I sometimes forget while reading the blogs of northern friends, who months ago showed pictures of kids playing in fallen leaves, that winter takes longer to get to North Texas.
Yesterday was 72 degrees outside and Astrid enjoyed playing in the fallen leaves. Having sprained my ankle early last month, I hadn't even noticed the leaves changing color. Children have a way of directing our attention to the important stuff in life.
My vermiposting experiment absolutely SUCKED. Turns out that the worms need to be covered from sun and/or rain and we don't have any outside coverage. So, they stayed in the house (along with their fruit-fly groupies) until cooler weather came and I could move them out to the garage (which only stays reasonably cool during the winter). By summer of next year, I need to figure out a way to keep them outside covered from the sun and rain. I need a vermiposter HUT.
STILL trying to control the fruit flies in the house! I have traps EVERYWHERE.
Em got the raised garden bed I ordered put together except for digging holes to place the "feet" in the ground.
Thanksgiving is at my house this year, so I'm trying to get that plan done (to the exclusion of others). Today, I ordered an organic turkey and roast. I make babyfood for Astrid and it's all organic; I don't think new people should be eating things containing hormones or antibiotics. So, whatever the guests invited don't eat will be cut up and frozen for Astrid.
Sorry to say that my son won't be coming for Thanksgiving this year. It'll be just Em's family and my two daughters with their families. I really don't know what happened to my son, but he's been unwilling to have his picture posted online for many years now, and has recently just grown apart from his entire family. I love him and wish him well, but it's pretty hard to take the dismissal. A cousin of mine has a brother with whom he hasn't communicated in over 30 years; he doesn't even know if he's alive or not. I hope my son's not moving in that direction because *I* still want to see him even if no one else does, but my grandfather used to hide in the basement when company came, so it's not like there aren't genetic precedents.
Hope you all have a happy Thanksgiving if I don't get back here to post before then.
Yesterday was the day of action for 350. I'd thought about what to do on this day for about a year and when the day came I did NOTHING ... unless stirring and spraying my vermiposter counts. I'm still worried about the 2010 midterm elections, so called people a) to ask if they could volunteer and b) ask if they would PLEASE vote.
Here are some results from people who actually did something: 350 on 10-10-10.
I also took two naps during the day yesterday. My resistance is down and I seem to have been chasing off a cold.
As shown somewhere on the sidebar, this past weekend was Crunchy Chicken's Dry Humps 2010 challenge. I had no intention of engaging in this challenge until the weekend came, Em had gone off to work and I found myself with no excuse not to. I find it pretty easy to do these challenges when no one is involved except me.
The only interesting thing (for me) was using water over again for cooking. For instance, I made potato salad Saturday, boiling potatoes in water and then reusing that water to boil the eggs. Also boiled brats, but got fresh water for that. Had it not been for the challenge, I wouldn't have thought to reuse the water. It's always easy to just not flush the toilet when I'm the only one here, and who bathes or showers anymore? :-)
I noticed one trade-off and it always seems like there's a trade-off SOMEWHERE. I used a paper towel to avoid using water and a dishrag to clean off areas after cooking.
Once Em came home, I'm sure he flushed the toilet because he can't stand to see a toilet unflushed. That was about the extent of his five-gallon day.
Sunday, I baked baby back ribs. No water necessary for that and leftover potato salad, so no water at all for cooking. When Em came home from work I'm sure he flushed the toilet again and he always washes the dishes after supper.
Since the whole point of these challenges is to make us conscious of what we do unconsciously, I can say there was success on this front. Today I'll be showering AND doing a small load of laundry, but the challenge is over, right?
I know some eco-bloggers who concentrate on getting ready for life after oil's been depleted. I'm not one of them, which is why I have on my list of other places of interest Peak Oil Debunked and Wrong Tomorrow because the people doing these predictions typically don't have experience in the fields they're discussing.
Here's a few minutes by Richard Sears on Planning for the end of oil.
