, and see if they have a canner, and if they would be interested in sending a food storage speaker to a canning workshop.

Learned: For Sharon's Competency Project, my first commitment was to build a worm farm and a rain barrel. We got the worm farm done last week, and now I am working on the rain barrel. As with so many of my projects, there are obstacles. My drill chuck is stuck, so the first thing I need to do is go out and find someone that can help me unstick it. Then I will go hunt down a barrel or two. Then, I can go to work on gathering the parts and figuring out how to assemble them.

I also researched raw-food pet diets, so our cat can also eventually eat sustainably. Not sure what the cat will think of that! I need to get some supplements to make sure she gets enough taurine. Basically, the cat would get raw chicken or turkey with sweet potatoes or squash, with some yogurt.

Library: DH bought the Crisis Preparedness Handbook and a bound copy of Where There is No Doctor. You give that man a mission, and he is thorough!

Starting the Worm Farm

2008-12-02T14:43:00.004-05:00

We have three knife-honing steels, so we picked our least-favorite and heated
it in the gas flame of the stove, and used it to melt drainage holes.

My yard and kitchen are too small to generate enough materials to get a nice hot compost pile going, so in the summer I usually trench compost. We dig holes and trenches in and around the planting beds, and bury most of our kitchen waste. It usually decomposes within weeks. But frankly, I feel completely unmotivated to do that in the winter. I needed a winter composting method, which led me to vermiculture, or worm composting.

After looking at a lot of expensive commercial worm farms, I found instructions for a cheap and easy worm bin that is just our speed. It starts with two 10-gallon Rubbermaid storage bins.

We bought the worms at PetSmart, where they stock them as lizard food. I looked at bait shops and checked with my local Cooperative Extension Agent, but I couldn't find another source. I bought 2 tubs, for about $3.50 each, with 40-50 worms per tub. The worms will multiply, so I shouldn't have to do that again.

I had planned to drill the holes in the bin, but my drill chuck remains stuck. So, DD15 melted the holes with the tip of a knife steel and a metal skewer, heated in the gas stove flame.

We did eat the apples we peeled for the worms.

DD12 shredded and wet the newspaper bedding, then we added the worms in their peat moss, a little dirt and leaves from the garden, and some carrot and apple peels. We covered all that with a layer of wet cardboard. We will feed them only lightly for the next few weeks, to give them time to get settled and start multiplying. Once they get going, we should be able to give them 5-6 pounds of waste per week, according the articles I have read.

Worms are not exactly entertaining to watch.

DD12 has been appointed the Official Worm Farmer. The bin will be under the kitchen table, where we will remember to feed and tend them. The worms like temperatures between 55 and 75F, and the cellar will be too cold in the winter. In the summer we will move the bin to the cellar or outside on the back porch.

Our kitchen table is a storage/work surface, not for eating, so I put stuff under it,
like a big box of extra pots and pans. Now, it also has a worm farm.

We put the waste bucket back on the counter to collect worm food. Hopefully, by spring we will have turned our scraps into buckets of lovely worm castings for the garden.

I checked on the worms today, and they seem to have warmed right up. They shy away from the light when I lift up the damp cardboard. My family seems slightly weirded out by the worms in the kitchen, but it's too cold in the cellar. They'll get used to it.

Independence Challenge - Week 30

2008-12-01T15:56:00.016-05:00

Cider jugs lined up and waiting for us to sanitize the "primary fermentation" bucket. Note the elegant metal computer desk that has become a kitchen storage fixture. I hope to find a small corner cupboard or utility cupboard to replace that. I'd love to have storage for small appliances and the cast iron collection.

I got a cold the day after Thanksgiving, so I have not accomplished as much as I hoped over the holiday break. I have not met my goal of being ready to have my mom move in by the end of this month. Hopefully, by Christmas. It's hard to re-organize your whole house, while still carrying on the regular daily stuff.

We did have a nice holiday of cooking, visiting with family and friends, watching films, and relaxing at home. And we did mop up a couple of half-done projects. It's December 1st, so the kids will want to start our paper Christmas tree project this evening. It's kind of a reverse advent calendar; we add something every day until the star goes on top on Christmas Eve. I'll take photos as that develops.

Planted: Nothing.

Harvested: Cabbage and lemon thyme.

Preserved: Started a bucket of hard cider fermenting. I'll make a separate post about that with photos. The apples are not organic, but Weaver's uses an Integrated Pest Management program that minimizes spraying, and their cider is UV pasteurized, not heated, so it should be good for making hard cider.

I jarred up horseradish I grated from a root. Peeled it, grated and ground it in the food processor with some white vinegar. It made about a pint. DH leaned over and took a big whiff while it was still in the food processor - really cleared his stuffy nose! People say it will only keep its heat for a few months in the fridge. I want to plant some, and make it part of our late fall routine.

I made my own cranberry sauce. It was so easy; just a cup each of water and sugar, simmered with a bag of berries. It made about 2/3 of a quart jar that I am keeping in the fridge. Next time, I will jar it in pints and water-process it. Found a new cranberry sauce-filled muffin recipe to try this week.

I made a big mistake that cost me 3 quarts of really good chicken stock. I had once accidentally frozen a quart of stock in a jar, and it didn't break. So I thought, "Hmm, why not use my reusable jars, instead of plastic bags? I can just move jars right from freezer to fridge as needed." Wrong! All three were broken the third day, I guess after freezing really solidly. Wasted jars and stock. I made 6 quarts of new turkey stock. In quart freezer ziplocks, thank you.

Cooked: Wednesday night there was an interfaith Thanksgiving service, hosted this year at our church. There were Muslim, Buddhist, Baha'i, Hindu, Christian and Jewish guests. I baked a Parsnip Spice Cake. I know a bit about kosher cooking, but I know almost nothing about the Halal dietary laws that Muslims observe. Just enough not to use lard or alcohol-based vanilla extract. I made a label for the plate on the refreshment table, listing the ingredients - so, whether the guests were vegan, vegetarian, Jewish, or Muslim, they could decide for themselves whether to eat it.

It's not a new recipe, but I took an all-local Cornbread Pudding to the family Thanksgiving feast in Philadelphia. When you are not the host, you don't get leftovers, so on Sunday night I roasted some turkey parts and made some pie, so I could have leftover turkey sandwiches and pie. And I had more pie and turkey sandwiches today. :-)

DH caught me roasting a butternut. 'What's that?" "Pumpkin," I said. 'No it's not. It's squash! I don't like squash." "You like pumpkin pie, and pumpkin is a squash, and most pie pumpkins look more like this than jack-o-lanterns - you just never see pumpkin except out of a can." "Still. Not eating it." Which is how I ended up baking sweet potato pie. I'll make pumpkin muffins with the other orange stuff. ~sigh~

Stocked: Hair conditioner, copy paper, packing tape. Parsnips and unshelled walnuts.

I got sucked into Wal-Mart, originally in search of a $13.95 haircut. I already go there once a month to get a $4 prescription refill. But once you are in, the prices are mesmerizing, and you end up buying conditioner, copy paper, and tape. They had sweet potatoes for $.38/lb, green beans for .99/lb, and .68 sleeves of celery. I see how people end up shopping there, even as they mutter, "I hate Wal-Mart." You hate that you want to buy things. I'm so torn - Wal-mart is our nation's largest retailer, and they are making an effort to sell local and organic products. Shouldn't I try to support that? But the organization as a whole is the most non-local thing in the world. When I get a new Rx, I will switch to Target, who I hear has a similar $4 program. If I don't go in there, I won't have to deal with the ethical conflicts.

Friday, I bought almost nothing on "Buy Nothing Day." Just two matinee film tickets and a bag of Swedish Fish, for my mother and I to see The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. Holocaust-themed film are never feel-good, and this one was immediately followed by a ladies' rest room full of weepiness, but it was good to go to the movies with her.

On Saturday, a friend of DD15's came to visit for the afternoon. They live in Maryland, but were doing a holiday road trip in our area, and the kids wanted to go to a movie and hang out. It was all arranged via text message and Facebook. I had never met his mother, but I couldn't just let her wander around unhosted, so DH and I took her to lunch, and then she came with me to Weaver's Orchard. I bought half a bushel of our favorite Honeycrisp apples for eating and 7 gallons of cider (5 for the bucket and 2 for drinking), as well as Crispins and McIntoshes to make applesauce, and some other fresh veggies. My new friend also bought apples and veg. Her son has a severe peanut allergy, so she is very mindful about food. When we came back to Reading, we toured the GoggleWorks art center while we waited for the kids. Then we showed them the nightime view from the Pagoda. She told me about a big book sale event in Annapolis, and I told her about our AAUW book sale. I don't know if DD15 and this boy will date, but at least I made a new mom-friend!

Prepped: DH got space blankets for the bug-out bags; they came in box of 12. He also bought forearm lifting straps for our general equipment supply. These straps allow you to use the leverage of your whole forearm to lift things, instead of relying on your hand strength to grasp. That's a great tool for people with hand disabilities like my arthritis. He also bought us a boning knife and a new pepper grinder - I looked for used items, but these are really essential cooking equipment for us, and it was worth buying new to get exactly what we needed. The knife really made a huge difference in meat carving.

He also got four packages of military-style emergency rations for our bug-out bags. They have a five-year shelf life, so I have to figure out how to remember to rotate those. Ugh - we may have to eat them in five years. Each vacuum-sealed brick has six 400-calorie portions of "pleasant lemon vanilla flavor" stuff. Maybe I could put cubes of it on the coffee hour snack table at church - hee hee!

Managed: The sweet potatoes in the cellar are getting shriveled. I have not been using them fast enough. I think I better roast them all and freeze chunks or puree. The squash look fine. I just roasted the first one. The white potatoes are slightly shriveled, but not bad, and we use them regularly. The onions look good. I have not gotten the cellar thermometers I meant to get, and we have been using the clothes dryer for towels, sheets, and jeans - bottom line, I think the cellar has not been as cold and damp as needed for good root storage. The local harvest comes in long before the cellar is chilly enough.

I've been eating the little bits out of the freezer - four pierogies, a lone burrito, that kind of thing that accumulates in the upstairs freezer. I must find time to really re-organize it this week. The stuff in the front comes and goes briskly, but I can't remember what is in the back.

Funny how many things get done here by people wearing
pajama pants. I don't think the worms noticed.

Reduced, Reused, Recycled: We finally got the worm bin started. I will make a separate blog post for that. The poor worms hibernated in the fridge for more than a month. They were still alive, and I hope they warm up and start making little worms very quickly.

Family/Local: Doing some research to prepare for the food security seminar for youth, and the food discussion group at our church, both of which will start in January. People are definitely interested. Heard about a Three-Bowl Ritual that focuses on food waste awareness - might be good for a group activity.

Learned: Signed up for a December 2nd webinar about Small Farm Incubators. It will be good for me to better understand the obstacles to small farm operations, if I eventually want to build a buying co-op with local suppliers.

Library: I'll put this in the "library" section since it contributes to our journaling and documenting. DH got a fancy new Canon camera. His aunts wanted to give him a graduation gift in May, and they finally agreed on a camera. DH is a writer, and might be able to sell more freelance work if he can also supply photos. Our older Kodak EasyShare DX7590 camera now officially becomes "mine" and I plan to find a macro lens for it on eBay. It's hard to take garden and food pix without a close-up lens.

Dark Days Challenge - Leftover Style

2008-11-30T22:29:00.004-05:00

I served this Dark Days dinner Leftover Style - self-serve on the counter. I made mine into turkey sandwiches. The bread was from a local bakery, but not the Miracle Whip. I am not sure Miracle Whip is even an organic substance, but I am deeply addicted to it on turkey sandwiches. Yummm!

For the third year, we went to DH's godparents in Philadelphia. They have 40-50 people and everyone brings food. I am slowly finding my niche at the buffet table.

My Cornbread Pudding went over well. I used leftover Sweet Potato Cornbread, broken into chunks to get stale for a day or two - otherwise it just dissolves in the custard. I didn't find it necessary to tell our hosts that everything in it was local - even the Brinser's Best Roasted Yellow Corn Meal from the Echo Hill Country Store in Fleetwood @ $1.40 for a 2-lb bag produced in Manheim by Haldeman Mills (37 miles). The sweet potatoes were from Two Gander Farm in Oley, eggs from a Lancaster farm that has a stand at the Fairgrounds Market, milk and half & half from Clover Farms. Not local: vanilla, cinnamon, nutmeg, cane sugar, salt.

