The first batch of our homemade kraut is finished, and wow, it is good! I love kraut, but even I have never had kraut that tasted this good before! I'm on the web tonight trying to find tasty recipes for it. We all had some plain, and I put the rest of the half gallon jar into the fridge to prevent any deterioration. We're declaring Kraut version 1.0 an official and unqualified success! I'm under orders from the rest of the crew to find and secure several more good kraut cabbages this week so we can put a whole bucket of the stuff on to ferment for Kraut version 2.0.
The first batch of wheat beer (the half gallon that didn't have raspberry in it) has been primed and bottled, and is sitting in a dark covered box on the counter for the next week, after which it will go down into the storage room for a couple or three more. After that, it should be fully carbonated, and we can bring a bottle up to chill and taste. Woohoo! On to the next batch, which will be a dark nut brown ale for my sweetie. I'm just waiting for the dark malt extract to come in and we'll be ready to start.
The mead is clearing out nicely, and the raspberry and cherry wines are just about finished with their main fermentations. The plum is still going - however it is clearing out really nicely too, and it *is* slowing down finally. I'm hoping to rack the mead this weekend and then take it downstairs to the dark storage room to settle for a month or so before bottling. With luck the plum and raspberry will be ready to go downstairs, too. I'll also test the vinegars this weekend again, and see if I can tell how many more weeks they might need. After that, they will also be bottled for aging and storage, and their glass crocks cleaned and ready for the next project. I'll admit, it'll be nice to get that part of my countertop back!
I had a really interesting experience a couple of days ago while scanning the grocery store ads - I realized that there was really very little we needed to buy this week. Now, I am going to buy a few sale items that we will stock up on, but there is really nothing much that we *need.* We've finally arrived at the happy point where most of our buying now is mainly for the purpose of stocking up on cheap basics as replacements and not because we have an empty pantry. That means that our food bill should be going down a bit over the next few months, which will be a welcome change. Buying everything in bulk costs extra up front and storing that much stuff has its challenges, but after a while it means you reach the point where all your meals are made with cheaper ingredients.
Another positive thing I've noticed while scanning store ads this week: I'm definitely losing my taste for overprocessed junky food. Which is good news for a lot of reasons, one of which - I hope - is that it will help me to lose some weight!
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
Saturday, November 17, 2007
View From the Kitchen Today, Nov 17
Two large crocks of home-made vinegars sit on the counter - and the plum is almost finished! We tasted it a bit the other day and it's developing a wonderful flavor - as good as last year's, I think. It should be ready to filter and bottle by the end of this month, or a week or so into December. That means a few of the folks on our Christmas list will be getting a bottle. The apple cider vinegar is about halfway finished, so it will probably take another month before it is ready. The temperatures up here on the top floor of the house are on the lower end of where acetobacter likes, so it takes a while to brew. But I wonder sometimes if the long, slow ferment isn't part of what's helping to keep so much of the original fruit flavor in the vinegar.
Three jugs of wine sit next to the two crocks - all topped off with airlocks and covered with clean white kitchen towels to keep out the extra light. All three are still slowly fermenting, and have been racked at least once - the cherry and plum have been racked twice now. The mead is finally starting to clear a bit, and it looks like it will be a nice golden color when finished. I'm going to be starting a raspberry wine later this weekend - and then I'll move on to my very first batch of homebrew beer! I'm making a light wheat beer for my very first batch. The recipe I'm using only has 6 ingredients, and a simple wort boiling routine, so I should be able to handle it without much confusion. When it has finished its first really hard fermentation, I'm going to rack it into two half-gallon jars and let one proceed without extra ingredients and add some raspberry juice concentrate to the second. The neat thing is, beer brewing is fast when compared with winemaking, so I should be able to haul a bottle out, chill it and taste it by Yule.
Next on the list will be a nut brown ale for my sweetie. He likes his beer strong and dark. No pale ales for him - he says if you can see through it, it's just not worth drinking! So after I see that my first batch is doing okay, I will start a second, larger batch for him as part of his Christmas present from me. I plan to try to keep him in homebrew as much as possible during this next year. I'd love to eventually come up with a handful of tried and true recipes we can make here at home that are just exactly the type he likes. Then maybe next fall, if I'm feeling ambitious, I'll try a batch or two of barley wine - something that he just adores, but we don't often buy because it's fairly expensive. That will have to age for a while, but I think it would be a really cool project.
After these five batches of brew, I have plans to make an apricot wine and an apricot wheat beer, and an apricot melomel (we have a bunch of frozen apricots on hand that need to be used up) some "kosher type" concord grape wine, a blackberry wine and some carrot/raisin sherry. After those are finished, it should be April or May and just about be time to start the gardening year over again. That means I'll have to put away the brewing stuff (except for the occasional bottling weekend as things mature and clear) until next fall. But by this time next year, I expect to have quite the collection of homemade wines maturing, stacked in boxes on their sides in the storage room.
That's one of the nice things about growing older - one finally develops the patience for this sort of thing.
Three jugs of wine sit next to the two crocks - all topped off with airlocks and covered with clean white kitchen towels to keep out the extra light. All three are still slowly fermenting, and have been racked at least once - the cherry and plum have been racked twice now. The mead is finally starting to clear a bit, and it looks like it will be a nice golden color when finished. I'm going to be starting a raspberry wine later this weekend - and then I'll move on to my very first batch of homebrew beer! I'm making a light wheat beer for my very first batch. The recipe I'm using only has 6 ingredients, and a simple wort boiling routine, so I should be able to handle it without much confusion. When it has finished its first really hard fermentation, I'm going to rack it into two half-gallon jars and let one proceed without extra ingredients and add some raspberry juice concentrate to the second. The neat thing is, beer brewing is fast when compared with winemaking, so I should be able to haul a bottle out, chill it and taste it by Yule.
Next on the list will be a nut brown ale for my sweetie. He likes his beer strong and dark. No pale ales for him - he says if you can see through it, it's just not worth drinking! So after I see that my first batch is doing okay, I will start a second, larger batch for him as part of his Christmas present from me. I plan to try to keep him in homebrew as much as possible during this next year. I'd love to eventually come up with a handful of tried and true recipes we can make here at home that are just exactly the type he likes. Then maybe next fall, if I'm feeling ambitious, I'll try a batch or two of barley wine - something that he just adores, but we don't often buy because it's fairly expensive. That will have to age for a while, but I think it would be a really cool project.
After these five batches of brew, I have plans to make an apricot wine and an apricot wheat beer, and an apricot melomel (we have a bunch of frozen apricots on hand that need to be used up) some "kosher type" concord grape wine, a blackberry wine and some carrot/raisin sherry. After those are finished, it should be April or May and just about be time to start the gardening year over again. That means I'll have to put away the brewing stuff (except for the occasional bottling weekend as things mature and clear) until next fall. But by this time next year, I expect to have quite the collection of homemade wines maturing, stacked in boxes on their sides in the storage room.
That's one of the nice things about growing older - one finally develops the patience for this sort of thing.
Friday, November 16, 2007
Dogs! (Gollum!)
Our two newest canine additions are an interesting set of contradictions at times. Sometimes they behave almost like furry little toddlers - they follow me around, beg for food and want to be picked up and carried all the time. They have decided that civilized animals sleep on beds, so if they both disappear in mid-day, that's where I usually find them napping. They also "talk" - I swear Rugby almost has "mamma!" down pat now - and whine and generally do everything they can to communicate in "our language." But then there are times when they are just very doggy.
Take the other day. Our big male cat, Aramis, brought in a mostly-dead vole. He wasn't all dead yet, just mostly dead. Although I didn't get the bellows out and ask him what he had that was worth living for, his condition was pretty apparent. Anyway, I looked up from doing homework (it seems I do little else these days) and watched as Aramis came trotting proudly into the house with his prize - closely flanked by two small dogs who were very intent on finding out just what he had in his mouth. I could almost hear them say, "what's it got in its mouthses, Precious? Is it crunchable? Is it tasty? Is it juicy? GOLLUM!"
