"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.
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
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.
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