After dinner, we played games - word games, charades, poker. The younger kids got turns, even if they are not good players yet. People watch football, nap, and dandle babies. They hire help for the clean-up, so no one is trapped in the kitchen. We look through old photo albums, which include pix of DH's late parents, and DH as a child. There's a fire, and a pot of mulled cider. I like it.

But, we don't get leftovers. I like leftovers. This year, I planned ahead for that. Today, I roasted 4 large thighs and a quarter-breast of turkey. The meat was from Wegman's at the Fairground Market - local and affordable, but not organic. I made gravy with the pan drippings. Not local: salt, pepper, garlic powder, flour.

I also made my own cranberry sauce. Cranberries don't grow around here, so no way to make that local, but at least it was homemade. A cup each sugar and water brought to a boil, then toss in a bag of fresh cranberries and let it simmer until all the berries burst and get mushy. I poured it into a canning jar to gel up for use on the leftover turkey-in-progress. I still have three thighs worth of roasted turkey to use in recipes this week!

DH didn't make his sweet potato pie for the actual holiday, but I still wanted some, so I made one sweet potato and one egg custard pie. The major ingredients were local - sweet potatoes, eggs, and milk. But the crust was a localness FAIL - I used frozen pie crusts. I just don't have room on my 2-foot-square countertop to make pastry. The "secret" ingredient is Cream of Coconut, obviously not local.

Custard is really easy way to use up the second crust in the frozen 2-pack. As long as you don't accidentally slosh it when you slide in the stupid oven rack! I'll be scrubbing that tray for days.

It's not difficult to make holiday feast food from local ingredients - but it can be hard to give up the favorite recipes that call for a few exotic ingredients.

Independence Challenge - Week 29

2008-11-23T16:15:00.001-05:00

DD12 making "tire angels." We went to a birthday party at a
rock-climbing gym, and the floor was padded with shredded tires.

I used to try to post these updates on Thursdays but I am switching to Sundays. On Sundays, I have been to the weekend rummage sales, been to the market, and had some quiet reflective time at church. I've reached the end of weekly menu plan, and I have an idea what the next week holds. The afternoons are a relaxed time for writing. now that soccer season has ended. I do still write a little bit every day, or I will forget it all my the end of the week.

Planted: Just the opposite - I killed the indoor herbs. I'm 47 years old, and I have never been able to keep plants alive indoors - why did I think that had changed? Apparently, the indoor air is much drier than outside. Or - something I don't recognize killed them like a fungus or wilt. I really do better outdoors; I should focus more on making a tunnel or cold frame.

Harvested: Cabbage and thyme. We've had some hard freezes now, and a week of below-freezing temps, so there won't be much else.

Preserved: The jar of sauerkraut turned out weird. It never developed a lot of brine, and seemed slightly green, but it smelled like kraut. DH tried a tiny bit and said it was weak. We don't eat a lot of it, and only DH really likes it, so maybe this is just something I don't have to make from scratch.

Cooked: Made Chicken Stock from a bag of organic bones in the freezer. The rest of the ingredients came from storage or the garden. It's soup-making season, so I need to keep up with the demand for stock. I was planning to start keeping stock in the new freezer, but I filled it up. There is now slightly more room in the upstairs freezer, which I use for stuff I use frequently - or won't remember to use at all if I hide it in the cellar. I also make waffles for DD12 and keep them in the upstairs freezer.

I continue to struggle with the regular production of family meals, within the new parameters of the storage menu, seasonal/local eating, and careful shopping. We all continue to struggle with resisting the urge to eat out - both generations of us grew up loving hoagies, take-out pizza, and fast food. DH and I both admit that when we are out running errands alone, we sneak take-out food. We do try to patronize local independent restaurants, instead of chains. It's gonna take time to give up flavors we've know since childhood. I quit smoking three years ago, and still crave a cigarette every so often.

DD15 packs her dinner to work. She makes things like shrimp curry and rice and packs it in reusable containers that she brings back home with her. I always ask her to make extra, so DH and I have leftovers to eat for lunch. She's already a good cook; I think she will be a great cook when she grows up. But she better have roommates that like to wash dishes - she leaves a trail of destruction.

Stored: I really wrestled with turkey shopping. I don't need a turkey - we are feasting with Philadelphia family. But it's the best time to buy turkey to freeze. I would love to buy a local pastured turkey, but I just can't afford the $5-8/lb price tag. The battle between the wallet and the principles is hard, especially with both of us underemployed and the savings whittling away.

Weis had store-brand turkeys on sale for $0.47/lb, which was so hard to walk away from. But I am boycotting them, since they stopped donating bread to the food bank, and that turkey itself is from somewhere in the Midwest. I would have had to buy $25 worth of other food from Weis to get the turkey. Giant had more anonymous Midwestern turkeys for .89/lb. Wegman's at the farmer's market has conventionally-raised local birds at 1.65/lb. I went with Wegman's, the most local source. Got a 3# quarter breast, 4 boneless thighs in 4# packages, and 10# of turkey backs (.20/lb) in three bags to freeze for stock-making.

Also stored: onions, kosher salt, cider vinegar, anchovies, dried apricots, golden raisins, semolina flour (for pasta making), barley, ginger root, onion powder, mild chili powder, ancho chili powder, black peppercorns.

Bought more Maggi bouillon cubes; I like the way they dissolve faster than the drier ones. If I have no stock thawed, and I just need to make rice, I put bouillon in the water. And, they are good for the bug-out bags.

Prepped: DH bought waterproof matches, magnesium fire starters, and compasses for our bug out bags. We traded lists for what should go in them, and came up with lists for individual bags, a family box for the car, and a third list of items to gather in the event of a slower evacuation. DH wanted to shop for new bug-out packs for each of us. (I think he has some sort of luggage fetish.) These are bags that will just sit in a closet 90% of their life - I convinced him to let me get used bags at yard sales for next to nothing. I'd rather spend the money on food, clothing, or insulation.

We hit two church rummage sales on Saturday. The kids were disappointed that there were no clothes to dig through, but they they had loads of junk, and I found a lot of good stuff. Spent a total of $20, including a round of baked goods made by little old church ladies.

Kitchen: a plastic mandoline for $1, two perforated steel French bread bakers, two small stainless steel bowls, a tube pan to replace my bent one, and a Kitchen Magician Food Galmourizer (LOL - it's a plastic tool for making garnishes). I got a Salton yogurt maker - I already make yogurt without, but this may help when my kitchen is so cold.

Organizers: a cute old suitcase to store my napkins and tablecloths, 3 new Clinique make-up bags for toiletries in our bug-out bags, a set of 4 glass canisters for dried fruit storage, wooden plate rack to organize my platters, plastic bin for canned goods, two brand new Hallmark greeting card organizers - I'll use one as a gift for my Mom, and the other I sorted my cards into.

Misc: a box of chalk, some candles, and a small Christmas tree wall decoration.

Managed: Cleaned and inventoried the fridge. Did better at not wasting any food.

Local/Family: It was a depressing week in the community. The school bus chaos is out of control, and our barber around the corner was shot and killed by armed robbers. But, the Thanksgiving service at church was about Ethical Eating, and I talked to more people about starting a food circle in January.

Reduced/Reused/Recycled: The farmer's market is just heaped with food this week. It's so hard not to over-shop; I'm only letting myself do that with food for storage, not immediate consumption. I made sure I ate before I went. My only real impulse buying was a bag of golden raisins. I'm doing better at keeping my menu plans in mind, and sticking to the list. I'm working hard to stop wasting food, and buying too much produce is my usual mistake.

The water bill was $77 last month, and $100 this month. I think we used less water last month, certainly not 30% more! I asked the landlord for bill copies, and he referred me to the city water bureau - but they said he is the account-holder and they cannot give me numbers. So, I need to push the landlord for bill copies, and figure out what is going on.

Learning: DH signed up for an EMT course. The course will take 6 months of Sundays, starting in January. We will drop him off at the community college on the way to church (they are near each other). It only costs $125 and he will take the state EMT certification course at the end. He is moving toward an interest in emergency management, and this will add to his skillset. And, we get a our own in-home EMT!

Sharon Astyk started a Competence Project, to encourage people to learn new practical skills for "badges." I said I would build a worm bin and a rain barrel. But DH kicked my butt by starting a whole EMT course. I am also committing myself to getting better at bread baking - I just have not been able to find my groove there.

Library: We ordered Friedman's Hot, Flat, and Crowded. It's the January book club selection at church. I also bought Sharon's Depletion and Abundance, to make the Amazon shipping free. I prefer used books, but at least two people will read these at our house, maybe three, and more if I lend them out at church.

DH subscribed us to Home Power magazine.

Found an interesting (if depressing) book at a thrift shop: Giraffe, the novelization of the slaughter of the world's largest captive herd of giraffes in a Czechoslovakian zoo in 1975. My winter bookshelf is huge and bizarrely diverse.

Rant: Key Communicator

2008-11-21T15:42:00.008-05:00

A few weeks ago, DD12's school admin asked me if I wanted to be on a parent list and I said OK. This what happens when you go to the office too often to find out why your kid is failing math.

(It's because she sits next to a disruptive kid, to whom she cannot stop responding. Now that she sits next to a quiet kid, she is doing much better.)

Apparently, I am now a Key Communicator:

"...a network of people who are well-connected to both the schools and the community. The idea is to promote a continuing two-way exchange of information between key communicators and the school district."

That means I get pre-recorded phone messages when there is violence at the high school. Since mid-October, there was a minor stabbing, a guard shot with a pellet gun, and an attack by a disgruntled drop-out that was refused re-entry but managed to wander from class to class for hours until she encountered and beat up an old rival.

(Is it any wonder we have my 10th grader cyberschooling from home?)

At first, I thought this "two-way exchange" meant they had made me an official Complainer, to give them feedback from other parents where there are problems. But then I got invited to a dinner...

The dinner was held at the brand-new school that DD12's class moved into on Monday, a magnet school for Agriculture, Science, and Ecology. Good concept, and shiny new building, but I haven't seen a lot of meaningful content yet. At least, not communicated to parents. I am sure I am spoiled by having homeschooled. I can't get used to the curriculum being invisible to me.

The dinner was eerie and corporate. I was greeted at the door by a security guy that looked more like a butler. There was a uniformed ROTC color guard and the Pledge of Allegiance. I counted about 100 seats at round tables in the cafetorium. I sat at a table with our principal, his wife, his mother, the school admin and her assistant, and two other parent "Key Communicators." There were introductions: the Superintendent acknowledged his "cabinet" of top administrators, and the elected School Board Directors, the architectural firm reps for the project, the Mayor, and the principals of the two schools that will be housed in the building. Everyone chortled about their success. At first, I thought the "success" was the dinner itself! I thought, "Wow, they have low expectations." Then I realized that the dinner was to celebrate the spending of $4M to produce this school building. There were very visible displays of sucking up to the Superintendent, accompanied by insider jokes about ordering new office furniture.

The President of the Board showed up very late, and couldn't figure out how to get in the building. (I happened to be out in the hall, listening to the Superintendent tersely giving her instructions through doors and hallways - boy, was he annoyed.) She then proceeded to re-introduce the School Board, exclaiming that the school was only built because the Board had done a lot of work and made a lot of hard decisions. No one stopped her to tell her they had already been thanked during the speeches. I suppose it was a political ritual being played out.

(No one thanked the children who waited in cramped temporary quarters while the construction went almost three months overtime. No one thanked the teachers who tried to teach in hallways and auditoriums. No one thanked the parents, who dealt with the confusion, the crappy bus service, and the lack of teacher contact. No one thanked the taxpayers who will pay for the building.)

The phrase, "It's all for the children," was repeated often, along with things like "Every day, in every way, things are getting better for the children." But there was not a child in sight.

I couldn't tell if there were any teachers, but it didn't seem so - perhaps a union rep that was not introduced. Thousands of dollars spent on catering, an elaborate over-sized cake, rented tables and linens, centerpieces, and gift bags full of custom-imprint schwag. (Gift bags?!) There were black imprinted bags and red ones. I got a black one that had a Post-It note portfolio with "Key Communicator" printed on it - and a imprinted pen, and an imprinted 2Gb flash drive, an imprinted mug full of imprinted M&Ms, and a glossy embossed folder full of info that is already on the website. I wonder what the red bags had in them.