I finally took the now completely dead vole away from all three of them (I had to actually pry Rugby's mouth open and remove the saliva-slicked corpse) and soothed their wounded sensibilities with some treat bribes. We have a lot of voles in the garden and they do a tremendous amount of damage and breed like, well, like voles. Because of this, I really don't want to discourage any of the pets that have a mind to hunt. But I also don't want to have to deal with parasites, so that's our compromise.
This propensity to want to eat nasty stuff is just one of the many reasons why, although I do tend to baby my dogs, I still recognize that they are dogs. Although... a friend of mine once told me a story about herself as a baby. It seems her mother came in one day and found her crunching something. Something that was sticking partway out of her mouth. Something that had long, waving feelers. Something that looked an awful lot like a super-sized cockroach. Ewww.
So maybe there aren't that many differences after all. But at least I don't need to worry about sending the pups to college.
.
Take the other day. Our big male cat, Aramis, brought in a mostly-dead vole. He wasn't all dead yet, just mostly dead. Although I didn't get the bellows out and ask him what he had that was worth living for, his condition was pretty apparent. Anyway, I looked up from doing homework (it seems I do little else these days) and watched as Aramis came trotting proudly into the house with his prize - closely flanked by two small dogs who were very intent on finding out just what he had in his mouth. I could almost hear them say, "what's it got in its mouthses, Precious? Is it crunchable? Is it tasty? Is it juicy? GOLLUM!"
I finally took the now completely dead vole away from all three of them (I had to actually pry Rugby's mouth open and remove the saliva-slicked corpse) and soothed their wounded sensibilities with some treat bribes. We have a lot of voles in the garden and they do a tremendous amount of damage and breed like, well, like voles. Because of this, I really don't want to discourage any of the pets that have a mind to hunt. But I also don't want to have to deal with parasites, so that's our compromise.
This propensity to want to eat nasty stuff is just one of the many reasons why, although I do tend to baby my dogs, I still recognize that they are dogs. Although... a friend of mine once told me a story about herself as a baby. It seems her mother came in one day and found her crunching something. Something that was sticking partway out of her mouth. Something that had long, waving feelers. Something that looked an awful lot like a super-sized cockroach. Ewww.
So maybe there aren't that many differences after all. But at least I don't need to worry about sending the pups to college.
.
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
Attack of the Butt-Cracks
(Or, how your being a slave to fashion may have people laughing at you behind your back[side].)
I see it nearly every day - otherwise attractive looking young women wearing stuff that is either 1) totally unsuited for their body type, or 2) just plain fall-on-your-ass-laughing silly.
Case in point, "low rise" or "hiphugger" jeans. Girls, let's face it - even though your fashionista idols on TV may wear this type of pants, only maybe one in every hundred women looks decent in them. The rest of us look like we're five months pregnant - or worse. These pants make even normally curvy women look like overweight, hugely love-handled, binge beer-drinking trailer park refugees.
Then there is the butt-crack issue. You simply cannot bend over even the slightest in these pants without your backside hanging out. If you haven't noticed this "feature" you really should. There have been times I've literally felt compelled to cover my eyes out of embarassment for your unwitting humiliation. I'm sure that most of you just don't think about it, but please - the next time you put on your midi tops and your low rise jeans, do all of us a favor and bend over in front of a mirror and have a good look at what you're flashing at the world. And then for goodness sake, if you agree that's not putting your best side forward, go put on a longer top or some jeans that aren't about to fall off! Have some respect for yourself and everyone else. Okay?
Second case in point: wearing really high heeled stiletto pumps. With jeans. At school. In the rain. I call these "silly shoes" and when I see them I always wonder about the mental health of the woman wearing them.
I saw a young woman today that I could tell was wearing these killer shoes before I even could see her feet. She had that choppy, ungainly, clown-on-stilts walk that one can spot a half mile off. She was wearing what had to be 3- inch pencil thin heels to walk around on campus. In the rain. In a place and a season where one can encounter ice on the walkways, not to mention the cracks in the concrete and uneven joins in the pavement. This gal was a broken leg or busted face waiting to happen. So if you can't bring yourself to wear sensible shoes for walking around outside on uneven ground in all weather, you might consider keeping the heels to under 2 inches. Then at least maybe you won't look quite so much like a badly-strung marionette as you mince around campus on your shoe-stilts.
I know silly fads in clothing aren't anything new - I have several books in my personal library on fashions throughout history. I've always considered it amazing what people will wear if someone convinces them that it's "posh" to do so. But I think sometimes that we here in the good old "modern" U.S. are just as silly and superficial as any of these fashionplates from the past. I wouldn't be surprised if in a few hundred years people are writing books about what passes for fashion now, and having a huge belly laugh at our expense.
So, you might want to do what you can now to make sure pictures of your butt-crack don't end up on those yet-to-be-written pages. I'm just sayin'...
I see it nearly every day - otherwise attractive looking young women wearing stuff that is either 1) totally unsuited for their body type, or 2) just plain fall-on-your-ass-laughing silly.
Case in point, "low rise" or "hiphugger" jeans. Girls, let's face it - even though your fashionista idols on TV may wear this type of pants, only maybe one in every hundred women looks decent in them. The rest of us look like we're five months pregnant - or worse. These pants make even normally curvy women look like overweight, hugely love-handled, binge beer-drinking trailer park refugees.
Then there is the butt-crack issue. You simply cannot bend over even the slightest in these pants without your backside hanging out. If you haven't noticed this "feature" you really should. There have been times I've literally felt compelled to cover my eyes out of embarassment for your unwitting humiliation. I'm sure that most of you just don't think about it, but please - the next time you put on your midi tops and your low rise jeans, do all of us a favor and bend over in front of a mirror and have a good look at what you're flashing at the world. And then for goodness sake, if you agree that's not putting your best side forward, go put on a longer top or some jeans that aren't about to fall off! Have some respect for yourself and everyone else. Okay?
Second case in point: wearing really high heeled stiletto pumps. With jeans. At school. In the rain. I call these "silly shoes" and when I see them I always wonder about the mental health of the woman wearing them.
I saw a young woman today that I could tell was wearing these killer shoes before I even could see her feet. She had that choppy, ungainly, clown-on-stilts walk that one can spot a half mile off. She was wearing what had to be 3- inch pencil thin heels to walk around on campus. In the rain. In a place and a season where one can encounter ice on the walkways, not to mention the cracks in the concrete and uneven joins in the pavement. This gal was a broken leg or busted face waiting to happen. So if you can't bring yourself to wear sensible shoes for walking around outside on uneven ground in all weather, you might consider keeping the heels to under 2 inches. Then at least maybe you won't look quite so much like a badly-strung marionette as you mince around campus on your shoe-stilts.
I know silly fads in clothing aren't anything new - I have several books in my personal library on fashions throughout history. I've always considered it amazing what people will wear if someone convinces them that it's "posh" to do so. But I think sometimes that we here in the good old "modern" U.S. are just as silly and superficial as any of these fashionplates from the past. I wouldn't be surprised if in a few hundred years people are writing books about what passes for fashion now, and having a huge belly laugh at our expense.
So, you might want to do what you can now to make sure pictures of your butt-crack don't end up on those yet-to-be-written pages. I'm just sayin'...
Monday, November 12, 2007
Tempeh, Part II
Well, I'm munching on my first home-made batch of tempeh right now! It turned out to be not terribly difficult to make, and the flavor is good - very mild. I cut half of one of the slabs into "fingers" and deep fried it in a bit of canola oil. Half of it was briefly soaked in chicken bullion before frying, the other half was fried without any treatment and lightly salted. I think the soaked came out better - the bit of extra flavor is nice and the extra moisture seems to have made them a bit more tender inside.
