2012 Garden Planning – Part 9 of 9 – Water Conservation Techniques

Posted on January 27, 2012 by Christine

Note: Every Friday from December 2nd to January 27th will address how to plan your 2012 garden. If you have missed a post, simply click on the list below…

12/1 – TEOTWAWKI? Or Fear Mongering?
12/2 – Where to Begin? With the Seven Most Unsafe Foods
12/9 – What Do YOU Eat?
12/16 – Top Foods to Grow
12/23 – Yard Assessment/Plant Needs
12/30 – Companion Planting
1/6 – Creating a Planting Schematic
1/13 – Obtain seeds, plants, make schedule
1/20 – Who You Callin’ Dirty? Make Your Own Dirt!
1/27 – Water Conservation Techniques

Welcome back to the last weekly installment of 2012 Garden Planning!

So I’ve covered everything from seed selection to plotting out your garden via Excel, the benefits of ease of making your own compost and now we are at the end of the series. But last is definitely not least – you cannot grow anything without a reasonable amount of water.

Across our nation, however, water is becoming increasingly expensive. In some areas, such as a suburban setting like ours, residents often pay an ‘upcharge’ for their water – which can be far higher than the rates that city dwellers, just 20 minutes away in our case, pay.

The first ten years I lived in the hamlet of Belton (just south of Kansas City), my mother continued to insist that I must have a water leak somewhere on the property. “It just can’t be $70-$80 per month. It’s impossible. I pay $80 every four months…and that includes trash service!”

Well Mom, there isn’t any leak and yes, it really costs that much. Or it did. Before I put in some water-saving devices in the house. And actually, the first step in water conservation should start with…

Ummm…Christine? This is a post about water conservation techniques in regards to 2012 Garden Planning. Don’t you think that…

Shut up, you!

That little voice in my head has a point, so I’ll get straight to the point. You can conserve water in a number of ways. Here are the ones I know about…

Collect
Conserve
Recycle

So let’s tackle these in order, shall we?

Collect…

Collect as much of your rainwater as possible. We have had great success with rain barrels which my handy husband hooked up to the guttering that leads from our roof. In the spring and summer we can easily fill every one of the barrels in a matter of minutes during an average rainstorm.

You can pay a pretty penny buying them new, or you can easily make your own for less than $20 per barrel (that includes parts). Here is a YouTube video on MYO Rain Barrel and here is another step by step from BHG As you may have noticed, there are slight variations on the theme – in BHG’s case, they use a trash can.

We got quite a few of our barrels from Indigo Wild two years ago for just $5 each. That was a GREAT deal. Indigo Wild made a little back on their shipping costs and we got some excellent blue barrels. Fair warning, though, the barrels held lavender soap. It smelled delightful, though, truly delightful, as the rains slowly washed out the lavender bubbles into the ground. Once they had stopped producing bubbles we stopped them up and used them to store the rainwater. Indigo Wild will often advertise on Craig’s List when they have a surplus of barrels and if you are local, you will find them in the Westport area.

Conserve

Reduce Usage

Install water-saving devices in all of your toilets. We have two toilets, and have done this with just one (I had recently re-decorated and didn’t want to give up my special decorative handle on the toilet). The initial investment of the adapter kit was just $20. Here is the exact model on Amazon…

This little puppy paid for itself within the first month of use. Combined with better usage techniques (the old adage, “If its brown flush it down, if its yellow let it mellow) has meant that our water bill consistently hovers right around $55…instead of $70-$85 per month. We have had the adapter installed for over 18 months and it works great and has saved us at least $300. This offsets the cost of watering our raised beds during the summer. Before we couldn’t afford to water anything during the summer, now if we run out of water from the rain barrels (which happened during a long dry spell) we still kept our water bills reasonable (only two months of $90 each).

Last but not least, in terms of reducing usage: water in the evening or early morning, avoiding direct sun. For example, we would water our backyard plants (western exposure) early in the morning. By the time the sun made it over to the backyard, the plants had absorbed the water. We watered our front yard in the evening, after the sun had dropped low enough to cast the front yard (eastern exposure) in shadows. This, combined with watering the plants low to the ground and right at the base (instead of using water wasting sprinklers) helped further conserve what water we were using.

Other Conservation Techniques

Mulch is what I’m talking about here. Piled high around plants, it keeps the base of the plant and the soil underneath it cool and prevents moisture from escaping. Mulch could come in the form of wood chips, grass clippings, shredded paper and more.

The idea is to keep the moisture in, but not to the detriment of the plant – too much moisture, or too much mulch (tomatoes like a nice ring of mulch but want space at the main stalk – so think doughnut-shape).