The experiments with replacing portions of ground beef with cooked, mashed, brown lentils and cooked bulgur were totally successful. Em didn't notice any change in taste at all either in hamburger patties or his beloved hamburger helper. I should mention, however, that I season pretty much everything these days with Montreal Steak Seasoning. There was a sale at Kroger one day and I got about 8 of these. I use it on pretty much everything because it's got pretty much everything in it. I sprinkle it on vegetables, too!
My dandruff is back ... with a vengeance, so I'm gonna need to go through the whole routine I went through before to get it to go away again. PITA, but at least I'm getting a feel for how long I can go between "treatments" to keep my scalp healthy.
So, here we go with today's topic:
Like most envirowackos, I'm interested in ways to make non-toxic products that actually work like the toxic ones. I haven't yet tested these two, but now that I have a teensy granddaughter, I've been thinking about the impact of the world around her. To take her outside for any length of time, she's gonna need some sun screen. She's a pale-face like her dad.
I've never purchased products like Bon Ami. Em takes a more gentle approach to everything in life, so HE has, but I'm more the "shotgun it" type, not wanting to take any more time on cleaning than is truly necessary to get the job done and get away from it. If I make something, though, I have an investment in it so I'm more inclined to use it and make it work. We've got baking soda all over the place, for instance, because it's SO helpful in keeping our kitchen stain-free. Em had some problems with digestion for a while that seems to have been resolved with daily yo-chs (a combination of yogurt, cottage cheese and frozen berries). Berries love to stain anything in which they come in contact, so it's baking soda to the rescue.
We went grocery shopping yesterday for the first time in over a month. It had been much longer than that since we'd had any hamburger or tuna or chicken helper on hand and Em loves to make it when it's his turn to cook.
Yesterday, our local Kroger finally had a sale that corresponded with coupons on HH that also corresponded with a sale on Angus chuck.
Thing is, since we've not had hamburger helper, I've been mixing bulgur in with ground meat dishes to both try and get us to eat less meat and add healthier foods to our diet, and Em has LOVED the substitutes ... so I'm hoping he loves the substitutes here.
I bought 6 pounds of ground chuck, to which I'll add 1 lb (dried) brown lentils (cooked and smashed) plus one cup of dry bulgur (cooked and mixed with the lentils). I'm hoping to end up with 10-12 (roughly 1-lb) piles of meat & stuff.
I think he chose 10 HH and 2 tuna helpers, but my lower back went out this week and I really didn't pay too close attention, anxiously awaiting the end of the grocery experience so I could sit down. Point is: I think 10 would be enough.
Lots more work involved over just separating and wrapping the meat for freezing, I learned. First, the lentils needed to be cooked and an attempt made at mashing them.
Then, the bulgur needed to be cooked and added to the lentils.
Separating and wrapping the meat is always a chore in itself and one that is never measured on the meniscus. As Rachael Ray is fond of saying, "I eyeball it." Here's the 1st half of meat mixed with 1st half of non-meat mix (eyeballed).
Close-up, you can see that the mix definitely doesn't resemble 100% meat.
After I finished wrapping the 2nd half of that, I went on to wrap 4 boneless primes that Em and I will share.
I know some folks eat less/no meat all the time, but this is the first year I've been actively engaged in cutting back on our consumption of animal products. Will we give up meat altogether eventually? I kinda doubt it. We've spent over 60 years eating animals, starting before they were given hormones and antibiotics. Will I feed Astrid the kind of meat we've bought for years? No way!
Still have 40oz of bacon to cut and package. I freeze 4 pieces of bacon separately. That can wait until tomorrow, however. As I said in the beginning, I've had problems with my back this past week and today's the first day of fluidity, so I want to spend some time hooping.
The First Tuesday Social Action Film Festival at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Oak Cliff will be showing Garbage tomorrow night. We won't be going to see it. Even though I hate to pass up an opportunity to get even more envirowacko than I already am, we're going to Winstar tomorrow and we're always way, way too tired to do anything on Winstar evenings because we go in the middle of the night and wear ourselves out walking ... which is why we're going because I did something to my lower back taking a nap this week and I need to walk it out.