So far I've munched on it plain, with a dip of soy and ginger, and dipped into some Thai peanut salad dressing I like to make. It's good with all of them, but I think I like it with the Thai peanut best. I'm also thinking they would be good lightly breaded with a spicy breading before cooking. I still have 3/4 of the batch I just made, so I will try it in different dishes over the next few days and pick out my favorites. I think the bullion soaked and deep fried version would make a tasty wrap samich with lots of veggies and some spicy mustard...
All in all, another successful Mad Kitchen Scientist project! The hardest part of the whole thing was finding a nice warm - but not too warm - place for the inoculated soybean mush to incubate for 24 hours. After hunting all over the house, I found a nice warm spot on top of one of our fluorescent light fixtures in the sunroom. I actually had to put several layers of terry toweling above the "hot spot" to lower the temps a bit, but it worked like a champ.
If anyone is curious, here are some links to nutritional information on Tempeh:
Tempeh, on the WHFoods site.
Health Benefits of Tempeh.
The highest level of soy isoflavones is found in Tempeh.
Tempeh won't make you as gassy as other soy or bean products.
And, here are some recipes!
Recipes from Tempeh.info.
.
So far I've munched on it plain, with a dip of soy and ginger, and dipped into some Thai peanut salad dressing I like to make. It's good with all of them, but I think I like it with the Thai peanut best. I'm also thinking they would be good lightly breaded with a spicy breading before cooking. I still have 3/4 of the batch I just made, so I will try it in different dishes over the next few days and pick out my favorites. I think the bullion soaked and deep fried version would make a tasty wrap samich with lots of veggies and some spicy mustard...
All in all, another successful Mad Kitchen Scientist project! The hardest part of the whole thing was finding a nice warm - but not too warm - place for the inoculated soybean mush to incubate for 24 hours. After hunting all over the house, I found a nice warm spot on top of one of our fluorescent light fixtures in the sunroom. I actually had to put several layers of terry toweling above the "hot spot" to lower the temps a bit, but it worked like a champ.
If anyone is curious, here are some links to nutritional information on Tempeh:
Tempeh, on the WHFoods site.
Health Benefits of Tempeh.
The highest level of soy isoflavones is found in Tempeh.
Tempeh won't make you as gassy as other soy or bean products.
And, here are some recipes!
Recipes from Tempeh.info.
.
Sunday, November 11, 2007
View From the Kitchen Today, Nov 11
Well, it's been a good week, if you're a mad kitchen scientist like me. The apple cider and plum vinegars are souring nicely. I siphoned out a small taste of the plum last night with a sterile straw, and so far it's promising to be as wonderful as the small batch we made last year. The apple cider vinegar was a bit slower to get a good thick coating of "mother" on the top, but it's also moving along well.
The mead is in its third week of primary fermentation! But to give it credit, it didn't go quite as strong as the plum and cherry did at first, so it's not surprising that it's taking longer to finish up. I also added a bit more honey a week ago, because I wanted the honey taste to be stronger - so that probably lengthened this first step out a bit as well. The plum is showing signs of allllmost being ready to rack again. The cherry is still cloudy, so I'm leaving that one be for now.
My newest project is the home fermenation of soy foods - I'm doing tempeh, miso, and shoyu during the coming weeks. I did some research and found that okara actually makes great tempeh (at least, according to some folks) and since it's a byproduct of soymilk making, which I already do, it gives me another use for the leftovers. I also found a tip online about adding a bit of oats to the soybeans to make the milk "creamier" and better tasting, so I tried that today. It worked great, but it's actually a little *too* thick for my taste. So next time, instead of using one cup of old fashioned rolled oats per 6 cups of soaked soybeans, I'll use 1/2 cup. That should be plenty, judging from this batch. But the beany taste I sometimes still have in my soymilk was nearly completely gone this time and it did taste richer. Plus, if oats are a grain, and soy is a bean - doesn't the combination make a "complete protein?" Maybe. But in any case, I think the oatmeal trick is here to stay.
I kept the okara/oat leftovers, rinsed them through once to get rid of the oat starch goo (saved the rinsings for the whole wheat bread I'm going to start this afternoon) and then rolled it all up in a clean terry towel to dry a bit before mixing in the vinegar and tempeh starter. I'm trying to find ways for us to eat less meat, and do more good food here at home, so tempeh seemed a natural choice. I was thrilled to find that it also helps me to use up the okara. Okara is good for a lot of things, but it's hard to keep up with it. If you make soymilk more than once a week, it really seems to pile up. If we had chickens, I'd give the extras to them - I'm sure they'd love it. But we don't at the moment, so as much as I hate to, I'd have to compost it or we'd be eating it breakfast, lunch and dinner! Making tempeh is a good compromise - we don't get tired of okara this and okara that and less of it goes into the compost bin.
My next experiment will be making koji rice for making miso and shoyu. I'm really looking forward to this part! I've wanted to make miso for a long time, and the shoyu or tamari is a welcome bonus. I think tempeh is as far as I'll get this week - but next weekend begins my Thanksgiving holiday break where I"ll have about 10 days off from school to "play." So I think I'll wait till next weekend to start the koji, since it requires a lot more watching and preparation. In the meantime, I need to find or buy some miso crocks. I don't expect to find any actual miso crocks, but I think I can find some straight sided glass cannisters at the store that will do really well as replacements.
Another project for the upcoming holiday week is starting our first batches of homebrew beer. I'm going to start a very small wheat beer batch for me, and a larger nut brown ale for my sweetie. He's brewed before, but I haven't - just the wine and vinegar and such - so I'll be doing most of the work and he will be there to supervise and help out. We've probably got 20 dozen beer bottles in the storage room that I've saved over the years, so we have that covered! I also bought a corker/capper the other day for sealing up all these goodies, so we're covered there. All we need is a larger carboy (3 gallon) and the ingredients. So I'm going to start gathering those last few items up this coming week, and if I have everything I need, I'll put at least the wheat beer on next weekend while working on the koji.
The mead is in its third week of primary fermentation! But to give it credit, it didn't go quite as strong as the plum and cherry did at first, so it's not surprising that it's taking longer to finish up. I also added a bit more honey a week ago, because I wanted the honey taste to be stronger - so that probably lengthened this first step out a bit as well. The plum is showing signs of allllmost being ready to rack again. The cherry is still cloudy, so I'm leaving that one be for now.
My newest project is the home fermenation of soy foods - I'm doing tempeh, miso, and shoyu during the coming weeks. I did some research and found that okara actually makes great tempeh (at least, according to some folks) and since it's a byproduct of soymilk making, which I already do, it gives me another use for the leftovers. I also found a tip online about adding a bit of oats to the soybeans to make the milk "creamier" and better tasting, so I tried that today. It worked great, but it's actually a little *too* thick for my taste. So next time, instead of using one cup of old fashioned rolled oats per 6 cups of soaked soybeans, I'll use 1/2 cup. That should be plenty, judging from this batch. But the beany taste I sometimes still have in my soymilk was nearly completely gone this time and it did taste richer. Plus, if oats are a grain, and soy is a bean - doesn't the combination make a "complete protein?" Maybe. But in any case, I think the oatmeal trick is here to stay.
I kept the okara/oat leftovers, rinsed them through once to get rid of the oat starch goo (saved the rinsings for the whole wheat bread I'm going to start this afternoon) and then rolled it all up in a clean terry towel to dry a bit before mixing in the vinegar and tempeh starter. I'm trying to find ways for us to eat less meat, and do more good food here at home, so tempeh seemed a natural choice. I was thrilled to find that it also helps me to use up the okara. Okara is good for a lot of things, but it's hard to keep up with it. If you make soymilk more than once a week, it really seems to pile up. If we had chickens, I'd give the extras to them - I'm sure they'd love it. But we don't at the moment, so as much as I hate to, I'd have to compost it or we'd be eating it breakfast, lunch and dinner! Making tempeh is a good compromise - we don't get tired of okara this and okara that and less of it goes into the compost bin.