Recycle Water

Do you ever have castoff water inside that could be put to better use? Instead of pouring the boiling water from pasta or potatoes down the drain – pour it into a different pan or bucket and use it to water your inside plants or plants in containers. I do the same thing with water or plain tea. If there is any left in a glass I pour it into the nearest plant.

I would love to incorporate greywater into our yard and raised beds, but at this point we don’t know enough and our house is not properly set up for this feature. Greywater is ‘gently used’ water – from showers, bathtubs, sinks and washing machines. In order to be able to use it, you must make sure you are using eco-friendly shampoos, soaps, and detergents…and no bleach!

I encourage you to read more about greywater here at Greywater Action (after looking at this site, I’m forwarding it to the hubby for serious reconsideration on our current ‘no grey water’ stand. TLC’s How Stuff Works also talks about greywater here. Take a look at it and then make your own decisions on whether or not to utilize it in your garden.

And that, folks, is all I’ve got for today. And for this series of posts…at least for now.

Thanks to my computer drive’s failure I am unable to show you my own lists and plans for 2012. Rest assured, I’ve got one and I’ll begin implementing it soon with a healthy start of seeds for early spring planting. Thanks for joining me on this 2012 Garden Planning adventure…

Happy Gardening!

Make Your Own – Pancake and Waffle Mix

Posted on January 26, 2012 by Christine

I’ve been busy evaluating every shelf of my pantry. What’s in it? What do I use? What do I really need?

Well…I can cross Bisquick off of my list. Especially now that I’ve found a recipe for it in my new Quick Fix Healthy Mix: 225 healthy and affordable mix recipes to stock your kitchen book.

It took me less than three minutes to put it together…

It called for ingredients I already had on hand, which made it extra convenient.

All Purpose Master Pancake and Waffle Mix

(makes 9 cups of mix)

4 cups all-purpose flour
4 cups whole-wheat flour
1 cup sugar (or equivalent sugar substitute)
1 1/2 Tbsp baking soda
1 Tbsp salt

You just mix it all together and store it in a covered container. I included a recipe card to re-make the recipe on the inside lid of the container and then added the following recipe to the outside of the lid…

Waffles

3 cups All Purpose Master Pancake and Waffle mix
2 cups milk or buttermilk
2 eggs
2 Tbsp sugar or equivalent sugar substitute

The recipe in the book called for only two cups of mix and also called for 1/4 cup melted butter, but I altered it. The original recipe was too runny and I didn’t like the way the butter tasted in the mix. We usually make bacon waffles – because everything is better with bacon. Cook the bacon thoroughly beforehand – then add the strips after you have poured the batter into the waffle iron.

I also added 1/2 tsp of almond extract, just for a change of pace. It imparted a light scent, but I probably should have added a full teaspoon in order to get the full impact of almond in the waffles.

Mmmm…Waffles…

So my conclusion is this. There is absolutely NO reason not to make my own pancake/waffle/baking mix. It’s simple, quick, and affordable. AND it doesn’t contain any additional, unwanted preservatives.

I checked on Amazon and I could buy Bisquick All-Purpose Baking Mix – Net Weight 80 Oz (5 lb) for $15.99. Or I could make my own mix – 72 ounces for about $1.50 worth of ingredients…hmmm…

I think I’ll go with making my own! This is one cool book to have!

Broken on Purpose

Posted on January 25, 2012 by Christine

Note: This topic may be a bit off-topic from my normal fare. My hard drive on my desktop computer died last week. I’ll be winging life for the next two weeks or so until we, hopefully, can recover all of my lost files. As a result, my brain is stuck on ‘broken’ at the moment…

I just finished watching Seth Godin’s Broken on Purpose TED talk. The phrase, ‘broken on purpose’ has been banging around in my head for a while now. And not just how Seth Godin presented it – but in general, it seems that things are broken on purpose.

It makes me wonder too, how much better we could do, as individuals, as a community, or as a nation as a whole, if things were just a little less broken.

Take our two cell phones, for example. They are the cheapest, most basic, pay as you go phones we could find. I paid $20 each for them and we purchase minutes as needed. Considering that we do not text, cannot surf the web with them, and only use them for emergencies – our phone minutes last a long time.

I had hoped to give you exact numbers, but unfortunately my hard drive crashed this past Thursday, so instead I will give you pretty accurate estimations. Take my phone for example – last September I added $50 worth of minutes to it and I have yet to run out.