Also, I really think I need to tone down this envirowackiness of mine. You can get carried away. We went to the Fort Worth Museum a week or so ago to see Sharks (which sucked as a movie), but on our way to the Omni we passed a display of plastic stuff made into a display. It was designed to bring public attention to the pacific and atlantic plastic garbage patches, but I told the woman that I probably shouldn't see it because I'm envirowacko enough as it is.
For instance, I'm thinking ahead to Astrid eating something besides breast milk and after watching Food, Inc., I don't want her to eat anything but organically grown food, and the decision isn't mine to make, not to mention that No. 1 may not be in a position to afford such a proposition.
The problem is that plastics were designed to last forever but then used to make products designed to be thrown away. Much of the plastic trash we generate on land flows into our oceans through storm drains and watersheds. It falls from garbage and container trucks, spills out of trashcans, or is tossed carelessly.
At sea, floating plastics are swept up into slowly moving currents. These currents are called gyres. Most of the research on plastic trash circulating in oceanic gyres has focused on the North Pacific, but there are 5 major oceanic gyres worldwide, with several smaller gyres in Alaska and Antarctica. Marine researchers don’t yet know the extent to which plastic pollution exists in the world’s oceans.
We've GOT to stop using plastics!
This is my contribution to National Environmental Education Week.
Seems like every time I turn around there's a week/month dedicated to something or other, but here's one I actually care about. I wouldn't have known about it had I not seen the challenge at Farmer's Daughter, so many thanks to the woman who teaches Environmental Science but is currently on maternity leave. Now that I'm a first-time grandmother, I have more than one thing in common with her.
So much for keeping the seeds outside to catch the sun.
Decided today that I'm going to experiment with not shaving this summer. The hair under my arms is now long enough that it doesn't itch at all and (as usual) I haven't shaved my legs all winter. It's a test of freedom more than anything else, I think. It's not like Em cares at all, so it's a question of whether I can maintain confidence through my daughters chiding me.
I think it was 26 or so years ago that we camped at a Coast Guard campground on the East coast. The kids were small, playing in the dirt of the campground. My husband was a CG reserve and this was the annual two-week duty training. A young, female CGer stopped by our campsite to show us a newspaper with our son's picture on the front page. He'd met a goat at the Bluebird Farm and the paper's photographer took one of those human-interest photos. She stayed for a while and discussed how she'd decided to stop shaving. I didn't have the self-confidence when I was young, but I'm willing to experiment with how I feel "going European" in this, my 63rd year. Could dispense with extraneous plastic and save money.
Yesterday we visited No. 1 and Astrid, so picked up some produce at Fiesta, which is near her house. Fiesta produce is always fresher looking than other groceries and most foods aren't in packages, so I can bring home just what I need with no packaging to discard. The girl who bagged our groceries was obviously sick, so I put everything I bought in a sink full of water with a little bleach, rinsed it off and let it sit on the counter to dry. Also still on the counter was that bowl of kale I'd picked before the snowstorm that never came, so today I'm committed to doing something with all this food.
This morning I tackled the kale. I'd read yesterday instructions on freezing it at Not Martha. It looked straightforward enough, so I got out all the things I'd need and went to it.
Some people cut and some people rip, and I cut some and ripped some. I didn't save the stems for anything, although some people eat them. Some people eat broccoli stems, too, but we're not hungry enough for that yet, either. They feed the dirt in my gardens just like asparagus stems.
First step after cutting is the blanch. Some people don't blanch, but I'm new at this, so I did.
Following Not Martha's instructions, I took each batch of kale from the salad spinner to the towel.
Once all the kale is processed and on the towel, the towel gets rolled tight and squeezed to remove as much moisture as possible. My largest bowl was the perfect amount to fit on the towel after processing.
The kale is then transferred to a baking sheet (covered with parchment so there's no sticking) and put into a freezer for 30 minutes.