My next experiment will be making koji rice for making miso and shoyu. I'm really looking forward to this part! I've wanted to make miso for a long time, and the shoyu or tamari is a welcome bonus. I think tempeh is as far as I'll get this week - but next weekend begins my Thanksgiving holiday break where I"ll have about 10 days off from school to "play." So I think I'll wait till next weekend to start the koji, since it requires a lot more watching and preparation. In the meantime, I need to find or buy some miso crocks. I don't expect to find any actual miso crocks, but I think I can find some straight sided glass cannisters at the store that will do really well as replacements.
Another project for the upcoming holiday week is starting our first batches of homebrew beer. I'm going to start a very small wheat beer batch for me, and a larger nut brown ale for my sweetie. He's brewed before, but I haven't - just the wine and vinegar and such - so I'll be doing most of the work and he will be there to supervise and help out. We've probably got 20 dozen beer bottles in the storage room that I've saved over the years, so we have that covered! I also bought a corker/capper the other day for sealing up all these goodies, so we're covered there. All we need is a larger carboy (3 gallon) and the ingredients. So I'm going to start gathering those last few items up this coming week, and if I have everything I need, I'll put at least the wheat beer on next weekend while working on the koji.
Sunday, October 28, 2007
Now that's just mean...
...messing with future archaeologist's minds this way:
"Darth Vader Rises
To fulfill the ancient tradition of placing grotesques on cathedrals, an image of Darth Vader from the Star Wars trilogy was sculpted and set high up in the northwest tower of the Washington National Cathedral. See other grotesques there at www.cathedral.org."
From the ThisOldHouse.com site.
Note to self - check on the water!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,,-7030889,00.html
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,303716,00.html
The state of Georgia gets an average of 50 inches of rain a year, has numerous rivers and streams and several federally funded reservoirs to hold their "excess" water for public use. In spite of this embarassment of water riches (well, compared to most western states, anyway) the citizens of Georgia have effectively just about run out of water this fall. That's pretty scary, if you think about it. What caused this to happen?
A drought which began just a year and a half ago has definitely taxed water reserves. Critics also cite poor planning, which allowed several opportunities to build state funded reservoirs to boost the federal reservoir system to pass by the wayside due to corporate selfishness and political posturing. (One of the pushes to build more reservoirs was apparently deliberately scuttled when construction companies discovered they wouldn't be able to build and sell expensive, fancy homes on the new "lakeside lots"...) Another problem, at least reading between the lines here, seems to be rampant consumavore water usage by the 9 million residents of the state and a near total lack of planning to deal with the water needs of the state's burgeoning population.
Let's face it - a one year drought, while unfortunate, isn't enough to make a well-run state water system run nearly completely dry. Heck, I've lived in areas where the residents get by on a quarter of the annual rainfall that Georgia normally gets, and droughts of 5-7 years in a row are not uncommon. While the water situation at the end of a long drought can be pretty scary, I've never seen one even close to the desperate situation facing the citizens of the peach state now. All nine million of them.
If I'd had to guess a year ago which state would be facing a water crisis this year, I certainly wouldn't have named Georgia! I'd probably have guessed one of the western, water-poor states - but I suppose relatively water-poor states probably have a much better grasp of the need to conserve their precious fresh water supply. It will be interesting to see what comes of this. When the current drama is over, will the citizens of Georgia learn to reign in their usage and invest in their fresh water infrastructure, or will they continue on blindly until the next water crisis hits and sit around pointing fingers at everyone else again?
Note to self: get some good, solid information on the water supplies locally, and see how much more we can conserve here at home.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,303716,00.html
The state of Georgia gets an average of 50 inches of rain a year, has numerous rivers and streams and several federally funded reservoirs to hold their "excess" water for public use. In spite of this embarassment of water riches (well, compared to most western states, anyway) the citizens of Georgia have effectively just about run out of water this fall. That's pretty scary, if you think about it. What caused this to happen?
A drought which began just a year and a half ago has definitely taxed water reserves. Critics also cite poor planning, which allowed several opportunities to build state funded reservoirs to boost the federal reservoir system to pass by the wayside due to corporate selfishness and political posturing. (One of the pushes to build more reservoirs was apparently deliberately scuttled when construction companies discovered they wouldn't be able to build and sell expensive, fancy homes on the new "lakeside lots"...) Another problem, at least reading between the lines here, seems to be rampant consumavore water usage by the 9 million residents of the state and a near total lack of planning to deal with the water needs of the state's burgeoning population.
Let's face it - a one year drought, while unfortunate, isn't enough to make a well-run state water system run nearly completely dry. Heck, I've lived in areas where the residents get by on a quarter of the annual rainfall that Georgia normally gets, and droughts of 5-7 years in a row are not uncommon. While the water situation at the end of a long drought can be pretty scary, I've never seen one even close to the desperate situation facing the citizens of the peach state now. All nine million of them.
If I'd had to guess a year ago which state would be facing a water crisis this year, I certainly wouldn't have named Georgia! I'd probably have guessed one of the western, water-poor states - but I suppose relatively water-poor states probably have a much better grasp of the need to conserve their precious fresh water supply. It will be interesting to see what comes of this. When the current drama is over, will the citizens of Georgia learn to reign in their usage and invest in their fresh water infrastructure, or will they continue on blindly until the next water crisis hits and sit around pointing fingers at everyone else again?
Note to self: get some good, solid information on the water supplies locally, and see how much more we can conserve here at home.
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Days of Wine and Vinegar
Last year, I made my very first batch of home-made vinegar.
I took about a half gallon of plum juice from our fall harvest of blue italian plums and some vinegar "mother" I found lurking in a grey blobbish mass at the bottom of an old bottle of balsamic vinegar and put them together and let the whole mess sit for about 6 weeks. When the 6 weeks was over, my hubby and I tasted the results and decided it was by far the very best vinegar either of us had ever tasted - but because we'd already dried or canned all the plums for the season, we had to wait another year to try it again.
So this year, I have about TWO gallons of both plum and apple cider vinegar going, plus one gallon of cherry wine vinegar, and one gallon each of plum wine, cherry wine, and apple wine. Because the temps down in the storage room are a bit cool now, everything has to be upstairs where it's 70 degrees. But the problem is I just realized today that by bringing all these burping, burbling jugs up here to brew I've lost about a third of my kitchen counter space until close to the end of the year. Ooops.
Actually, I think I may have gone a bit brew crazy. I was thinking about meads and wheat beers the other night when I was trying to fall asleep. And I've already made plans to try to brew some balsamic vinegar as soon as I can. It turns out from my research that it's really not that difficult - all you do differently is condense the grape must down to about 1/3 of its original volume, cool it, then seed it with "mother" and proceed as usual. Oh, there is that little bit about aging it for a while - um, maybe a few years...but other than that it's all business as usual.
And given the state of my storage room at the moment, I'm sure I can find a place to store (er...lose) a jug of home made balsamic vinegar for a couple of years at least...
I took about a half gallon of plum juice from our fall harvest of blue italian plums and some vinegar "mother" I found lurking in a grey blobbish mass at the bottom of an old bottle of balsamic vinegar and put them together and let the whole mess sit for about 6 weeks. When the 6 weeks was over, my hubby and I tasted the results and decided it was by far the very best vinegar either of us had ever tasted - but because we'd already dried or canned all the plums for the season, we had to wait another year to try it again.
So this year, I have about TWO gallons of both plum and apple cider vinegar going, plus one gallon of cherry wine vinegar, and one gallon each of plum wine, cherry wine, and apple wine. Because the temps down in the storage room are a bit cool now, everything has to be upstairs where it's 70 degrees. But the problem is I just realized today that by bringing all these burping, burbling jugs up here to brew I've lost about a third of my kitchen counter space until close to the end of the year. Ooops.
Actually, I think I may have gone a bit brew crazy. I was thinking about meads and wheat beers the other night when I was trying to fall asleep. And I've already made plans to try to brew some balsamic vinegar as soon as I can. It turns out from my research that it's really not that difficult - all you do differently is condense the grape must down to about 1/3 of its original volume, cool it, then seed it with "mother" and proceed as usual. Oh, there is that little bit about aging it for a while - um, maybe a few years...but other than that it's all business as usual.