I estimated at the time that I bought the phones, some four years ago, that we would be saving at least $30 per month in phone bills. I think that it is even more than that, but that really is beside the point. When I think of ‘broken on purpose’ – I think of how the purchasing structure for the phones is set up. You can buy $10 worth of minutes at a time from T-Mobile – or you can buy $100 worth of minutes. The difference? A 330% markup.

Pay $10 and get 30 minutes…at 33 cents per minute. Which expires, whether you use them or not, in 90 days.

Pay $100 and get 1000 minutes…at 10 cents per minute. And it doesn’t expire for a full year.

Now, it is all automated through the t-mobile website. It doesn’t cost the company any more or less to move the transaction through and take your money – yet the costs of making a phone call drop drastically the bigger amount of money you plunk down.

This makes me think about food deserts in inner cities. The prices for food and non-perishables in these areas can be absolutely exorbitant. The stores tell us this is due to the high rate of shoplifting.

I’ll leave that argument for another day, but, why is so much of the rest of our commerce, especially automated commerce such as T-Mobile, set up this way?

Perhaps some thought should be given to what kind of side effects this kind of business practice has on the poor. Someone who is desperate enough to pay 33 cents per minute instead of 10 cents per minute – must really need that phone, even if it is for just 30 minutes at a time.

Please don’t get me wrong, I’m not a bleeding heart liberal. I hover between hating payday loan people (I once told a friend who was considering opening one that it would be an immoral business to own and not to do it) and being certain that anyone who uses a service like that is a complete fool. But you have to wonder sometimes, how terribly hard it must be to break out of that cycle once it has begun.

You do a payday loan ‘just this once’ and find yourself with less the next paycheck than you had hoped. So, you buy just $10 worth of minutes on t-mobile, because the rest needs to be used for rent and grocery money. And you buy the crap in the grocery store because the good food is horrendously expensive and who has time to make it from scratch after working for nine hours and being on the bus (or walking) another two more?

It makes me see how quickly a person’s world can become surrounded and infused by ‘broken on purpose’ things. And how those things can lead to what is essentially a broken existence, where one spends an inordinate amount of time treading water, or taking two steps back for every one step forward.

I’m not suggesting that legislation is in order. Instead, I’m suggesting that as individuals who live in a community – and especially those who are of the entrepreneurial spirit – that we ask for and accept not ‘however much we can get’ and instead charge a fair price, a fair profit, for the materials we sell.

I worried that, at $3 per dozen, I was charging too much for eggs. Until one of my clients told me that the organic eggs she had purchased cost her $4.50 per dozen. I briefly considered raising my prices and then dismissed it. $3 per dozen was just fine for me – and it meant that they were affordable and reasonably priced.

I’ve had a lot of personal experience with living at or below the poverty line. The last thing I want to do is contribute to the problem. It reminds me of another article I saw recently…5 Stupid Habits You Develop Growing Up Poor. I’ve been guilty of a several of them at one time or other during my life. And it reminds me, at the start of this new year, to:

Spend responsibly
Save AND invest in myself (through education/learning/books)
Consider my effect on others (am I leading by example?)
Try and fix what’s broken

That last one is a doozy. How do we fix what is broken on purpose? Can we fix it? I believe that we can by voting with our feet and changing our own behavior and spending patterns.

What do you think?

Cheese? No…First We Start With Butter!

Posted on January 24, 2012 by Christine

Embarrassingly, I have no pictures to show you of my first experience making butter. Perhaps that is a good thing. You would have seen me waving my arms about like an excited little monkey, especially when the buttermilk came flooding out of the food processor…

So I dove into my new book, The Complete Guide to Making Cheese, Butter, and Yogurt at Home: Everything You Need to Know Explained Simply (Back to Basics Cooking). And although my intent had been to start with cheese, Chapter 3 caught my interest. Why not start with making butter?

It looked simple enough…1 quart of heavy cream and 1/2 teaspoon salt (optional). The book suggested either a clear glass jar or even a food processor. I decided I would try the food processor. Next time I’ll just shake it up in a jar and probably save myself a lot of mess.

A food processor, or even a blender, will make short work of it as well. To the tune of about thirty seconds of blending…max.

You start with heavy cream, and end up with butter and buttermilk.

My food processor was at capacity, so it ended up spewing some of the buttermilk out. Dave was present and as I waved my hands about, squealed in panic and tried to mop up the mess – he calmly suggested I use the ‘off’ button.

Oh, yeah, that did the trick!

After you have the butter and buttermilk, you aren’t quite done.

Pour through a fine mesh strainer.
Then take the cheese mixture and strain once again, this time through a double layer of cheesecloth.