The food was nice - fruit and cheese board with Brie. Good rolls. Salad with raspberry vinaigrette (pretty dated in catering, but still new to some of my tablemates). Three entrees: Pork Loin with Bearnaise, Baked Chicken, and a pasta with clam sauce and lots of shrimp. Cottage potatoes and green beans. Coffee service with the cake. All nice catered buffet food.

We were invited to tour the building between dinner and cake, unguided wandering through empty classrooms. It was nice, but only the kids can put it to the test. The other two parents gushed. "If all schools were like this, all the kids would be geniuses!" I disagree; buildings are important, but not nearly as important as people. People like parents, kids, and teachers - almost none of whom were at the dinner.

I've been involved with the public sector before. I know this is how "business" is done. And make no mistake, a school district is big business - fifth largest employer in the county, and one of the few organizations currently putting up new buildings. Those architects and general contrators would have knelt and licked shoes, if asked. There are more buildings to be built. The financing is already in place.

The Supervisor, hired by an elected Board, is the CEO of that organization. A little round pink-and-white man, he rules a school district that is 80% non-white. Only a third of the Board is non-white - no one is Hispanic, despite the fact that more than half the city is Hispanic, and about 75% of the kids. A good number of school-level staff seem to be black or Hispanic, with several minority principals. This is probably one of the few places it is not hard for a qualified black or Hispanic man to get hired, in this conservative county. Teachers are from a separate unionized country, and not invited to dine.

I was dismayed by the blatant lack of church-school separation. We were asked to bow our heads and listen to the Deputy Superintendent lead us in a plea to Jesus, rather than a non-denominational inspirational message. The staff dutifully thanked Jesus. The Supervisor also thanked him in his speech. No wonder they have trouble separating school activities from the afterschool proselytizing of the Good News Club. They send home applications for church clubs with every kid.

This is how I would have preferred to see the "success" of the new school celebrated:

- Run a food drive, where the classroom that brings in the most food gets to cut the ribbon on the school. The food is bundled into baskets for families identified by the guidance department.

- Announce an essay contest for magnet school students, on some topical theme. The winner gets a cash prize and his/her family gets to come to the dinner with him.

- Eat simpler food (let the adults eat that crap the kids eat every day!) and use the catering money to run a contest for teachers to submit innovative lesson plans. The winners get their projects funded. I bet a lot of teachers could do wonderful things with $1000. That dinner was probably worth 2 or 3 projects.

- Run a reading contest, and the classroom that reads the most books gets money to be spent on library materials the class helps choose.

- Have an elected committee of kids choose a Class Gift from this first 6th grade to the next. A piece of statuary, or perhaps new trees, or a bike rack.

- Figure out a way to extend the celebration to more than three parents. This school and every school in the district has huge difficulty getting low-income parents to get involved in school events. People work, or have younger kids, or have language barriers, or simply feel intimidated. No one at the dinner needed a translator, yet probably half the school's parents do. Fascinating display of institutional racism and classism.

- Buy a sweater for every kid - that new school is cold! 85% of the kids in this urban school qualify for free lunches. There must have been some way to celebrate the new school in a manner that benefited the kids more than the administrators. If I had to hear one more of them say "It's all about the kids," I'd have barfed.

DH and I have talked about inviting the principal and his wife out to dinner. I'd like to see how he feels about it. He strikes me as a practical man, certainly a disciplined man with the will to work this system, but I bet he could think of a lot better ways to inaugurate the school than a stuffy dinner. He invited me to be a Science Inquiry Helper, which somehow involves Hissing Madagascar Cockroaches. Ugh. The things we do for our kids. I'm considering that to be separate from this Key Communicator shtick.

But there is still a dinner kicker! Having read the goal statement for the Key Communicator program, I approached the Community Relations person, to whom we report. It went something like this:

Me: "You want feedback, and I have some. In what form do you want it?"
She:"You tell me."
Me: "Do you want it now?"
She: "Oh. I guess so."

I told her that I often get these school phone messages when I am at soccer practice with other middle school parents. I tell them what the message says. ("Great! That is what we want you to do.") But they seldom believe it. The rumor mill has a different story. Everyone knows someone with a kid at the high school, who has a different story. Or, the police officer that a neighbor knows has another story. The newspaper has yet another story, in print, with quotes from police and witnesses.

She: "Well, that's what your job is, to tell them the truth."
Me: "How do we know which is the truth?"
She: "What we tell you is the truth."
Me: "Then, I guess my feedback is that no one believes that."
She: "It's your job to work harder to convince them."

OMG! I'm an unpaid PR shill for the school district!

Oh, this will be precious.

I get to go to these dinners twice a year. I should probably dress better than khakis and a hoodie next time. And bring my handy-dandy Key Communicator pen and Post-It Notes.

'Cuz I have some communicatin' to do.

[PS: As I was writing this up earlier today, I got a crying phone call from a panicked DD12, on her VERY late bus home. Apparently the kids were out of control, the police were called, the emergency door alarm was going off, they wouldn't let her off the bus, and she wanted me to rescue her from the bus immediately! I could hear screaming.

I jumped in the car and headed for the bus route, but the bus started moving again, triggering a chaotic round of cell phone calls as I chased the bus. I finally caught up at a school bus stop - several angry parents were there, having been waiting for over an hour. At least I got the phone number for the school bus dispatcher out of the driver. There is a lot more to that story, but I got her off the bus at 4:38pm - the buss was due at 3:21pm. She was crying, had a headache, needed to pee, and was starving because the school lunch was horrible. She says someone took down her name and said she was suspended, although she had nothing to do with the trouble. We will be in the principal's office when it opens on Monday, poor man. ]

[PPS: And while I was driving her home from the bus debacle, apparently someone robbed the barber shop around the corner from our house. The newsfeed says that someone else tried to draw a gun, and was shot in the head. We hope it is not the barber or a neighbor. There are lots of police searching our neighborhood for two gunmen. Rough day, today.]

Weekly Menu Review

2008-11-21T08:30:00.001-05:00

I really need to do better at organizing the freezer. Who knows what
is in the back? I added 3 quarts of stock, 2 pints of pizza sauce, butter,
half&half, pork bones for stock, and a bag of DD12's potato smiles
since last week. Making waffles to freeze this weekend.

UPDATE: Alert! Do NOT try freezing stock in jars.
I did one jar that did not break, but when I did these three,
they all broke on about the 3rd day, wasting both jars and lovely stock.

Time to see how well I did with the new menu plan. I know this seems silly to people that have used a menu plan for years, but writing it down helps me think about cooking from storage. For years, I just knew what to cook, and bought it weekly at the store, according to what was on sale. Now, I am trying to coordinate using my stored food, eat locally and seasonally, and watch the sales to replenish my long- and short-term storage.

This was the plan:

Mon - Shrimp Fried Rice
Tue - Bangers and Mash with White Pepper Gravy
Wed - Chicken and Spinach Lasagna
Thu - Red Beans & Rice with Chicken
Fri - Hawaiian Pizza

Monday went OK, except that I didn't get dinner done until 9:30 PM. I took DD15 to work at 4, and did grocery shopping until she was done at 6:15 PM. All I had to do was go home and cook, right? Ha. Got sidetracked by a business emergency as soon as I walked in. But we did have Shrimp Fried Rice, by gum! With broccoli from our garden, bacon from the Bacon Club, local eggs, and basmati rice.

Tuesday's plan to make roast chicken for lunch was derailed - it takes longer than I thought to thaw a whole frozen chicken. Oops. But I didn't need the chicken to be cooked until Wednesday night, so that was OK. Tuna sandwiches for lunch. Baked cookies. Tuesday dinner was the "locavore" version of Bangers and Mash, which I posted for the Dark Days local eating challenge.

By Wednesday lunch, the chicken was still not fully thawed. DD15 made her own shrimp curry for lunch to take to work, and I asked her to make enough for both of us. Really busy day, and dinner was suddenly a struggle. There was a storm front moving through, and both DH and I got sinus headaches. We ended up declaring an "on your own" night - everyone forages for themselves. Gotta use that canned soup in the cellar sometime, right? DD15 made us look bad by making herself rice with beans, peppers, and shreds of chicken she picked from the bones leftover from stock-making.

Thursday we finally had chicken! But for dinner - DD15 and DH were both out in the afternoon. I put the chicken in before I got DD15 from work. DH made experimental Sausage & Sage Dressing to go with it, using a bag of stale rolls I bought from the discount rack. I made gravy using both sausage and chicken pan juices, with fresh chicken stock. Scorecard: gravy needed more kick, maybe mustard or more pepper. Chicken was predictably good. Dressing was like a savory bread pudding - I really liked it.

OK, so now it's Friday. But, there is not enough leftover chicken for lasagna. A 5-pound chicken doesn't go as far as I thought for 4 people. I have only managed to make 2 out of 5 planned dinners. Am I maybe planning too much food? Maybe only four large meals per week, and more homemade "quick food" ready in the fridge. People keep wandering into the kitchen looking for something to eat, and not finding something easy to put together.

Cleaned and inventoried the fridge this morning, to see what needs attention. Emptied a few containers from the back - mostly leftover sauces made by DD15. Things that need using: 4 leeks, a quarter pound of bleu cheese, cooked sweet potato, some carrots getting limp, three stale rolls, a pineapple (now on counter).

Top shelf: Uh oh- out of milk! Have pickles, chocolate syrup, red cooking wine, spelt and WW flour, wheat germ, flax meal, buttermilk, half&half, red miso, homemade yogurt, duck sauce, ginger plum sauce, 2 qts ricotta, 3# mozzarella, lemon juice, salsa, pizza sauce, sour cream, bacon fat.

Middle Shelf: Plastic basket of tortillas and assorted cheese, bag of dried beef, 2 quarts of chicken stock, containers of carrots and cooked sweet potato, piece of scrapple, 2 yogurts for DD12, jar of maraschino cherries, lard, tomato sauce, DH's beverage.

Bottom Shelf: Leftover chicken, leftover cooked rice, leftover dressing and gravy, 2 cartons of live red worms for compost bin, bag of spinach, 4 leeks.

Drawers (not seen): 3 dozen eggs (making pasta) 1/4lb bacon, 1/2 lb keilbasi, bags of carrots, half sleeve celery, 2 apples, small cabbage head, celeriac.

Today, I am making Celeriac-Leek Soup and Sweet Potato Cornbread. Making a little apple bread pudding from the rest of the stale rolls. Cutting up that pineapple. We have a busy weekend ahead, and we need to have some easy fridge pickings.

Next week is Thanksgiving Week. We will have dinner at DH's large (40-50 people) family gathering in Philadelphia, so I get out of cooking a big meal. But I need to take a dish for the buffet. I am a relative newcomer to this event, and most of the attendees staked out a niche on the buffet table years ago. First time, I took a nice ginger applesauce cake from a premium bakery. Last year, DH took his blonde brownies, having reconstructed his late father's recipe (a sentimental hit). This year, DH will make his luscious sweet potato pie (the secret is Cream of Coconut). And I need to produce something fabulous, that does not complete with another guest's traditional contribution. The dessert table is packed, so no more of that. I better call the hostess and consult before taking a side dish - maybe I can make something she can check off her list.

We'll eat heavily on Thursday, so I we'll eat lightly the rest of the week, with easy cooking. Apples, clementines, muffins for snacking. I'll leave next Friday completely unplanned, to take advantage of yummy leftovers.

Monday: Chicken Corn Noodle Soup
Tuesday: Turkey Burritos with Refried Beans
Wednesday: Spinach Salad with Blue Cheese Crumbles
Thursday: Bagels and honey lebne w/fruit (breakfast)

Dinner Prep: Thaw a pack of chicken thighs and a roll of ground turkey. Thaw dried beef to make Creamed Chipped Beef for a lunch.

Regular Weekly Prep: Make bread, yogurt, lebne, freezer waffles, carrot muffins and/or parsnip coffee cake.