And given the state of my storage room at the moment, I'm sure I can find a place to store (er...lose) a jug of home made balsamic vinegar for a couple of years at least...
Sunday, October 7, 2007
It must be age catching up with me
I am apparently becoming all too predictable.
A bit of background - we have three small dogs. Because I'm "momma" and was mainly responsible for daily care and training of the two newest additions when we got them earlier this year, I am now the center of their universe. They follow me everywhere I go. And I do mean everywhere. And I do mean follow. Closely. On my heels, as it were. I can't walk down the hall without feeling little puppy noses "bumping" the back of my calves. It's a dog thing, I've been told. But because of this, I've started to call the three of them my "pup-arazzi."
So, fast forward to this morning. I had a really busy last couple of days. I spent a lot of time on the road, on my feet, and away from home, so I was a little beat last night. As a result, I slept in for a while this morning. At least, I slept in until the puparazzi decided it was time for me to get up. When I finally heeded the gentle nosings and subvocal whinings and got up, they joyously danced around my feet for a minute, then both of the pups ran ahead of me to the master bathroom. When they got there, they promptly sat at tail-wagging attendance - one on each side of the potty. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry - apparently they've picked up on my morning "routine" and have decided that 1) I need support and encouragement because of my advancing age, or 2) I need an honor guard, or 3) I need a life guard.
I think I've decided that I don't really want to know what they're thinking. I'll probably be happier that way.
A bit of background - we have three small dogs. Because I'm "momma" and was mainly responsible for daily care and training of the two newest additions when we got them earlier this year, I am now the center of their universe. They follow me everywhere I go. And I do mean everywhere. And I do mean follow. Closely. On my heels, as it were. I can't walk down the hall without feeling little puppy noses "bumping" the back of my calves. It's a dog thing, I've been told. But because of this, I've started to call the three of them my "pup-arazzi."
So, fast forward to this morning. I had a really busy last couple of days. I spent a lot of time on the road, on my feet, and away from home, so I was a little beat last night. As a result, I slept in for a while this morning. At least, I slept in until the puparazzi decided it was time for me to get up. When I finally heeded the gentle nosings and subvocal whinings and got up, they joyously danced around my feet for a minute, then both of the pups ran ahead of me to the master bathroom. When they got there, they promptly sat at tail-wagging attendance - one on each side of the potty. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry - apparently they've picked up on my morning "routine" and have decided that 1) I need support and encouragement because of my advancing age, or 2) I need an honor guard, or 3) I need a life guard.
I think I've decided that I don't really want to know what they're thinking. I'll probably be happier that way.
Saturday, October 6, 2007
Beauty (or rocks) are in the eye of the beholder
I had a small booth at a local craft show this weekend. Although it was snowing, there were a lot of people out walking and gawking. Maybe they figured the weekend was shot anyway, so why not go shopping? Or perhaps all the white stuff falling from the sky made them think about the upcoming holiday gift season. But whatever the reason, I probably talked to more people this weekend than I usually do in several months.I had some of my glass artwork there - mostly beads and miniature vessels - and some of the questions I was asked were hilarious. One lady stopped at my booth, looked astonished, and exclaimed "where did you find these pretty rocks? How did you polish them?" Honestly, most of my stuff looks nothing like rocks. Then there were the folks who simply didn't know what these little things with holes were.
Them: "What are these things?"
Me: "Um, they are beads. See, they have little holes for stringing?"
Them: "Beads? (skeptical look) What do you do with them?"
Me: "Well, some people like to make jewelry out of them."
Them: "Really?"
Me, to myself: "No, not really, I just sell pretty polished rocks with holes in them for no particular reason..."
Of course I was very polite, but inside I was laughing. I know this is a bit of a backwater place here, but c'mon - do you mean to tell me you've never seen beads before? I guess some people just don't get out much. Another guy asked if what I did was like what another vendor who sells plates, and when I said "no, she mostly forms her stuff with a kiln, and I use a torch" he said "oh, so you're primitive!" I didn't quite know how to take that, but I decided to laugh and take it as a joke. But, who knows - maybe he had a mental image of me sitting cross-legged in a cave somewhere melting glass rods over the smoky end of a big burning stick?
Then there were about half a dozen people who simply had no idea that one could actually melt glass. I didn't ask them how they thought bottles and jars were made - maybe chiseled and polished one by one from huge natural glass crystals? *shrug*
I think the big surprise this weekend is how popular my "orphan" basket was. Orphans are beads that started life as experiments, or are leftovers from sets I put together. I sold dozens this weekend. I guess some of the reason for their popularity, beside the fact that they were cheap, is the "hunting for treasure" thing. I debated whether to bring these oddballs at all, but I remembered some of the beads I've had on auction before that I thought weren't very special ended up getting the most bids. So I brought them. In retrospect, I'm glad I did. Beads that I really didn't personally like very much found homes with people who thought they were just the best ever. I think there is probably a life lesson hiding in this story somewhere. Maybe it's that beauty really is in the eye of the beholder. If so, I guess rocks probably are, too.
Wednesday, October 3, 2007
This Place is Dangerous
No, not this place, THIS PLACE. Turns out there is one just a couple of hours from here. I went with a good friend this weekend, and my oh my. I had to keep reminding myself that my latest goal is to get rid of extra stuff, not come home with a bunch more! Although, they do have a lot of interesting organizational items that I might be able to make use of as I work on paring down and organizing the house...and I've just got to get me some of that lingonberry juice concentrate next time I'm down there - yum!
On another note, it's been years since I last made a purely social local friendship, and I hadn't realized until recently how much I've missed that. Atomic Wombat is a witty, fun person to be around, and that made the shopping trip a whole lot of fun. We even laughed when my otherwise very brilliant husband gave us wrong directions and we ended up driving up and down the same stretch of road three times in half an hour - waving to Ikea each time we passed it - yet again. The main roads in Salt Lake City go by numbers, not names, and the exit to the oriental grocery store was at exit 9000, not 90,000 (which doesn't exist.)
We were actually clear over in the next valley before we put two and two together and decided that there was indeed an extra zero mucking up my hubby's directions, despite his insistence to the contrary. As soon as we divided his directions by 10, we had the right exit and the rest of the trip went more smoothly. Except that I apparently snored while I snoozed in the car on the way back. Ooops. I blame it on falling asleep while sitting up. Yeah, that's it.
On another note, it's been years since I last made a purely social local friendship, and I hadn't realized until recently how much I've missed that. Atomic Wombat is a witty, fun person to be around, and that made the shopping trip a whole lot of fun. We even laughed when my otherwise very brilliant husband gave us wrong directions and we ended up driving up and down the same stretch of road three times in half an hour - waving to Ikea each time we passed it - yet again. The main roads in Salt Lake City go by numbers, not names, and the exit to the oriental grocery store was at exit 9000, not 90,000 (which doesn't exist.)
We were actually clear over in the next valley before we put two and two together and decided that there was indeed an extra zero mucking up my hubby's directions, despite his insistence to the contrary. As soon as we divided his directions by 10, we had the right exit and the rest of the trip went more smoothly. Except that I apparently snored while I snoozed in the car on the way back. Ooops. I blame it on falling asleep while sitting up. Yeah, that's it.
Monday, October 1, 2007
Momma, momma! It's snowing outside!
This is our fourth winter here, and this is by far the earliest it's snowed for us. We woke up Saturday morning to this:
The furry puppy-kids were, of course, ecstatic over the change in weather. This was their first snow. They kept running in and out and in and out, and in the process got pretty wet and muddy. Here's a picture of the little scruffians after a romp and a wrestle outside in the snowy grass. "Momma, momma, snow is really cool!" (Notice the wagging tail blurs - they were having a blast - it didn't seem to bother them at all!)
Of course, if I had a built in fur coat like that it probably wouldn't bother me, either. That's just a preview of how they looked most of the day - they got much wetter and scruffier before the day was through. Needless to say, they both got a good bath and brushing on Sunday.