I used a wooden spoon to push the rest of the buttermilk out of the butter. It took a few minutes. I didn’t add the salt and honestly, I don’t miss it. I think I will go salt-free on my butter for now.

I ended up with 1.5 pounds of butter and 1 – 3/4 cups of buttermilk. It would have been two if I hadn’t have panicked when it started coming out of the food processor.

So now, let’s talk price point for a minute.

A quart of heavy cream cost me $4.38 at HyVee. I can probably get that down by $1.00 if I buy it at Aldi’s.

Now, the best price I can find on butter these days is $1.99 per pound for the store brand. So I spent $4.38 for $3.00 worth of butter.

Geez, that’s not sounding too good. At least, not until you figure in the buttermilk bread.

With my nearly two cups of buttermilk (which will be fully two cups next time I do this) I made six one pound loaves of buttermilk bread.

So, just say you were to buy those six loaves of buttermilk bread pre-baked in a store. And say you paid $2 each for them, that would a total of $12…plus the $3 worth of butter made, that means that for an investment of $5.00 I have produced $15.00 worth of butter and bread.

And yes, before you ask it, I also looked at time spent.

10-15 minutes for the butter
5 minutes prepping the dough, 1 minute checking on it, 1 minute dusting and cutting out a loaf, and 2-3 minutes total checking on it when baking

That’s not a lot, folks. The Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day: The Discovery That Revolutionizes Home Baking has a great buttermilk bread recipe…buy the book and check it out!

Sleepless Night Yields a List of Goals…and one knocked out of the way

Posted on January 23, 2012 by Christine

I’ve been trying to get up an hour earlier, at 4-4:30 a.m., in what has become a seemingly futile attempt to work on Book 2 of War’s End. This means that I am often asleep as early as 8pm.

The other night, I was unconscious by 8:15, only to wake up at midnight, unable to sleep. My rule is that I have to lay in bed for at least 30 minutes and try to go back to sleep. It didn’t work, so at 12:30 a.m., I was wide awake and…not into writing on War’s End.

Instead, my brain was swimming with all of the things I hope to learn this year. My list of goals was two pages in length, but here is the applicable (to this blog) side of it…

Food and Cooking

Learn how to make condiments, salad dressings, bread crumbs, sauces, vinegars and basic mixes
- ketchup, mustard, ponzu
- 2-3 different salad dressings
- White and red wine vinegar, white vinegar, apple cider vinegar and more
- Make my own alfredo sauce, and find a good recipe for a spaghetti sauce we can use
- Master bread-making and replace bread purchases entirely with homemade bread
- Master dairy needs such as: sour cream, yogurt, crème fraiche, and cheese (mozzarella, cheddar, cream cheese, and more)
- Go through cookbooks and make a new recipe each week
- Make the switch to raw/farm-produced milk (goat or cow)
- Create homemade cereals that E will eat and move away from commercial cereals
- Make some snack foods – “cereal bars”, crackers, chips, trail mixes that Dave and E will eat
- Make 2-3 new sodas from Making Soda book

Gardening & Yard

Install a tree-friendly treehouse around willow for Emily
Plant red clover for bees in grassy areas and wildflowers in front yard
Install metal cans on fences for growing herbs and edible flowers (2×4 board w/hooks or brackets of some kind for cans)
Master the art of growing broccoli, cauliflower and Brussels sprouts
Master the art of growing sprouts indoors in the volumes we need
Install two potato towers (made of painted tires) in yard
Install two new raised beds in new mulched area w/stepping stumps
Produce at least three hundred pounds of produce this year
Figure out the pH needs of the cherry and blueberry bushes and get them growing and producing

Household & Organizing

Organize basement crafts and basement bedroom (install more cabinetry on walls?)
Organize emergency food and supplies (see specific list)
Organize and label hall closet (perhaps put canning supplies in there?)
Organize garage – should be for Dave’s homebrewing and a ‘work’ area of sorts for house and outdoor projects
Alter curtain in hall bathroom closet to provide easier access to closet
Begin replacing store bought items with homemade items: shampoo, body wash, conditioner, soap, lip balm, lotion & laundry detergent
Switch to Tom’s of Maine toothpaste after last of toothpaste containers runs out
Organize master closet

Money/Business/Teaching Classes

Increase class offerings: more DIY classes (DIY dairy, DIY condiments)
Switch from purchased cleaning products to making my own natural and organic ones – start with glass cleaner and ‘soft scrub’. Will also need to make a disinfecting toilet spray
Reduce household spending by half and reduce grocery expenses to $300 per month (currently approximately $500)

And I’ve already got one on the list done and another in the works!