Shopping: Get tortillas, ginger root, horseradish root, semolina flour, bananas. 15# basmati rice and 25# sugar for storage. Swiss cheese, milk, half & half, eggs.

So, now I am going to the farmer's market, list in hand, to try to stick to the menu plan. It's hard, when there is so much holiday food on display, not to come home with more produce than we can use before it spoils. Produce is my biggest food-wasting area, and I am trying to stop wasting ANY food.

Dark Days Challenge - Bangers & Mash

2008-11-18T23:45:00.009-05:00

Our version of Bangers & Mash.

I decided to try the Dark Days Eat Local Challenge this winter. I tried the One Local Summer Challenge, but quickly dropped out when I couldn't regularly find enough local ingredients. I was obsessing over getting everything just right, and meticulously calculating mileage for each ingredient.

But now, I have had a summer and fall of gardening, cooking, canning, drying, storing, freezing, and root cellaring. And I'm going to be more relaxed about it. It's the effort that matters, and the things I learn from it, not whether I get it exactly right every time.

Fresh pork sausage from Jack Leininger Meats - $2.99/lb.

What do I consider local? Certainly, everything I grew myself, or foraged. And everything I bought directly from a Berks County grower at a farmstand, auction, or market stall. Anything I know came from a local producer, like a butcher, dairy, or bakery, even if every input was not locally sourced. We don't produce bread flour in this region, for instance, but if the bakery is local, or I made the bread, I am going to consider it local. The counties that surround Berks - Lancaster, Chester, Lebanon, Schuylkill, Montgomery - they are all less than an hour away by car. I'll think of them as local, and some of their farmers have market stalls closer to me than their farms.

Potatoes from Burkholder's and cabbage from my own garden.

As the Challenge progresses, I will give more thought to what "local" means, and post an evolving list of my local foodshed sources. I've actually drawn a map the divides the county into quarters, and I have sources grouped by quarter, so I can make my shopping trips as fuel efficient as possible.

Cooking cabbage in the sausage drippings with a little water to deglaze.

My first Challenge meal was a dinner of Bangers & Mash, a simple sausage and mashed potato meal often served in British pubs. The sausage was made by a local butcher at the Fairgrounds market, fresh pork sausage that I had in the freezer. The potatoes were from the Burkholder farmstand near Fleetwood. The gravy was the peppery milk gravy that DD15 makes. We used local Clover Farms milk.

My vintage potato ricer.

With it, I made Sauteed Cabbage and Apples, which gave the meal a more German motif. I used a small head of cabbage I grew in our garden, and threw in a handful of apple slices from a #10 apple from the Stoudt's Orchard stand at the West Reading market. DH is made happy with cabbage, but suggested a little onion for next time, and slightly less apple.

I like those #10 apples from Stoudt's. Never had 'em before.

What wasn't local? Maybe the little bit of bacon fat I added when the cabbage started to stick. Not sure if that particular blob of fat came from local bacon. In the gravy, the butter was local, but not the superfine flour for the roux, nor the salt and pepper.

I'm happy with this first Challenge effort. I had everything on hand in the pantry or freezer.

Independence Challenge - Week 28

2008-11-17T18:12:00.001-05:00

This is one of my favorite breakfasts, oatmeal with fruit and yogurt.
I cut up two very ripe pears for this batch...

Planted: Ginger root sprouts; put in water to root. Did a little fall garden clean-up, much more still to do. I wanted to bag my mom's leaves, but she (and all her neighbors) blew them to the curb and her Township came by with the giant leaf-sucker before I got any. At least we can get free leaf compost next spring from the Township facility. Although, with all the wind and rain, I bet there will be more in Mom's yard.

Oatmeal: 1/2 cup rolled oats, 1 cup water, a handful of raisins,
a sprinkle of cinnamon-sugar mix, a pinch of salt. Cook on low for 5 minutes
or so, until thick, while peeling pears. Dump onto pears.

Harvested: Two more little heads of cabbage, broccoli, basil, lemon thyme, rose hips, lemon balm.

Preserved: Made apple butter with some apple seconds - Gala, Goldrush, and #10's. I wanted to experiment with adding much less sugar than usual. Filled a 4-quart slow cooker to the top with peeled apple pieces and added 2 tsp cinnamon, a sprinkle of nutmeg, 1/4 tsp of ground cloves, 2 Tbl of sugar, one Tbl of apple cider vinegar, and a pinch of salt. Then I cooked it for 10 hours on low, the last 2 hours with the lid sideways. When it cooled, it was still watery, so I put it back in a pot on the stove for about an hour on the lowest setting, and whizzed it with the immersion blender. It got very thick and I put it in a jar for the fridge. Not as sweet as the store-bought kind, but we like it that way. I think next time I would start it at night, let it cook overnight covered, and then have the whole next day to watch it cook down with no lid. Yielded a little over a pint from 4 quarts of apples - I need a bigger crockpot to produce enough to can for our pantry.

Then I top it with about a cup of homemade yogurt sweetened
with a squirt of honey. "It's like gravy for oatmeal!"

Cooked: Tropical produce like pineapple, avocados, and clementines is on sale. We love clementines, and can go through a 5# case in one day. They are only on sale in November and December - I see them other times of year, but they become very expensive out of season. I know they come from Spain, and I will miss them when import costs rise to where they stop shipping. I feel like a bad locavore when I buy them, but we can't grow citrus in Pennsylvania. We traditionally peel a whole case of clementines and put out a big bowl of juicy little segments as a Thanksgiving appetizer. I can deal with anticipating seasonal fruits that only appear for a short time in the annual cycle of seasons, but I don't look forward to never getting citrus, bananas, pineapple and other things that don't grow in the Northeast US. I expect their prices to climb beyond what I will pay, as a rising fuel prices and the import credit crunch.

My "Bacon of the Month Club" delivery arrived this week. Oscar's Applewood Bacon this month. Did I mention that I won a subscription to this last holiday season, by blogging at Serious Eats? I won Bacon! I can't even recall anything else I got for Christmas. I feel crappy about the carbon footprint, and I would never buy this for myself, but I must admit that I have loved it while it lasts. I've been watching for other blogging-for-prizes opportunities.

DD12 ran out of jarred pizza sauce, so we mad some. She is very particular about things, so we had low expectations. I found a popular recipe with lots of good feedback online, and made it a little more bland for her - no red pepper flakes, less black pepper and spices. We also whizzed it up with the hand blender, since she doesn't like lumpy texture. She pronounced it, "Not the best I ever had, but not as terrible as I expected." Believe it or not, I think that means she will eat it. I froze it in pint containers. DD12 made us tortilla pizzas, and I liked it just fine, so I kept the recipe.

Stored: Seems to be the season for canned fruit sales. I got ten cans of pineapple, 6 of tomato paste, kosher salt, and 6 packages of deeply-discounted black Halloween napkins. DH got 2 big cans of WD-40 and more hot cocoa mix.

Know what? Grocery shopping only cost about $50 this past 10 days or so, including the stuff I bought for storage. Most of it was produce and milk. This business of having food stored is pretty cool.

Prepped: Found two cast iron skillets on Craigslist, smaller 6.5" and 8" skillets to round out my collection. Also got an Atlas pasta maker, with a ravioli attachment - whoo hoo! I have been wanting to try making crackers, as well as pasta. With lasgana on the menu for next week, this was good timing.

DH, DD15, my mom, and I all went to a free flu shot clinic at the state Dept of Health. Saved $120. Then we went out for breakfast. Spent $20. (DD12 got her shot at school.) My arm doesn't even hurt.

DH took DD15 to buy a winter coat. Normally, that's a Mom job, but she thought she already had one picked out. Turns out, it was too lightweight - a rain coat. He did an excellent job of helping her choose a black wool pea coat that will last for years and can be dressed up or down. Good Dadding! Next, he can take DD12 for a school sweater and a winter coat!

OK, this might not seem like "preparations," but it was on the Media Plan. I came back from the store, and DH was all aglow. Uh oh. "I thought you should know that I bought a 42" HDTV while you were gone." Apparently, he called DD15 over to watch him click the cursor, and say "I just spent $1000." It is in our long-term media plan, and our Christmas plan, and we think this is a good time to take advantage of frightened retailers, and he shopped for more than a month before deciding that Amazon had the best deal, and he got free shipping, and he did not use credit. Still a huge purchase. I hope it moves us faster toward saving $100/mo by giving up cable TV and get Netflix. The TV will pay off a year after giving up cable. For people who do not watch TV at all, that might not make sense, but for a family that enjoys film as much as we do, it does.

Managed: Worked on menu planning, to do a better job of eating out of storage. This coming week, we will see if I can stick to the plan. I also participated in a little round of "show me your fridge" and that actually helped me with the menu planning. I think I might take pix of the fridge more often.

DD15 got those big oil containers washed in the bathtub, refilled with water, and carted to the cellar. They add 15 gallons to my water reserves (15 gallons in crated milk jugs). With the water in the hot water heater, we now have 2 weeks of water for 5 people (counting my mother).

We returned the solar lantern; it would not charge. We may make a trip to the huge Cabela's outdoor outfitter that is about 15 miles away. They might have a lot of different lantern options to look at, in person.

Reduced, Reused, Recycled: The car was acting up again, another $260 worth of spark plug and battery trouble. We want our 2000 Jeep Cherokee to last a few more years, to see where we end up and what vehicles come onto the market. But it's fighting us. I think all the driving to conferences is taking a toll. Offsetting that annoyance is the news that I will be able to apply for mileage reimbursement, retroactive to when we first got involved in the youth group this spring. Whew! That will be a help, as will some offers by fellow youth advisors to make room for us in their car pools.

Does anyone have idea for how I can reuse these canisters? I hate
to throw them away, but I can't think how to use them. They are
not bug- or rodent-proof, and only moderately moisture-proof.

I moved the fridge and vacuumed the coils to make it more efficient. (Wow. That sounds so green, doesn't it? OK, here's what really happened: I dropped the lid to the ice tea pitcher down between the cabinet and the side of the fridge. In moving the fridge to get it, I knocked the hot cocoa canister off the top of the fridge. Much vacuuming ensued. ~sigh~ )

I posted to Craigslist to find some free leftover carpet padding to insulate that cold section of bedroom floor over the porch. So far, I only got offers to sell big rolls of it.

Local/Family: Getting ready to take some big steps in this area. I am "ramping up" my involvement in community food security, in a couple of ways. (Get it? Ramping Up is the name of this blog!) I have a lot of things to take care of this fall, including moving my mom in for the winter, so the new activity will start in January - this is planning time.

This summer, at our national convention in Florida, delegates at the 2008 General Assembly selected “Ethical Eating” to be the 2008-2012 Congregational Study/Action Issue (CSAI) of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations (PDF Study Guide). I am going to take that on in my congregation here in Reading, by organizing a study group. A lot of folks are already interested in various food issues, and we run a monthly food pantry distribution, so I think there will be a high level of interest.

In January, I am going to start organizing a local bulk purchasing coop. I will focus local foods, but my larger concern is that city folk find access to inexpensive bulk food staples, so it will not all be local or organic. I've been talking to some people about this for a few months.

I was at another youth conference with my daughter the weekend of Nov 7-9. Part of it was a planning meeting for January event that will focus on Social Action issues. I volunteered to develop a 75-minute youth workshop about "Ethical Eating" for the January conference. Too short to go into a lot of detail, so I will use it to show how food security issues affect all of us, introduce a range of issues, and invite them to choose an issue to learn more about. I will also bring food to taste, which will attract the little beasties to my workshop. We do 4-6 conferences a year, for 50-100 youth each time, many of them repeat attendees. I may work on a series of workshops, perhaps develop a workbook for other youth programs.

I am becoming a Science Inquiry Helper at DD12's public school. The theme of this magnet school is "Agriculture, Science, and Ecology," and it has already gotten an award even thought it did not open yet. I'm going in there to see what they are teaching these city kids. That got me invited to a Key Communicator dinner at the new school, which I found disturbing on several levels. More about that another day, but let's just say I am ruined for public school after having homeschooled. I keep repeating to myself, "DD12 is happier in public school."