The furry puppy-kids were, of course, ecstatic over the change in weather. This was their first snow. They kept running in and out and in and out, and in the process got pretty wet and muddy. Here's a picture of the little scruffians after a romp and a wrestle outside in the snowy grass. "Momma, momma, snow is really cool!" (Notice the wagging tail blurs - they were having a blast - it didn't seem to bother them at all!)
Of course, if I had a built in fur coat like that it probably wouldn't bother me, either. That's just a preview of how they looked most of the day - they got much wetter and scruffier before the day was through. Needless to say, they both got a good bath and brushing on Sunday.
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
So, some people are rock-heads. Who knew?
"The real problem today is people taking other people for granite..." (over-read on an online forum somewhere this past week)
My guess is the author of this post meant to say that the problem was people "taking other people for GRANTED" but, hey - maybe people mistaking other people for inanimate igneous rockage is a bigger problem in our country than I thought it was.
I personally think the real tragedy is people who do not read mindlessly reusing phrases they've overheard but obviously do not understand. Perhaps the poster quoted above was the Miss Teen USA contestant who made a fool of herself recently by using nothing but parroted sound bites to answer a simple question about the lack of basic geographic literacy in the USA - a question that she apparently didn't have the wherewithal upstairs to comprehend. Gawd, that was painful to watch...
The moral of the story is, unless you actually know what you are saying it's probably better to leave those catchy phrases out of your speech. That is, unless you want other people to take you for granite.
My guess is the author of this post meant to say that the problem was people "taking other people for GRANTED" but, hey - maybe people mistaking other people for inanimate igneous rockage is a bigger problem in our country than I thought it was.
I personally think the real tragedy is people who do not read mindlessly reusing phrases they've overheard but obviously do not understand. Perhaps the poster quoted above was the Miss Teen USA contestant who made a fool of herself recently by using nothing but parroted sound bites to answer a simple question about the lack of basic geographic literacy in the USA - a question that she apparently didn't have the wherewithal upstairs to comprehend. Gawd, that was painful to watch...
The moral of the story is, unless you actually know what you are saying it's probably better to leave those catchy phrases out of your speech. That is, unless you want other people to take you for granite.
Sunday, September 16, 2007
Putting my kitchen on a diet
My kitchen bugs me. The cabinets are overstuffed with "stuff" and some of them are so bad that if you open the door too quickly things fall out onto the ceramic tile floor and break. I can't find a lot of items I use or would like to use more often. We have multiples of some items that we simply don't need multiples of. I bought a really neat modular food storage system for putting away and saving leftovers, but I kept the mishmash of plastic food storage oddities I was using before. I have some lovely glass pie pans which bake the very best crusts, but I also still have a half dozen cheapie tin ones cluttering up the shelves that I never use. The top of the refrigerator hadn't been cleaned since who knows when. I think you get the picture.
So last night, I began to slowly pare down and organize my kitchen. It's going to take a while, but I think it'll pay huge dividends in sanity and efficiency once I've finished. The first place I worked on was our cabinet above the trash compactor. It had been set up as more or less a larger version of the ubiquitous kitchen "junk drawer" (and yes, we have one of those, too, which I will get to later...) and was one of the cabinets things have been routinely falling out of. So I completely emptied it out, sorted the mess, threw away a large part of it, and refilled the cabinet with small appliances I like to use on a regular basis, but which were always on top shelves and very difficult for me to reach. One tiny bit of sanity reclaimed.
That made me feel so good that I just started working my way around the room. Next was the top of the refrigerator, and I won't even say how much junk and dust and grime I found there. I'll just leave it to the imagination - but be sure to imagine a lot. However, it's gone now and the only things still up there are three large bags of bulk cold cereal that I will be transferring to large pourable containers tomorrow. The cabinet above the fridge is also now cleared out and is home to a few things I use very seldom, but don't want to have to hike downstairs for when I need them. Things like the family-size Salton Yogurt Maker, and an extra small crockpot.
After that, I began to tackle the pantry wall. I consolidated all the dry goods cannisters and put them up high, and put the stuff that gets used every day in the two middle shelves. We now have a shelf just for items we use for bringing lunches to work and school - no more bleary-eyed digging in multiple cabinets in the morning looking for thermos jars and lunch kits and lids for the mess. I then pulled out the mish-mash of plastic containers and lids made obsolete by the new modular stuff and set them aside for the garage sale we'll be having in a couple of weeks. I also pulled out baking multiples like the tin pie pans and set many of them aside for resale. I took a good look at where and how things were being stored, and moved them around to where large items like oil containers no longer have to lay on their sides and leak because they are not able to stand upright on the shelves. That one change alone probably gained me back a handful of sorely needed sanity points.
I'm not finished by a long shot - but I have made significant improvements in just an evening's work. I am planning to work on it more this afternoon and evening, and after class tomorrow I will take a trip to the Don Aslett cleaning store here in town to pick up some specialty cleaning items like a cobwebber and a ceiling fan brush. I don't know what happened to the ones I had in Texas, but apparently they didn't make the move with me, and I'm tired of doing these chores without the proper tools. They are fairly inexpensive to buy, and save sanity points every time they are used. And believe me, I can use all the sanity points I can get these days!
So last night, I began to slowly pare down and organize my kitchen. It's going to take a while, but I think it'll pay huge dividends in sanity and efficiency once I've finished. The first place I worked on was our cabinet above the trash compactor. It had been set up as more or less a larger version of the ubiquitous kitchen "junk drawer" (and yes, we have one of those, too, which I will get to later...) and was one of the cabinets things have been routinely falling out of. So I completely emptied it out, sorted the mess, threw away a large part of it, and refilled the cabinet with small appliances I like to use on a regular basis, but which were always on top shelves and very difficult for me to reach. One tiny bit of sanity reclaimed.
That made me feel so good that I just started working my way around the room. Next was the top of the refrigerator, and I won't even say how much junk and dust and grime I found there. I'll just leave it to the imagination - but be sure to imagine a lot. However, it's gone now and the only things still up there are three large bags of bulk cold cereal that I will be transferring to large pourable containers tomorrow. The cabinet above the fridge is also now cleared out and is home to a few things I use very seldom, but don't want to have to hike downstairs for when I need them. Things like the family-size Salton Yogurt Maker, and an extra small crockpot.
After that, I began to tackle the pantry wall. I consolidated all the dry goods cannisters and put them up high, and put the stuff that gets used every day in the two middle shelves. We now have a shelf just for items we use for bringing lunches to work and school - no more bleary-eyed digging in multiple cabinets in the morning looking for thermos jars and lunch kits and lids for the mess. I then pulled out the mish-mash of plastic containers and lids made obsolete by the new modular stuff and set them aside for the garage sale we'll be having in a couple of weeks. I also pulled out baking multiples like the tin pie pans and set many of them aside for resale. I took a good look at where and how things were being stored, and moved them around to where large items like oil containers no longer have to lay on their sides and leak because they are not able to stand upright on the shelves. That one change alone probably gained me back a handful of sorely needed sanity points.
I'm not finished by a long shot - but I have made significant improvements in just an evening's work. I am planning to work on it more this afternoon and evening, and after class tomorrow I will take a trip to the Don Aslett cleaning store here in town to pick up some specialty cleaning items like a cobwebber and a ceiling fan brush. I don't know what happened to the ones I had in Texas, but apparently they didn't make the move with me, and I'm tired of doing these chores without the proper tools. They are fairly inexpensive to buy, and save sanity points every time they are used. And believe me, I can use all the sanity points I can get these days!
Monday, September 10, 2007
Speaking of potatoes...
Here is a pic of some of the potatoes we grew this year in our garden. Mostly gourmet and fingerling types, although there are some "blue" mashers in there, too.Okay, we live in Idaho, so why in the world are we growing potatoes? Well, for flavor, mostly. What they tend to grow here are the big old Russet bakers that you get in the restaurant. And while those are nice (and even nicer when you get them fresh from the fields!) sometimes you just want a nice, tender, moist biteful on the end of your fork, smothered with chives and sour cream, and steaming hot from the oven or pot. MMMMMMmmmmmm! And nothing is better than tiny taters fresh from the garden.