We got 3 quart freezer bags of kale from this batch. Each bag will be more than enough for the two of us at one meal. Takes the guesswork out of it for me, as the kale is already cooked down from the blanch.
This month has been designated by the Crunchy Chicken the month of the Food Waste Reduction Challenge. Notice the badge on the sidebar?
I always have the best intentions of incorporating more fresh fruits and vegetables into our diet, buy them on sale, and then ... mostly what happens is that Em cooks supper several days in a row and I forget all about the food I'd bought that's been sitting in the refrigerator for ... well, for example, No. 2 flew down to attend No. 1's wedding shower in April of 2009 (last Spring) and I bought some spinach/artichoke dip for her to eat while here. She's a vegetarian and I wanted to be sure to have something besides peanut butter/jelly sandwiches in case she got hungry ... except she preferred peanut butter/jelly sandwiches to that dip and we just got around to eating it this week. No kidding.
I found a ball of homemade pizza dough on the freezer door and a container of that hot pork sausage that Em likes on his pizza. I didn't have any bell peppers or onions, though, and I like my pizza to have SOME vegetables. We had a 2-lb bag of carrots that I think I was gonna use for the baby shower last month, but Dave's mom made so many food dishes that whatever carrot dish I was gonna make got changed into something else that filled the few gaps left ... so I asked Em if he'd like carrots on his pizza. His face contorted into what I took to be a "NO!", so I thought, "Well, that dip has spinach and artichokes in it at least" and spread it onto the pizza dough. Worst thing that could happen was food poisoning, right?
Em had made spaghetti (with no veggies) the night before, and there was some sauce with ground beef left, so I put that on next.
Rest was pretty standard fresh ingredients and the pizza was quite good although it stuck to the pan a bit (which had more to do with not enough oil on the pan than old ingredients).
We both woke up the next morning feeling fine, so NO food poisoning! Makes me wonder if that dip was actually a food or more like a twinkie.
So, Diane was blogging about making a carrot cake and I thought, "I wonder if they use any carrots?" and it turned out they did and Em likes carrot cake (oh happy day), so I looked around for some recipes that didn't involve 12 cups of sugar, and found some capable of being tweaked to lesser amounts without losing the taste or using artificial sweeteners. I had a plan for the carrots.
The next day, Em said, "So, you want to get rid of those carrots?" Thinking he'd found a new public dumpster, I said, "I want to USE the carrots." He said that his very favorite salad is carrot-raisin if I could find a recipe for that on the web. With Google as my friend, I was able to make
and
from
and Em liked BOTH very much.
Tomorrow I see what I can do with apples and cantaloupe on their last legs.
The video from which I got this idea made smaller pots using half a roll, but either way seems like a good idea to me.
I'm sending some of my friends/family up north a few starts this year, the weather here is 63 today, and I found myself starting to make some of these "pots" today. Em is SO grateful! I think I've told you how he just can't stand how I save things for no apparent reason and ... empty toilet paper rolls???
The half rolls get cut about 1/2" on 4 sides and don't quite hold the square shape of those in the video, but I was going for them to keep their round shape anyway. I'm NOT handy, so my pots came out looking like they were cut from the hands of a non-handy person with some even requiring a tad of tape to cover the hole from my inability disorder, but the whole point is to make quick, cheap, makeshift, biodegradable pots, so they made the cut.
I lined the shipping box with bubble-wrap to keep the box from getting wet when I water the starts that I put in the little makeshift pots. What? You don't have a closet full of boxes and bubble-wrap? Em would be so proud of you.
Saving pop-tops for No. 2's Theatre class, too.
They're good for extra credit. Not sure when they need to be sent, but I'm hoping it's soon, because between the toilet paper rolls and the pop-tops being saved, Em's fairly sure I'll be on one of those TV reality shows soon.
That difference in color on the TP rolls in the final product is the difference between cottonelle (which always seemed to have coupons) and Angel Soft (now my preferred TP even over Charmin). We don't use recycled TP ... YET.