We had a family conference this week. The family groans whenever I say, "Let's have a family conference." They know there will be work involved. We just had the last week of soccer season, freeing our schedule until spring season starts. I have not been getting as much done as I would like in preparing the attic, so I delegated to DH and the girls. We are setting aside some afternoons and evenings where I help sort stuff, then they will move it around and do the cleaning. Major push to declutter and organize over the next few weeks. We will go to DH's large family gathering in Philadelphia, so I don't have to cook or clean for guests.

Learned: Nothing formally, but there is seldom a project that does not result in my learning something new. I suspect I am about to learn to make pasta.

Pure evil.

Oh! I thought of something. I learned I can no longer make Jello Cake, which involves baking a 9x13 cake from boxed mix, then pouring a large package of prepared liquid Jello over it. Yellow Cake and Cherry Jello, for instance. Then you put it in the fridge for 3-4 hours, so the Jello firms up in the cake. I thought I would make one as a fun little snack. I cannot stop eating it. The sugar is like crack in its jello-ized form. I'm not used to it anymore. I better not ever make the Pudding Cake, either - which involves poking holes in a box cake and pouring liquid instant pudding over it - chocolate cake with chocolate pudding is especially devastating. It's tough to repress childhood flavor memories.

Library: I'm trying to get back on my program of ordering one used book per week from my wishlist. This week, I ordered Annie Proulx' The Complete Dairy Foods Cookbook : How to make everything from cheese to custard in your own kitchen (Rodale 1982). I've had this out from the library and liked it.

Our church had a service auction, and I bid on a gift certificate to a used book store located at a farmer's market in Lancaster County, about a hour away. I will get a $25 certificate for $10. And the trip will give me a chance to check out a market I have not visited in years, deep in Amish and Mennonite country. I might find those organic bulk potatoes I wanted.

Our church also has a book sale area, where donated books are sold as a small on-going fundraiser. Along with a little fiction, I found these last week:

Cabbage or Cauliflower: A Garden Guide for the Identification of Vegetable and Herb Seedlings. A very useful concept, and full of nice drawings, but I think photos might be better. I will test it out this spring. Perhaps I could use it as a sort of notebook, and add prints of photos I take of my own seedlings, for future reference when I forget to label a flat of something.

Bread Winners, a 1979 book from Rodale about bread bakers and their recipes. I bet there are a lot of tasty winter experiments in there.

Garden Bulbs in Color, a 1939 book full of colorized plates. I am not much of a bulb person, but I think it is a good addition to the garden book shelf, in case I become more interested when I have more yard. I typically like vintage cottage-garden flowers, and this book will give me old names.

We've been buying some new books, too, much as I prefer used. All of DD15's friends are reading Twilight, and the movie comes out next week, so she is racing through the book. Maybe anything that encourages teenagers to read should be supported.

Bloom Day - November 2008

2008-11-15T12:52:00.008-05:00

Sedum stonecrop Sieboldii "October Daphne" on it's last legs.

I haven't done Garden Bloom Day in forever. Too distracted by food storage and impending doom, I guess. We went out to dinner with newly-married friends last night. We went to Hong Thanh, a little Vietnamese place downtown, and had bowls of excellent noodle soup, following buy coconut cups for dessert. Then DH and I went to see the new Bond movie. It was like a date night.

Hypericum moseranum 'Tri-color' - St John's Wort did much better
this year, away from the salt of the front sidewalk planter.

A last little rebloom of Salvia nemorosa 'Caradonna'

Zinnia "Profusion" in orange, self-sown from seeds in the compost.

I slept until 10 this morning, instead of jumping up at the crack of dawn to go to yard sales. I saw some of the garden bloggers posting for Bloom Day (like my Bethlehem buddy and the great flower scans at Ellis Hollow). It was a leisurely morning, so I decided to take the camera outside and try to remember to enjoy my garden!

The wild petunias are still spreading. I never plant these,
and I always thought they were annuals, but they come back every year.

Marigolds still plugging along under the rim of a pan full of spent sedums.

Little bit of potted basil that didn't quite get killed by the frost.

This great snapdragon just doesn't stop. I saw another one in front
of a neighbor's house around the corner -maybe birds sewed it in my yard
from hers. I picked most of these a fews weeks ago to put in a Mason jar
at church, to remember my grandmother for All Soul's Day.

These rose hips need picking.

We went to DD12's last soccer game of the season this afternoon - and halfway through the second half it started pouring down rain. It had already rained last night and half the morning, so the field was sodden and muddy. Now, they couldn't even see across it. Most of the parents ran for the pavilion. I thought, "If my baby is out there, I will stay, too," even though I couldn't see through my glasses. The referee called the game a few minutes later. By then, the rain had soaked my hoodie and run down my back into my pants. It wasn't a terribly cold day, and the rain wasn't really cold, but it's November, and we were all soaked and chilled. I got the car blanket to wrap around DD12 in her thin synthetic uniform. We were miserable by the time we got home, and we all stripped and took warm showers. I wished we had a fireplace. Hot cocoa only goes so far.

A nice patch of lemon balm regrowing after being cut back. I will
have to pick this to dry, along with the second-growth yarrow foliage.

Gaura Lindheimeri "Pink Fountain" at the end of its second year.
I mulch these with dried grass and yard debris, since some people
have trouble overwintering them.

Coreopsis "Creme Brulee" also a the end of Year Two in my yard.
I need to either sheer these back early in the season for lower growth,
or stake them up somehow.

Oops - haven't been out here this week, and the broccoli is blooming.

I better get out here and cut these tomorrow. They were free
starts planted very late, and I didn't think they would make it,
so I am happy for this little crop.

They lost the game, 0-5. We lost all 10 games this season. We have a lot of girls playing for the first time, and we tend to lose the seasoned players to suburban teams when their families move out of the city. But every kid improved their personal game. A character-building year. DD12 found her niche as a forward, after more than 2 years as a mediocre fullback - she can run much faster than any of us realized. We will practice shooting this spring, so she could actually score next season. I enjoy socializing with the other parents. I'm going to invite them to do something over the holidays.

I also got a lot of small cabbages from the free starts - already
picked 2 heads and 6 are left. I think the variety was "Blue Thunder."

Lots of fall clean-up left to do. Dead peony foliage,
blackening Baptisia, shriveling zinnas.

The grass needs a final trim and there are a lot of pots and buckets to store.

The dried yarrow reminds me of mid-summer's heat. I can't wait for it come back.

New Menu Planning

2008-11-13T19:26:00.007-05:00

When I started Sharon's Independence Challenge six months ago, she quoted someone talking about an annual cycle of three activities. You plant like crazy in the spring, you preserve like crazy all summer, and then you spend the winter getting the most out of the stored food. I can really feel that shift right now. I'm not focused on stocking up any more - I'm figuring out how to cook it all now. It's not as easy as I thought.

I was reading someone's blog (wish I could remember who) and she talked about her mother having a 6-week rotation of dinners, with certain things made special for holidays, and new recipes slotted in occasionally. She listed some things she considers go-to meals, the building blocks of her menu planning.

That got me to thinking that I have left behind a lot of my go-to meals, and I need to make a new list. One of DD15's old favorite meals was chicken and sauce over rice, made with canned Cream of Chicken Soup. But now, she knows how to make her own sauces from scratch. I used to love Kraft Mac-n-cheese, and now I make macaroni with pesto and parmesan, or DH makes his heirloom baked mac-n-cheese. Our old eating style had more prepared food and meat in it. Dinner went together fast, unless we wanted it slow on purpose. We bought meat each week, and then decided what to have with it. I went to the store at least twice a week, and we were usually out of something.

We eat better now, but we have new problems. When it's time for dinner, we often discover that nothing is thawed, or some key component isn't ready. More prepping ahead is required, and actual menu planning. Especially since I plan to do the Dark Days Challenge, which asks me to try to produce one all-local meal each week from November 15 to March 15. Whew!

We do have daytime go-to meals. Breakfast is oatmeal and fruit (me), or eggs with grits and gravy (DD15), or quick bread and spread. The kids still like cereal a lot. Lunch is homemade soup, or sandwiches made of leftovers, or DD15 makes stir-fry or curry.

We already decided to have meals planned around staples instead of meat. I took a stab at a basic list for each category, and I want to try that method of having a rotation of menus. I'm going for 6 simple dishes in each category (with the other two nights being leftovers or new recipes), and then I can vary the preparation of the basic dish.

Rice: Fried Rice, Cheese Rice, Curry, Dal and Rice, Paella, Jambalaya

Potatoes: Mashed, Latkes, Potato Filling, Baked Potatoes, Colcannon

Pasta: Lasagna, Pesto Mac, Pasta and Sauce, Filled Pasta, Baked Ziti, Asian Dumplings

Beans: Rice and Beans, Pork and Beans, Pea Soup, Refried Beans, Chili, Bean Soup

Bread: Pizza, Quiche, Waffles, Stromboli, Savory Bread Pudding

So, after looking at my fridge and freezer, this is next week's menu:

Mon - Shrimp Fried Rice (needs bacon, eggs, broccoli)
Tue - Bangers and Mash with DD15's White Pepper Gravy
Wed - Chicken and Spinach Lasagna (makes leftovers)
Thu - Red Beans & Rice with Chicken
Fri - Hawaiian Pizza

The all-local meal will be Tuesday - I got the apple sausage, potatoes, and milk locally, and grew the cabbage.

Dinner Prep: Thaw a whole chicken, a pound of sausage, a small bag of broccoli. Make sauce for lasagna, doctor up some for pizza. Roast chicken Tues at lunch, then pick carcass and peel potatoes. Make braised cabbage with sausage. Make lasagna in advance of baking. Make pizza dough.

Regular Weekly Prep: Make bread, yogurt, lebne, quick bread. Cut up pineapple. Brew herbal tea. Make soup (potato leek). Bake a dessert (Jewish Apple Cake).

Shopping: Replenish instant yeast, milk, chili powder, hominy, clementines, celeriac. Take advantage of Thanksgiving sales on turkey (.47/lb Weis). Buy dried apricots on sale, and turkey backs at market to freeze for stock later (.10/lb last year). Giant has BOGO pork roast, butter for $1.99, and 2/$1 tomato paste. Long-term storage: buy rice, salt, and 25# sugar. Look for local organic bulk potatoes.

Sounds tidy. But, can I stick with planning that is so detailed? We'll see, won't we?

What's in YOUR fridge?

2008-11-13T16:06:00.006-05:00

Meadowlark posted pix of her fridge, so of course, I had to post mine, too. Come on, everybody can play! If you post yours, put the link in the comments. No fair cleaning it first! I'd love to see a post from someone with a non-traditional cold storage, like a spring house or ice box.

I can't back up far enough in my small kitchen to take a photo of the whole thing at once so I'll do bits and pieces. The fridge is somewhat empty. I am actually cooking stuff right now to put in there, so I made room for yogurt, apple butter, brewed ice tea, and chicken stock.

The top shelf is jars of pickles and jam, milk, bags of spelt and WW flour, and ricotta cheese stockpiled back in the corner. There is a bottle of red cooking wine hiding out behind the chocolate syrup. A pile of spinach, cabbage, and parsley, crowned by a takeout box of leftover homefries. Middle shelf has a barely-visible basket of tortillas and cheese for DD12 to make pizza, and then a lot of stuff in containers: carrots for munching, bacon fat, sour cream, leftover potato soup, cooked sweet potato, miso, lard, yogurt, lebne, etc. Oh, let's not forget the not-quite-rotten bananas I keep saying I am baking into bread. The bottom (dirty) shelf is currently dominated by leeks, a bowl of over-ripe pears, and thawing chicken, but I just made room for a large container of chicken stock to congeal overnight, so I can skim it. DD12's yogurt is down there - she won't eat my homemade, yet.

I am SO happy I recently cleaned these drawers. The left one is the egg and pork-product drawer. I don't like the foam egg cartons, but they get recycled constantly to my organic egg lady. I see DD12's organic hot dogs, kielbasi, a package of cheddar, and my just-arrived Bacon of the Month package. The drawer on the right is just carrots, apples, and celery. I stopped putting leafy greens down there - I forget them and they liquefy in unappetizing ways. Note the lovely vintage 70's harvest gold vinyl flooring - Mmmmm!