We also harvested some beets - and every single one of them is now sitting in a dark red, sweet-tart ginger-honey flavored brine in the fridge, making pickled beets. And the elderberries we harvested from our own shrubs in the back were joined by about 8 - 10 pounds of wildpicked berries we gathered this weekend. All of that has been steam juiced and cooled, and some of it is now put up in amber glass bottles of elderberry cordial for the winter flu season. The rest will be made into elderberry syrup for pancakes and elderberry jelly for toast. If I have enough left, I might put on a gallon jug of elderberry wine to ferment. Maybe that will finally get me to finish that cherry wine I wanted to make this summer, which has been sitting as juice in the fridge for a while now.
Sunday, September 2, 2007
Grocery Store Sticker Shock
I wanted to bake Tuscan Dried Tomato and Herb bread today, but I was a bit short on a few of the ingredients I needed, so I took off early this morning to the grocery store to pick those up and a few other items we were short on. As usual these days, going to the grocery store was a bit of a shock.
These days I go to the grocery stores as little as I can possibly get away with - sometimes as seldom as once every other week. I chose last year when we finished our wonderful-loverly-spacious storage room to start buying staples in bulk to save money and cut down on gas expenses. But this morning we needed some bulk items, fresh milk and meat, so I got up early and headed off to our local Winco Foods.
Winco's prices are generally very good overall and I love their bulk food aisle, although you do still have to compare prices with bulk stuff from other sources to make sure you're getting a good deal. My morning "sticker shock" moment today, however, came when I priced a new roll of aluminum foil for wrapping the finished breads in and found it had gone up about 75% since the last time I bought foil. Whoa. And it hasn't been *that* long since I last bought foil. Maybe a year, maybe a bit more. I tend to use it sparingly and buy the larger packages, so it lasts a while. But nearly 8 dollars for a 200 foot roll of the thin foil? What's going on here?
My previous sticker shock moment happened not more than a couple or three days ago. Last month I bought three 50-pound bags of dried milk from our nearby bulk food dealer, on the assumption that "fresh" milk at the store was going to go up to some ungodly price this fall - rumors were that it might be as much as 5 bucks a gallon by the end of the year. So, considering that we use dried milk a lot anyway and it keeps pretty well (even better once I get it repackaged into mylar bags with oxygen absorbers) I figured it was a good gamble to get as much as we could afford and reasonably use in the next year and put it into storage. So I did.
Three days ago I found out that the bags of milk I bought for 90 dollars a little over a month ago are now going for over 160 dollars a bag, and looking briefly online that seems to be a bargain at the moment. One hundred and sixty dollars a bag, for fifty pounds of dried milk. And this new price means the price of dried milk went up about 75% in just ONE MONTH. I know a lot of that is probably because other people heard the same rumor I heard and demand has driven up the price. But frankly, higher prices are higher prices - my checking account doesn't care if it's an artificially inflated price or if production costs have suddenly skyrocketed. The end result is the same. It'll be interesting to see if prices fall back to where they were or if this commodity will follow the path of others that never *quite* come back down to previous levels after the shock. I suspect the days of 90 dollar a bag dried milk are over.
It's shocks like this that make me wonder if some of the commentators I've been reading online are not right - that the era of "cheap" food may be ending. These last two or three generations here in the US are some of the luckiest in the history of our species because they have not had to suffer continual food shortages during their lives. Yes, poorer countries are currently experiencing terrible famines. Yes, poorer folks in developed countries still do not eat well or eat enough, but overall most folks here at least are overfed if anything. Here in the US we mostly have plenty to eat and more.
Unfortunately, because we live in the midst of this plenty, Americans waste huge amounts of food as a matter of course. Our family was no different until recently. I'm still working to get a handle on reducing the amount of food that goes to waste here. Working on my Druid First Degree has helped me to become more aware of the overall cost of what we eat and what we use. Not the monetary cost, per se, but the cost to the planet and to others who live here. It now seems sacrilege to me to throw even small amounts of food away - especially given the high environmental cost of producing it and given that so many people in the world are starving while we throw so much food away here in this country as well as burn tons of it in our gas tanks as ethanol. Because of our wasteful habits and addiction to driving long distances, people who used to buy our "surplus" commodities are going to soon be in dire straits as less and less of it becomes available for sale on the international markets. The thought of some day burning corn-based fuel in my gas tank that could have been used instead to keep small children alive somewhere is upsetting to me, so we're working on drastically cutting down the amount of extra driving we do now.
I guess there's no real purpose to this post, just a general kvetching about things that I cannot change. But at least I can see that things are changing, and because I can see I can make some adjustments to change how I live now. That's about all one can do, I suppose.
These days I go to the grocery stores as little as I can possibly get away with - sometimes as seldom as once every other week. I chose last year when we finished our wonderful-loverly-spacious storage room to start buying staples in bulk to save money and cut down on gas expenses. But this morning we needed some bulk items, fresh milk and meat, so I got up early and headed off to our local Winco Foods.
Winco's prices are generally very good overall and I love their bulk food aisle, although you do still have to compare prices with bulk stuff from other sources to make sure you're getting a good deal. My morning "sticker shock" moment today, however, came when I priced a new roll of aluminum foil for wrapping the finished breads in and found it had gone up about 75% since the last time I bought foil. Whoa. And it hasn't been *that* long since I last bought foil. Maybe a year, maybe a bit more. I tend to use it sparingly and buy the larger packages, so it lasts a while. But nearly 8 dollars for a 200 foot roll of the thin foil? What's going on here?
My previous sticker shock moment happened not more than a couple or three days ago. Last month I bought three 50-pound bags of dried milk from our nearby bulk food dealer, on the assumption that "fresh" milk at the store was going to go up to some ungodly price this fall - rumors were that it might be as much as 5 bucks a gallon by the end of the year. So, considering that we use dried milk a lot anyway and it keeps pretty well (even better once I get it repackaged into mylar bags with oxygen absorbers) I figured it was a good gamble to get as much as we could afford and reasonably use in the next year and put it into storage. So I did.
Three days ago I found out that the bags of milk I bought for 90 dollars a little over a month ago are now going for over 160 dollars a bag, and looking briefly online that seems to be a bargain at the moment. One hundred and sixty dollars a bag, for fifty pounds of dried milk. And this new price means the price of dried milk went up about 75% in just ONE MONTH. I know a lot of that is probably because other people heard the same rumor I heard and demand has driven up the price. But frankly, higher prices are higher prices - my checking account doesn't care if it's an artificially inflated price or if production costs have suddenly skyrocketed. The end result is the same. It'll be interesting to see if prices fall back to where they were or if this commodity will follow the path of others that never *quite* come back down to previous levels after the shock. I suspect the days of 90 dollar a bag dried milk are over.
It's shocks like this that make me wonder if some of the commentators I've been reading online are not right - that the era of "cheap" food may be ending. These last two or three generations here in the US are some of the luckiest in the history of our species because they have not had to suffer continual food shortages during their lives. Yes, poorer countries are currently experiencing terrible famines. Yes, poorer folks in developed countries still do not eat well or eat enough, but overall most folks here at least are overfed if anything. Here in the US we mostly have plenty to eat and more.
Unfortunately, because we live in the midst of this plenty, Americans waste huge amounts of food as a matter of course. Our family was no different until recently. I'm still working to get a handle on reducing the amount of food that goes to waste here. Working on my Druid First Degree has helped me to become more aware of the overall cost of what we eat and what we use. Not the monetary cost, per se, but the cost to the planet and to others who live here. It now seems sacrilege to me to throw even small amounts of food away - especially given the high environmental cost of producing it and given that so many people in the world are starving while we throw so much food away here in this country as well as burn tons of it in our gas tanks as ethanol. Because of our wasteful habits and addiction to driving long distances, people who used to buy our "surplus" commodities are going to soon be in dire straits as less and less of it becomes available for sale on the international markets. The thought of some day burning corn-based fuel in my gas tank that could have been used instead to keep small children alive somewhere is upsetting to me, so we're working on drastically cutting down the amount of extra driving we do now.