Fridge and freezer doors. The top freezer door shelf guardrail is missing, so we don't use it for much beyond freezer packs. On the door are bags of odds and ends like frozen lemon juice cubes and pesto lumps. The fridge door is butter and cream cheese, yeast in the "garage," mayo and Miracle Whip (no judging!), assorted jam, relish and mustard, leftover partial bags of chocolate chips, pickle jars, and a bunch of seldom-used dressing bottles on the bottom. Why can't I throw those away? Hopefully, you can't see the mold in the door gasket, which I can't ever seem to scrub out completely.

You would never know I organized this freezer about 2 weeks ago. People just *root* in here. Visible are DD12's frozen yogurts, back-up butter, a strip of slab bacon, bags of broccoli, beans, and peaches. The box holds things that fall out, like quart bags of stock and rolls of ground turkey. There is a 3-lb bag of shrimp I intend to portion into pounds, a beef bone for stock, DH's "hidden" cookie stash, and the ice cream maker freezer-thingee. I think the blue bag in the bag corner with the clothespin is corn niblets. The string at the top is attached to a glowstick that DD12 is trying to cryosave from Halloween.

The freezer in the basement is new, so it's cleaner, but no better organized. I filled it so fast that I lost track of what is in there. Inventory is an up-coming project. Visible on top: pork chili, ham-n-bean soup, blueberries, tortellini, pork chops, bacon. Pork was the last thing I bought, so all the chicken is on the bottom, another reason I need to re-organize. The basket has assorted sausage and brats.

So... what's in your fridge?

Independence Challenge - Week 27

2008-11-07T13:12:00.002-05:00

Pickled Pineapple, with dried cranberries and mint.

I saw a fox! It was at dusk, up on the mountain on the way to the soccer field. It ran/floated across the road in front of our car, and DD15 and I both yelled, "That's a fox!" as it disappeared into the underbrush. I know there are wild turkeys and pheasants up there, and the usual skunks, raccoons, groundhogs, possums. We see deer all the time. But I've never seen a live fox before. It was cool.

Fairly short update this week; really busy week.

Planted: Nothing, but I ordered some veggie seeds from an end-of-year sale.

Harvested: The last bits of mint tea and basil. Rose hips. Walnut husks for dye. Went to the second-to-last local market for the season, and got more sweet potatoes, more #10 apples, eggs, and a few springs of oregano.

Preserved: Pickled Pineapple, using our mint and a fresh pineapple I got on sale. It's a refrigerator pickle, so no two-part lid. My mom and I tasted it after a few days, and it was really good. Hope it doesn't get over-pickled for Thanksgiving. Does that happen? Checked on my sauerkraut, which smells OK so far. We compared the canned pickles I made earlier this summer with a recipe that calls for liming, with the refrigerator pickle recipe I made a few weeks ago. Both are bread-n-butter style. DH and I liked the crisper ones, my mom liked the fridge recipe. I think it pays to make a bunch of different kinds.

Cooked: DH surprised me with a 4-lb pot roast. With it, I made a new recipe for a potato and rice cake made in a skillet. Good with the gravy DD15 made from the beef drippings. "Oh, you found another vehicle for gravy, I see!" said smart-ass DH. We are still eating the leftover beef in sandwiches.

A big ham shank I got for only $2.

I tend to have a day of the week when I get in the mood to cook a lot. On Halloween Morning, I made yogurt and bread, the pickled pineapple, put Ham and 16-Bean Soup in the crockpot, and made Apple Coffee Cake. None of that was much work, scattered among other tasks, but I would not be able to get that done if I didn't work from home. DH liked waking up to the smell of bread, and DD15 was inspired to come down and make cheese grits, sage-onion gravy, and scrambled eggs that got done as the bread came out. All of the ingredients came from storage or the yard, except fresh milk, eggs, and the pineapple.

Drained some yogurt to make lebne, yogurt cheese, which I sweetened up with some plum preserves to make something like plum cream cheese. I tried it on the waffles and on a bagel. Yowsa!

Stocked: Wow. For the first time in months, I stored nothing this week. It was a busy week, with Halloween, the election, soccer, food bank, and getting ready for another youth conference this weekend in Annapolis.

Prepped: I found Tupperware Heaven! Actually, it was a yard sale. But I got a lot of nice big containers, and some smaller ones for the fridge. I like the flat square one for freezing a batch up muffins for short-term eating. I also got a 5-foot tower of 12x12x12 plastic drawers for the cellar, making more clean storage for craft and fabric stuff I drag out of the attic. ALL for $5. And a free half-pint jar. I just love yard sales like that.

At another sale, D12 found a great pair of soccer shinguards to replace her hand-me-downs. DD15 found a large plastic sewing box full of notions, including cute sew-in tags that say, "Made with Love by Nana." We'll do good things with that grandma's stuff. That's one of the things I like about sales - you don't just get stuff, you get ghosts tagging along, at no extra charge.

Managed: Checked all the "cellared" vegetables in the cellar and found three giant carrots in a plastic bag that had slipped behind something else. One carrot was in the process of liquifying, but the other two are still good. Would have lost those other two carrots if I hadn't done a good check. See how well this Independence Challenge works? If I hadn't needed something to write in this category, would I have checked the veg? I don't think so.

Reduced, Reused, Recycled - It usually doesn't get cold until mid-November. I don't think I turned on any heat until almost Thanksgiving last year. But the almanac and the forecasters are saying that early winter will be colder and snowier than usual. Mid-winter is supposed to be milder, and then a bad March. It doesn't help that the past winters few have been mild, with few big storms - it will make this one seem all the worse.

Our days are still variable - some days we turn on a space heater, some days not. I patrolled the house, looking for airleaks. Kinda futile - it's 100 years old, and it all leaks. Even the baseboards leak, since there are spaces between the wood, the plaster walls, the wood floor boards, and the exterior brick. I did recaulk the front door trim. The terrible aluminum storm windows rattle, and the curtains move with the windows closed. But some days it is too hot to have the quilts hung, so I am not worried until we have the heat on all the time.

In past years, the attic has been unheated storage space, with a door tightly closed at the bottom of the atttic stairs. We tried putting one of the girls up there a few years ago, but the first cold month cost us $100 in electric heat. I plan to have this insulated by the end of the month, and covered with inexpensive paneling. Paneling is ugly, to my taste, but this is a rental house, and the landlord refused to contribute. I just want it functionally warm, since it only needs to make it through this winter. I'm nailing a power strip to the rafter next to the only outlet, so we can plug in lights, space heater, and clock radio for the girls when they move up there.

Local/Family: DD15 and I volunteered at our church's monthly food bank distribution yesterday. We had a longer line than ever, and less canned goods to give out. Short on canned vegetables, cereal, bread. We did have cases of celery and jars of peanut butter to give out. One of the volunteers is going to the regional food bank meeting to see what we can expect in the next few months. We will have to also do an internal food drive.

Library: Found a copy of The Williamsburg Art of Cookery, a reproduction of a 1742 recipe collection, or "Accomplish'd Gentlewoman's Companion." I don't find colonial recipes to be very followable, and it's annoying when all the S's look like F's, but reading them always makes me feel humbly grateful for the invention of the stove.

I also found Volume 5 of Olive Miller's BookHouse series of children's literature anthologies, from 1921, From the Tower Window. It is beautifully illustrated. Might be fun to read from some winter evening. From an Amazon description:

In March 1919, Olive Beaupre Miller and her husband Harry started a book publishing company to sell Olive's compilation of children's literature known as, "The Book House for Children." Using an all female sales staff, their employees went door to door selling subscriptions to the six volume set. Much in the way that encyclopedias were also sold. The series was an immediate success and was continually republished until the 1970's. If you were a middle class parent in the 1930's through 1950's, this was the set of books to purchase for your children. Millions of Americans grew up reading these well written tales of virtue and morality. Over the decades, Olive produced many other books that were to become classics of the genre.

Fascinating. My mother, a generation of childrearing later, had a shelf of the 1954 Childcraft series of literature - still on the bookcase behind her front door, next to the 1960's World Book Encyclopedia. I was born in 1961, and my brother in 1964. I recall a series of endless grade-school reports on states, faithfully paraphrased from these volumes, and typed on our violent electric typewriter. It would move the whole dining room table when I hit the return.

Autumn Color in the City

2008-11-04T22:32:00.002-05:00

We are supposed to have rain for the next few days, which means most of the leaves will fall. As I went places yesterday, I turned on my camera and shot out my car window at stop lights. I've seen a lot of beautiful fall color photos on many garden and homestead blogs, so I though I would show you what it looks like in a city.

Just outside my door, I can (and do) look up the street and watch the mountain change with the seasons. The city owns most of the mountainside as a wildlife preserve, studded with bits of private property here and there.

If we drove up on that mountain, we would be able to look out over the city from several lookouts. It was overcast and misty yesterday. Reading and it's surrounding suburbs are nestled into the nooks of a series of rolling hills. Mt. Penn is the one rising above my house.

There is a scenic road called Skyline Drive, lined with stone walls that were built by CCC workers during the (first) Depression. One end is anchored by the Pagoda, a local landmark that just turned 100 years old, and is being restored. It exhibits its own fall color change in a jacket of yellow scaffolding.

We can see the foot of Neversink Mountain across the little valley below the Pagoda, rising behind East Reading.

OK, now back to where I was going... taking DD15 to work at the coffee shop at the Fairgrounds Mall. The mall is on the site of the old Reading Fair and Racetrack. This huge tree at the edge of the parking lot is one of the few remaining veterans of the Fair.

There is color even in tedious parking lot landscaping, like this convenience store grass.

This field could be anywhere - full of goldenrod, knotweed, and sumac. But just to the left is the convenience store (the Wawa on Rockland, for you locals).

The hillside next to the turning lane on 11th Street.

The other side of the same stretch. (Waiting at a light.)

"Mommy, why is that lady pulled up to that planter?" She's looking at the Sedum 'Angelina' turning colors. It will get darker red as it gets colder.

View of Mt. Penn from the parking lot at the Giant grocery store. Skyline Drive runs along the top of that ridge.

I know it's trash vegetation in a vacant lot between the CVS and the Weis market, but I like it better than the commercial landscaping.

It has more color.

An iron fence near a school. There was a guy in a car just to the right where I shot this out of my car window. I think he thought I was stalking him.

A lovely small tree along 13th St on the way back home.

Autumn Joy Sedum, or what the aphids have left of it, in front of my house.

Time to drive DD12 to soccer. I like this house at the stoplight. It was restored last year. Before that it looked like a classic haunted house. You can't see it in this windshield photo, but I like the purple that they used as an accent color.

Late goldenrod along the roadside.

A view down into City Park, still taken from my car at the red light.

A row of Japanese Bloodgrass next to Central Catholic High School, whose colors are red and white.

I think this tree on Hill Road flowers in the spring. It sure turns nice shades of yellow, apricot and orange in the fall.

My favorite group of trees on the way to soccer. I watch them do things all year.

A little red maple I always notice in the understory along the road.

The soccer field is on top of the mountain, a grass and gravel clearing surrounded by forest. The Rotary Club runs this field for Little League and our rec league, the Reading Soccer Club. We have to leave out snacks for the raccoons to keep them from digging in the trash cans and making a mess. It gets very dark, and you can see the stars, when they turn out the field lights.

Kat, Gillian, Diana, Kiera, DD12, and Precious waiting for a kicking drill. This will go on until long after dark, under lights, so that is the end of the day's photos. But...

I want to throw in some photos from this Sunday's grower market in West Reading. It's part of my fall color, and will also soon be gone for the winter. Stoudt's Orchards is where I get those #10 apples I keep raving about. I like how they offer samples of each variety, and baskets of seconds for those of us that go home and make jam.

Go Fish Seafood had a new stand there this week. They are a vendor at the Fairground's Market, and recently opened a storefront in West Reading. DD15 used to work at the market stand, and now we are spoiled for cheap grocery store seafood. They will only sell at the market on cooler spring and fall Sundays next year.

B&H Produce is one of the stands were I have been stocking up on carrots and celeriac. I will also be buying organic wheat berries from them. I hope they will grow more spelt next year.

So, that's my fall tour. I didn't really get "downtown" yesterday, where there are some nice trees and other plantings. Maybe another post on another day, if the rain doesn't take all the leaves.

Don't Forget to Vote!

2008-11-04T10:29:00.005-05:00

I know it would be hard to forget to vote today, with all the media coverage and community excitement, but don't wait for the last minute. Lines may be long in some places.

Workmen started ripping up the street in front of our polling place yesterday. It's the elementary school across the street. The jackhammer started at 8AM this morning, and they blocked the street in front of the polling entrance. The police came by, but I heard the jackhammer again a few minutes ago, so I don't think it was stopped. We are going to vote in about half an hour, and I will check it out. I'm gonna call the local TV station and the Mayor's office if they are blocking the entrance. If it isn't deliberate, it sure sends the message that it might be.

Update: We were able to vote without issue at about 11:30 AM, and the construction does not block foot access to the polling place, but the road in front of it is closed, and that ain't right, on election day. The Poll watcher told me an official protest had been lodged, and they were waiting for a response. It's a UGI crew, a natural gas utility, but it is not an emergency.

Independence Challenge - Six Month Anniversary

2008-10-31T12:05:00.001-04:00

These self-sown petunias just keep blooming through the freezing nights.

Happy anniversary to me! I can't believe it has been six months since I started the Independence Challenge! What a difference it made. The world has changed, too - or at least, the problems that worried us have now become more visible to everyone.

- We have more than 3 months of food stored, and we had none 6 months ago.
- We shop differently, buying bulk, locally where possible, to save money and control the quality of our food.
- We grew a lot of herbs and some of our vegetables.
- We cook and eat differently. We always cooked from scratch more than most people, and I am particularly hooked on making my own stock. But now we also make yogurt and bread regularly, eat smaller meat portions, and buy little prepared food.
- We preserve more, canning jam and pickles, drying herbs and fruit, cellaring root veggies. We bought a freezer to enable us to buy meat and freeze veggies in bulk.
- We reduced our trash and recycling output, and started worm composting.
- Our house is more energy efficient, and we are prepared to be frugally chilly.
- We have a plan to combine households with my mother over the next year or two, starting with her living with us over the winter.
- We have a plan to adapt this rented house, and later my mother's house to lower energy use.
-I made a lot of contacts in the local food and farm community, with an intent to do something to increase connectivity between producers and city residents.
- DH and I have a much more shared mindset about how the future may roll out, and how we will respond. We are certainly concerned about climate change, peak oil, and the economic downturn, but we feel confident about our ability to adapt.

We're far from perfect. We are still attracted to fast food. Our showers are still too long, and we often forget to turn off computers at night. We haven't established ourselves in sustainable jobs or businesses that will allow us to ride out a depression. We need to get better at planning meals out of storage, remembering to defrost things, and soaking beans overnight. We could grow more vegetables.

But we are doing, not just talking or just worrying, and I think that is what this Challenge is about. Six months of daily baby steps adds up to a lot of action. Imagine where we could be after a year.

Planted: My spinach in fish boxes has not sprouted. I don't know if the dirt is too cold, or the seeds were too old, or what. I think I may consider myself done gardening until spring, so I can focus on getting this house ready for Mom to stay with us - and then there is endless work to do on her house.

Harvested: Local produce from the market included sweet potatoes, No. 10 apples, Goldrush apples, Bartlett pears, sage, thyme, oregano, and eggs. Only two more weeks of that market left until next May. Boo hoo! I hate to go back to commercial eggs for the winter.

Preserved: Dried schnitz (PA Dutch talk for dried apple slices).

Cooked: Fall is definitely my time to get better at cooking out of storage. I want to bake, and make soup, and put things in the crockpot all the time. I am starting to queue the recipes I want to try.

I love making yogurt, just so I can mix in some of that plum jam I made a few weeks ago. It's like eating perfume. (In a good way, not a toxic alcoholic way.) I love to mix it with fruit and oatmeal. Yesterday, I ate a bowl of yogurt, pears, and nutty granola for lunch. I read a tip about making a separate little jar of yogurt to put aside as the starter for the next batch, so I make a half-pint jarful when I make the quart. Works great.

Stored: I am trying to focus now non-food supplies. I reserved a little of our food storage budget for later, as I cook more and discover what I forgot to store. Q-tips, toothpaste, lotion, 40# clay cat litter, laundry detergent. Cheddar cheese blocks on sale for less than $3/lb. Ten canisters of rolled oats, and 6 jars of applesauce at a dollar sale. A roll of duct tape for the bug-out bag.

But I couldn't resist stopping into the grocery liquidator when another errand took me past it: 6 boxes washing soda at $1.25, borax, toilet paper, yet more rolled oats, three bags of cereal, 2 big bottles of 100% fruit juice, 4 boxes of hot cereal, jello, 6 boxes of the granola bars DD12 likes to eat on the way to school, a few more cans of tomatoes and greens. Six more bags of chocolate chips for .65 each. Favorite score of the week: A #10 can full of bay leaves for $3.49. They don't expire until 2011, and I may still be using them!

I really like that store for trying out things I would not try at full-price: kosher barley soup mix (good), organic mushroom soup in aseptic boxes (good), Italian pesto in a tube (good), organic fat-free ramen noodles (yuck). If we like the samples, I buy more for the pantry.

Prepped: DH bought clothes for the new retail job. They want jeans, khakis, plain t-shirts and polo shirts, and he got a lot of new socks. (He likes black socks, and we discovered that hanging them outside turns them into gray socks and seems to weaken them - so now they will be dried inside.) He had a 20% discount coupon for everything. His clothes last for years, and all of this stuff can be worn for any occasion, even if he gets a different job, so it felt like "stocking up."

DH is taking over the development of our bug-out bags. He bought us a solar lantern that also comes with an AC/DC charger and a car cigarette lighter charger. He is a former private investigator that gets police and military supply catalogs in the mail, so I am not surprised. He already bought LED flashlights and multi-tools for everyone. I keep mine in my purse and find that I use them all the time. You have to be careful if you go into a courthouse or other government building; the knife on the multi-tool means you may have to check it as a weapon. (But I find that they usually miss it in the bag check- the profile on the Xray looks like a pliers, not a knife.)

We are developing a personal bug-out bag for each of us, and a family box or bucket with more food and tools that would evacuate to the car. We will also work on assembling all of our personal data and scans of important documents on a flash drive, with hard copies for the bags. Gotta remember to add my mom to the bug-out plan and develop her bag, too. DH is working on local maps with marked routes to rendezvous points, in case we are separated. We'll have bug-out drills, like we have family fire drills. In theory, once we get the kits together we will rotate the clothes and food every 6 months.

I stop at the Goodwill at least once a week, since it is very close to DD15's job. This week I found another plastic colander, a big jar, a plastic organizer basket for my jar lids, a nice cotton blanket for DH, and a roll of bright orange labels that say "biohazard" for DD15 to entertain herself.

I got three 5-gallon plastic oil vessels via Freecycle. A local family restaurant gets the oil direct from a relative's farm in Lebanon, and rebottles it to sell at their Middle Eastern restaurant. I met the wife-half of the couple on the Freecycle list, and she told me how to make yogurt in a crockpot - I like her. The oil jugs have screw tops and are stackable. The oil seems odorless (not rancid or used oil that would leave a smell in the plastic), so if I can get them clean enough, they will be great for water storage. I will have to wash and fill them in the bathtub.

Pursuing our media plan, DH reports that we will be able to use his Xbox 360 as an internet appliance to watch Netflix movie downloads. He already arranged the Xbox account, and we just need a Netflix account, when we are ready. The service launches Nov 19th.

Managed: I worked on finding more storage containers this week. The big blue bins with lids get too heavy to move around, which makes the stacks hard to use. Buckets will be more managable for most bulk food, and the bins can be converted to storing other things.

The Giant grocery bakeries say they don't save or give out buckets because it was "too hard to manage" and apparently people were fighting over them. But the smaller Weis store nearby will save buckets for me. I got 7 buckets this week, but only five lids that matched up. They were rinsed, so washing wasn't too bad (unlike one that I wheedled from a Giant, still smeared with frosting). I dried them with a towel and then further air-dried them for a day. The ingredient labels on the bakery buckets are horrifying. In no way are grocery store baked goods "natural."

I decanted sugar, oats, and cat food, so far. I haven't done anything with mylar bags or oxygen absorbers, yet, but this is a step up from sacks and cardboard boxes. A 25-lb sack of sugar fits in a 4-gallon frosting bucket quite nicely. The 4-gallon buckets hold about 12 pounds of rolled oats - I have two buckets of oats, and probably enough canisters to fill another. A 20-lb bag of cat food barely fits into a 5 gallon bucket.

The bakery lids do not look like they really seal once they are opened. I want to get some Gamma lids and see how they fit on the various bakery buckets. At more than $6/each, they aren't cheap. But I like the idea of a lid I can open and reseal easily.

Reduced, Reused, Recycled: I found a big masonry nail to anchor the end of the clothes drying rack, so we are back in business with that. I will only using the dryer for towels and sheets that are too big and heavy to hang indoors with out current set-up.

After two days that didn't break 50F outside, and nights below freezing, we finally broke down and turned on the oil-filled radiator in the living room. We all sit in chairs working at computers for long periods, and we were too chilled. It's about 64-66F in the living room during the day. The electric baseboard heater in our bedroom is set to low, just enough take off the chill. Part of our room overhangs the front porch, and there is no insulation in the floor. I need to find some carpet padding and scrap carpet to insulate that.

Local/Family: I actually used some of my stored water for a real emergency! My mom is having trouble with a bad pipe leak, and she turned off her water until we figure out what to do. I took her jugged water to tide her over, and she can sh0wer at my house or my brother's. The Universe is conspiring to move her toward our house.

Our City Council of elected idiots is seriously considering closing the library as a cost-cutting measure, to meet a budget short-fall. I plan to get involved in that discussion. I am organizing attendance at a City Council meeting, a letter-writing campaign, and a response from DD12's middle school. Perhaps an afterschool rally on the steps of the main library branch.

Learned: Found that Weaver's Orchard has cold-pasteurized cider, which is what I want for making hard cider. I am picking some up this weekend. Cold pasteurization uses UV light, instead of heating to kill bacteria, leaving the desirable yeast bodies alive. I am also tracking down a report of a roadside stand with "wild" cider that is completely unpasteurized. I may start two buckets of it.

Read an interesting post on La Vida Locavore, about how to lobby your Congressman about a food issue, or any issue. I do write letters and email my to my elected state and federal officials regularly, but this gave me a lot more ideas for how to make it count more. She also has an informative article abut Tim Holden (D), a local Congressman that is the vice-chair of the House Agriculture Committee. I'm not interested in blogging about politics - I don't feel qualified - but I am trying to learn more about the people that are going to decide whether we starve in the next decade or so.

Library: I realized this week that it has been a year since I started cataloging recipes on the WeGottaEat.com website. I now have over 550 recipes entered and tagged with keywords. I am their biggest, and probably most frequent, user. I stop in almost every day and add a receipe or print our a hardcopy of something I want to make. I keep the hard copies in a binder, building a family print cookbook. I really like this site.

Semi-Recycled Halloween

2008-10-29T13:34:00.003-04:00

We are having a semi-recycled Halloween. We have always liked making our own costumes out of bits and pieces. All year long we watch for potential costume pieces at yard sales.

Last year, DD12 wore a Gone-With-the-Wind gown I found for $1 at a church rummage - a lovely pale yellow dotted-swiss gown from someone's long-ago. Then she found a broad straw hat and white gloves, and her sister bought her a vintage parasol to complete the ensemble. She looked like she was an extra in a movie.

DD12 decided to be a doctor this year, using a lab coat at a yard sale. I often buy oddball pieces of clothing for future costumes. We got scrubs at the Goodwill for $6.

The stethoscope was an issue. I couldn't find a toy one anywhere I looked. The Halloween accessory aisles in stores have very limited supplies. Apparently, no matter what your age or gender, you can only be a Sexy Vampire, a Sexy Witch, a Sexy Pirate, or a Monster. You cannot be a doctor, a lawyer, or a Native American Tribal Leader.

We ended up buying a real stethoscop at a drug store, with a blood pressure cuff for $17. I am sorta justifying that as an addition to our medical supplies. Now someone has to learn how to take blood pressure readings!

DD12 wore the costume to a birthday costume part for a soccer teammate last weekend, and will wear it to trick-or-treat on Friday. Sunday, it will be re-used by a small-framed boy at chruch for the Haunted Basement. Not bad, in terms of costume mileage.