I guess there's no real purpose to this post, just a general kvetching about things that I cannot change. But at least I can see that things are changing, and because I can see I can make some adjustments to change how I live now. That's about all one can do, I suppose.
Saturday, September 1, 2007
It's a dog-eat-cookie world
I confess. I'm one of those really annoying people that babies my pets.
I pick them up and snuggle them. I let them sleep on the beds. I even bake them "cookies." Yeah, I'm afraid I'm that annoying. I don't call them dog treats, I call them "cookies." I bake the dog cookies fresh every week or so, flavoring them with whatever we have on hand that the dogs like - like bits of bacon and parmesan cheese. Or peanut butter. It's really not very difficult, and I usually pop a sheet of treats in the oven whenever I have something else baking, so it's not too inefficient, energy-wise. I used to buy treats from the store, but after the melamine pet food scare we switched to a US made dog and cat food, and I switched to baking pet treats at home instead of buying them.
The funny thing is, I used to be of the opinion that people who treated their dogs like small furry children were a few bricks shy upstairs. Now I'm doing it. I guess it's possible that I am now a few bricks shy, but I also think that maybe I have come to understand what it's like to be middle-aged with grown children who are living their own lives, and who don't really need coddling anymore. After so many years of being an active mom on a daily basis, to suddenly not be needed that way leaves a bit of an empty spot. A spot that three small loving lap dogs fill just fine. And so I get to cuddle and snuggle and bake cookies still, and life is good.
Especially for the dogs.
Here's the dog cookie recipe I baked tonight. I popped a tray of them in the oven right after the Dried Plum Walnut bread came out, so they pretty much used the residual heat from the four loaves of bread I just baked to cook.
--------------------
Bacon Parmesan Dog Treats
2 cups whole wheat flour
1/3 -1/2 cup grated, dried parmesan cheese (the kind in the green plastic tubes works good)
one fresh egg, or 2 tbsp dried egg powder
1/3 - 1/2 cup finely minced bacon bits
1/2 cup water, approximately
2 tbsp olive or other liquid oil
Medium mixing bowl
Cookie sheet, non stick or greased
Rolling wheel pizza type cutter
Mix dry ingredients together, then add wet ingredients and mix until it forms a slightly sticky dough that pulls away from the sides of the bowl. Add more water if needed - the ambient humidity and whether you used an egg or egg powder has a lot to do with how much water you will need. Grease your hands with some extra oil, and knead the dough ball briefly in the bowl until it holds together well and glistens.
Plop the dough ball onto the cookie sheet and use your still-oily hands to pat it into a thin rectangle. Use the rolling cutter to score the dough into squares - 3/4 inch on a side for toy dogs, larger for the larger breeds. (Sure, you can use those cute little dog bone cookie cutters, but take my word for it, it's a lot more work...and the dogs frankly don't care.) Pop the cookie sheet into the oven at 375 for about 10 minutes (watch it so it doesn't burn) and then shut the oven off. Let the cookies cool in the oven until they are crisp, then break them apart along the score lines. Store in a jar in the fridge, as the fat in the bacon and the cheese will make them prone to rancidity, especially in warm weather. Makes anywhere from 40-120 cracker-like training treats, depending on how small you cut them. Depending on how frugal you are when shopping for your pantry items, these probably won't cost much more, if any more, than the ready made treats in the store. And there's nothing in the ingredients list that one cannot pronounce.
I pick them up and snuggle them. I let them sleep on the beds. I even bake them "cookies." Yeah, I'm afraid I'm that annoying. I don't call them dog treats, I call them "cookies." I bake the dog cookies fresh every week or so, flavoring them with whatever we have on hand that the dogs like - like bits of bacon and parmesan cheese. Or peanut butter. It's really not very difficult, and I usually pop a sheet of treats in the oven whenever I have something else baking, so it's not too inefficient, energy-wise. I used to buy treats from the store, but after the melamine pet food scare we switched to a US made dog and cat food, and I switched to baking pet treats at home instead of buying them.
The funny thing is, I used to be of the opinion that people who treated their dogs like small furry children were a few bricks shy upstairs. Now I'm doing it. I guess it's possible that I am now a few bricks shy, but I also think that maybe I have come to understand what it's like to be middle-aged with grown children who are living their own lives, and who don't really need coddling anymore. After so many years of being an active mom on a daily basis, to suddenly not be needed that way leaves a bit of an empty spot. A spot that three small loving lap dogs fill just fine. And so I get to cuddle and snuggle and bake cookies still, and life is good.
Especially for the dogs.
Here's the dog cookie recipe I baked tonight. I popped a tray of them in the oven right after the Dried Plum Walnut bread came out, so they pretty much used the residual heat from the four loaves of bread I just baked to cook.
--------------------
Bacon Parmesan Dog Treats
2 cups whole wheat flour
1/3 -1/2 cup grated, dried parmesan cheese (the kind in the green plastic tubes works good)
one fresh egg, or 2 tbsp dried egg powder
1/3 - 1/2 cup finely minced bacon bits
1/2 cup water, approximately
2 tbsp olive or other liquid oil
Medium mixing bowl
Cookie sheet, non stick or greased
Rolling wheel pizza type cutter
Mix dry ingredients together, then add wet ingredients and mix until it forms a slightly sticky dough that pulls away from the sides of the bowl. Add more water if needed - the ambient humidity and whether you used an egg or egg powder has a lot to do with how much water you will need. Grease your hands with some extra oil, and knead the dough ball briefly in the bowl until it holds together well and glistens.
Plop the dough ball onto the cookie sheet and use your still-oily hands to pat it into a thin rectangle. Use the rolling cutter to score the dough into squares - 3/4 inch on a side for toy dogs, larger for the larger breeds. (Sure, you can use those cute little dog bone cookie cutters, but take my word for it, it's a lot more work...and the dogs frankly don't care.) Pop the cookie sheet into the oven at 375 for about 10 minutes (watch it so it doesn't burn) and then shut the oven off. Let the cookies cool in the oven until they are crisp, then break them apart along the score lines. Store in a jar in the fridge, as the fat in the bacon and the cheese will make them prone to rancidity, especially in warm weather. Makes anywhere from 40-120 cracker-like training treats, depending on how small you cut them. Depending on how frugal you are when shopping for your pantry items, these probably won't cost much more, if any more, than the ready made treats in the store. And there's nothing in the ingredients list that one cannot pronounce.
Sunday, August 26, 2007
Oh, no! Not another NatterBlog!!!!
Hello? Is anybody out there?
*crickets chirping*
Hmm, I thought not. ;-)
But that's okay. This is a simple blog more or less just for me and a small handful of people that maybe care a little about what I am up to. It's a way for me to try to write down fleeting thoughts and keep track of happenings without having to resort to putting things down on paper. (shudder)
So, why a blog? I guess the answer to that is, why not? Certainly I can't have any less to say than the other eight million blog writers out there. But why bother to say anything at all? I suppose the reason is that, having reached mid-life, I feel the need to have a good look at myself and my life. I supposed a blog is as good a way to do that as any. Whether anyone else gets anything from it remains to be seen.
*crickets chirping*
Hmm, I thought not. ;-)
But that's okay. This is a simple blog more or less just for me and a small handful of people that maybe care a little about what I am up to. It's a way for me to try to write down fleeting thoughts and keep track of happenings without having to resort to putting things down on paper. (shudder)
So, why a blog? I guess the answer to that is, why not? Certainly I can't have any less to say than the other eight million blog writers out there. But why bother to say anything at all? I suppose the reason is that, having reached mid-life, I feel the need to have a good look at myself and my life. I supposed a blog is as good a way to do that as any. Whether anyone else gets anything from it remains to be seen.
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