DD15 bought fangs at the dollar store and is making fake blood. Vampires in casual street clothes are very popular with teens. We are going trick-or-treating at a friend's house, as we have for the past few years - we parents sit in their driveway and give out candy, while the kids go around the neighborhood together. It's an area with lots of kids, so lots of families give out candy; I combine my bags of candy with our friends' bags, saving us both money. DD12 is thinking of this as her last trick-or-treat year. Darn! Now I have to buy my own Mary Janes, instead of snitching them from the kids.

Not a lot houses do candy in our own neighborhood - some people consider it too pagan, and I think it has become too expensive for some families. I find the "Harvest Festival" they do at school to be far more pagan-themed than costumes and candy were, which are merely commercial. Apparently, the evangelical Christian parents that pressured the school board to stop celebrating Halloween, just don't realize that Harvest worship is the oldest pagan theme there is. Tee hee!

On Sunday, we will have a Day of the Dead celebration at church, and remember our loved ones that have died. I think I will take a photo of my grandmother. Our city has lots of Hispanic families that celebrate Dia De los Muertos on All Souls' Day, so our annual service feels nicely connected to that. Then we have a bake sale Haunted Basement fundraiser afterward at Coffee Hour, to benefit UNICEF. The teen group puts on the haunted basement each year, and they have a lot of fun with it. This year's theme is Bedlam (the London insane asylum of yore).

It will be interesting to see how the celebration of Halloween progresses over the next decade or so, as the economy, energy crisis, and climate change take us all for a ride.

Independence Challenge - Week 25

2008-10-24T16:40:00.002-04:00

Witchhazel blooming along a road on the

wooded mountain above our city neighborhood.

I'm feeling good, at least about food storage. I'm not done, but I have a really healthy supply now. Crowded shelves and a nearly-full freezer. Some odds and ends left to get, and I need to organize a re-stocking routine. Water storage still needs more work. We'll have more time to catch up after soccer season ends in November, and we have the attic insulated.

I like the LDS/Mormon-style preparedness plan I've been reading about, where families have a 72-hour kit for bugging out, then a 3-month food supply for immediate use, then a year of long-term storage of major staples like wheat, beans, oats, and rice. I have most of the bug-out bags, and the 3-month supply. I found a local wheat source, but I need to find more barrels and buckets before I start on the long-term stuff. I may not subscribe to the LDS religious beliefs, but I surely do believe in their food storage plan.

Planted: Nothing new, but we are planning to finish a spinach cold frame and a worm composting farm next week. My ginger root is sprouting - does that count?

Harvested: We had our first freeze predicted Tuesday night, so I harvested everything tender from the yard - 10 green peppers I laid out to ripen, three heads of celery, two parsley plants. Also picked a small head of cabbage. The outside leaves were pretty chewed up by beetles, but the inside was lovely.

Preserved: Dried lots of celery and minced parsley. I use celery almost exclusively for stock-making, so I dry the whole stalk and all the leaves in hanging bunches. My home-grown celery stalks are much thinner and leafier than grocery-store celery, but it's the taste I am after anyway. I also dried celeriac leaves, which taste like celery.

Made a pint of sauerkraut with the little head of cabbage. Used my vintage potato chip slicer, since it was such a small head. Packed the salted cabbage in a quart mason jar - my favorite old cast iron potato masher fits in there perfectly to squoosh it down. It juiced right up. I cut a circle out of a plastic lid and put a bottle of juice inside the jar to weigh it all down, I put it on a shelf over the cellar steps, to wait out the 2 weeks of initial fermentation. I set an email reminder, so I don't forget to check it every few days.

I have about 8 more small heads of cabbage still out in the garden, so if this works out nicely, I will make more. DH and my mother are our only kraut-eaters, so I don't want to get carried away.

Blanched and froze another 2 giants heads each of cauliflower and broccoli - about 10 meal-sized quart bags. One of the cauliflowers was deep purple - turns a pretty lavender color when you blanch it. I hope it doesn't lose much more color when I cook it later - it would turn gray, which is unappetizing.
The last pint of bread-n-butter pickles from the summer got opened, and I found Kirby cukes on sale, so it was pretty quick to slice them and boil some syrup for 2 quarts of refrigerator pickles.

Cooked: Made a huge batch of broccoli-cauliflower-cheddar soup, and froze a quart before the ravening hordes sucked down the rest. Made the first parsnip cake of the season -I love that stuff, this time with craisins and walnuts.

Grilled the corn from the market, and cut off the kernels, then made corn cob stock from the cobs. The corn went into a Cuban-Inspired Pork Chili I tried for the first time. The stock went into a new cornbread recipe. Then the cobs went to compost bucket for the worms. I used the hell out of those last four ears of fresh corn!

I'm getting better with the seasonal cooking from the pantry. Now, if only I could stay in the bread-making groove. I just keep forgetting to put it in.

Managed: Found a big popcorn tin for all my baking chocolate. Mom says she has more tins for other things that come in soft packaging. Tins are really common at yard sales, too, but I usuallly ignore them. I labeled the storage jars I've added lately - DH notices if I don't and asks what is in every jar. Updated the list of what's in the freezer.

Checked the potatoes and squash I stored a few weeks ago, and everything looks okay. It hasn't been really chilly in the cellar yet, so I am a little worried things will start to spoil. I still need to get more onions, potatoes, and sweet potatoes, but I don't think the cellar is cold enough yet.

We have hard water that leaves soap scum and lime scale in the tub and toilet. I've tried all the combos of vinegar, salt, and baking soda cleanser that I can stand, and I am going back to chemicals for now, until we are out of this rented hovel, with its bathroom mold problem. The scum and scale provide a foothold for the mold that regularly creeps out from behind the poorly-intalled plastic shower walls to climb the walls and climbs the shower curtain. I feel guilty about the chemicals, but I can't stand the mold. I hate when people visit and have to see our bathroom. Ugh.

Prepped: At the Goodwill, I found a large black metal picture frame that gave me a holiday gift idea. Found a package of Graco stroller netting intended to protect babies in strollers from mosquitoes, but I am going to use it to protect containerized plants from bugs next summer.

Fabulous Freecycle Find: I got a very large cast iron griddle. The brand is Texsport, and appears to sell online for $35-40. I've wanted a griddle for a long time. This one is 24" deep, almost 27" with the handles, and is actually too big for my current stove. It would be great on a commercial stove with cast iron burners. It would also work ourdoors over a fire or a charcoal grill. I'm dying to be able to make more than one pancake at a time. The flip side has a ridged grilling surface.

Stored: DH brought home 4 cartons of grits (6#). When I looked surprised, he said, "I don't know why you are always so surprised when you ask me to get something and I actually come home with it." He's right; I don't give him credit for being a good shopper. And he really is 100% behind our efforts to stock up, even if he and I disagree on where the economic crisis will ultimately take us. He also brought two big boxes of decaf tea bags and two canisters of hot cocoa mix when he saw them listed on our shopping white board.

Made a last large food run (about $250), shopping the sales at various places. I remember a line from someone's blog, something like this: "I never need anything from the store. I shop to restock, taking a advantage of loss-leader sales. If you don't need something, you can always wait for the best price." That's my goal, and I am almost there. I only need milk, eggs, cheese, a little produce (like bananas), a few bread and cracker products. I am not making enough bread and rolls yet. We also buy a few treats, but not from need.

Redner's had a 40% off sale on store-brand fresh chicken, so I bought about $20 worth and froze 10 meal-sized packages: 4 bags chicken breast, 2 bags boneless thighs, 2 bags whole thighs, 2 bags drumsticks. Also got 4 canisters of bread crumbs, and 4# of margarine for baking, to freeze.

Price-Rite was good for 12 assorted cans of beans, 10 cans of albacore tuna, a gallon of white vinegar, 2# of brown sugar, cat litter, boullion cubes, pound bags of candied ginger and dried pineapple (only $1.49!), 4# box of dry milk, and pork ribs for the chili. For the freezer, I got 3# of shrimp, 3# of hot dogs, a pound of bacon, two bags of bagels, 2# of meatloaf mix, and 2 pints of heavy cream. They also had cheap garlic and kirby pickles. It's a great place to buy Hispanic seasonings, and I got dried chipotle peppers that I jarred up.

Big Lots did not impress me. Their prices on odd lots of canned goods are not much better than regular grocery sales. I like the Buy-Rite liquidator much more. I did buy 15 cans of Campbell's soup, a 7oz bottle of vanilla extract, a 2# can of peanuts (for granola), 3# of whole grain pasta, and 3 canisters of raisins. Cleaning products were cheap, so I got steel wool, cleanser, toilet cleaner for hard water, and citrus cleaner.

I cherry-picked the Giant specials: 30# of King Arthur white whole wheat flour for $3.20 per 5# bag (regularly 4.49) was my favorite deal. Lots of Buy-One-Get-One-Free: kielbasi, bacon, split chicken breast, frozen ravioli, Bagel Bites for DD12. Half price center-cut pork chops. Good sale on ricotta and mozzarella - can't freeze them, but they will stay good unopened in the fridge for several months. Also picked up some Fels Naptha soap, washing soda, baby wipes, natural dish soap.

Aldi rounded out the freezer: Bratwurst, chicken nuggets, five 1# rolls of frozen ground turkey, a 12# ham, and 4# of butter. Also got more dandruff shampoo, oats, ziplock bags, lemon juice, chunk light tuna, sugar, peanut butter, pancake syrup, rice crispies, saltines, a stash of fig newtons, and extra toothbrushes.

Reduced, Reused, Recycled: Still haven't turned on any heat. The residual daytime heat is still enough carry us through the night, even when it hits freezing. It's about 64-67 in here during the day, a little warmer near one of the two south-facing windows. Sweatshirts and slipper-socks are enough to be warm, with lap blankets when we sit still. We closed the storm windows throughout the house. DH needs to get another blanket on his side of the bed; his feather comforter is getting old and a little thin. We each have our own layer of bedcovers to roll up in, allowing each of us the right coverage for our own internal thermostats. Like two giant larvae snuggled together.

We are doing badly at not using the dryer. I haven't found a masonry nail that will hold up the clothes rod, and we run out of indoor clothesline fast. The windy weather has landed some laundry in the neighbor's muddy yard, and that wastes water on rewashing. I need to do some exploring of laundry aids at Home Depot or maybe Tractor Supply.

Local/Family: I bought local produce at the West Reading market: celeriac, baby bok choy, apples, carrots, eggs, 4 ears of the last sweet corn of the season, and 2 pecks of organic sweet potatoes to store. Some of what I bought at the more commercial Fairgrounds market was from a 100-mile radius. Erica from the B&H organic farm gave me a sample of the hard red wheat they have siloed; I plan to buy 50# from her, and encouraged her to grow spelt again, too.

Spent last weekend with DD15 at a youth retreat in Towson, Maryland. There is another in November in Annapolis, and I am scheduled for youth leader training in Philadelphia. Note to self: figure out how to tie the youth stuff into the food security stuff. Maybe develop an awareness workshop that presents basic info and makes suggestions for action - sorta like An Inconvenient Truth, but for food.

Learned: Checked with my chef-friend Rosella, who used to own a fresh pasta business. I wanted recommendations for a pasta machine. She said that most of the all-metal manual pasta makers are fine and cost less than $20 on eBay. That was a relief, after pricing water filters and grain mills that run $250-300, and the $200 Squeezo fruit mill. I will ask Rosella for a pasta-making lesson for the girls and I. We can also try making crackers.

DH found a great article at PlanetGreen about Green Sex. We both thought the bamboo sheets sounded good. Lots of resources listed there, as well as discussion about phthalates in sex toys and condoms. You'd think sex was already a pretty green activity, wouldn't you?

Library: Stopped at a used book store in Maryland last weekend, and bought some fiction. Looked at the garden and food books, but didn't find anything I really wanted. The gardening books were almost all about ornamentals, which once would have made me happy. Now, I want books about growing and preserving food.

DH and I each have a large collection of winter reading - I suspect we will run out of winter before we run out of books. I can't begin to express how much I love having a reading partner, after several oldbad relationships with people who were jealous of the booktime. DH and I even often like the same stuff; we've expanded each other's reading horizons. I can face any apocalypse, if I just have enough books and right person with whom to share them.