Here is my hall closet…

A jumble of blankets, outgrown stuff, and table linens were stuffed inside it.

The doorway is cramped and the closet is hard to get into. Basically, we don’t use any of these linens because we, a) keep shoving stuff in willy-nilly (I blame my husband for this – unreasonably, but I still blame him), and b) can’t fit into the space well at all.

I pulled everything out and realized that most of it is stuff I don’t even use and the rest could be put in more strategic locations to ensure it will be used in the future.

I decided to revamp the hall closet and, although it is a distance from the kitchen, store my canning jars inside it…

I’m still trying to figure out what to do with the top shelf.

This is much better than going out into the freezing cold garage and trying to reach bottles stacked haphazardly on open wire shelves. It also frees up space in the garage for a small indoor gardening supply section.

I’ve also started some apple cider vinegar. I’m unsure if it will work out, because I used some cans of Great Value apple juice. Now I couldn’t find anything saying if it had been pasteurized, but it does say it was made from concentrate…

I’ll be attaching the cheesecloth with rubber bands. I’ll keep you updated on whether the venture is successful…or not!

2012 Garden Planning – Part 8 of 9 – Who You Callin’ Dirty?

Posted on January 20, 2012 by Christine

Note: Every Friday from December 2nd to January 27th will address how to plan your 2012 garden. If you have missed a post, simply click on the list below…

Welcome back to the weekly installment of 2012 Garden Planning!

Dirt…who knew the stuff could be so expensive…or so cheap.

Wait, Christine, what? Is it expensive or cheap?

Well your cost depends on a number of factors – time, space, and willingness

If you have the money and not a lot of time, sure, go to the nursery or local Home Depot or Lowe’s and buy some big bags of organic dirt that promises (according to the pictures on the front) to sprout your seeds from nothing into luscious, gorgeous plants practically overnight. You will spend a pretty penny, but surely it is worth it! Right?

If you have a big enough yard and lots of raised beds, you could get a load of dirt delivered. This is a ‘catch as catch can’ – although I have had pretty good luck with folks delivering dirt to me. I’ve found them through Craig’s List and the dirt is usually rather high quality. Some dirt I received ‘from a bean field’ had plenty of seeds in it and they sprouted and grew a crop of pickling cucumbers right before first frost. Beans, cucumbers, whatever – I got free plants out of the deal!

Now if you are in a hurry, I totally understand. Get some dirt – in bags, delivered in a heap, whatever. But take the time now to think about next year, or later on in the season, and create a place for your own homemade dirt.

Note: I use dirt and compost interchangeably through this. To me, it is the same. It all goes on my plants. Ergo…

It also goes without saying that you need some space for this. Not a lot, but at least a three foot by three foot space is a good start. We built a large raised bed in one corner of our yard. It is approximately 3 1/2 feet deep by about 20 foot wide. Half of it has perennial plants in it, and the other half is our compost pile.

We put the following in the pile:

Full vacuum bags (this occasionally yields non-organic items, such as beads or non-organic fluff, but for the most part it is made up of human hair, animal fur and dirt)
Tea bags, coffee grounds and the paper towels I use to filter with
Any vegetable, fruit or herb leavings I don’t feed to the chickens (apple and potato peelings, anything badly rotten – chop it up small, folks)
Dryer lint
Paper products (used Kleenex and paper towels – nothing with grease, however)
Goat or rabbit manure (I pick it up from a local source)
Chicken house litter (mainly composed of shredded paper and chicken poo)

You could also add leaves, but exclude black walnut leaves, they have a compound that inhibits plant growth.

During the warm months we regularly wet this down if it has been too dry and try to turn it daily. You don’t want your compost too wet, that would slow down the rotting process. The ‘turning’ requires a pitchfork and a bit of a workout for the upper arm muscles.

Compost is hot, folks. The process of obtaining a finished product means that it ‘cooks’ and is actually warm, if not hot, to the touch. So its best not to put this right up against the side of your house. Capiche?

Done right, compost can be ‘done’ in about 6-8 weeks. You will know it is done by the texture and feel of it. The ‘parts’ that went into it become no longer identifiable. It will be loose, dark in color, and have no bad odor.

Congratulations…you have made dirt. Now go stick a plant in it and get to growing!

Last summer our Honduran neighbors in the house to the south of us finally caught the gardening bug. They put together four raised beds and one of their sons brought by some very special, very expensive mushroom and bat guano dirt. Seriously, that’s what it said on the package. They filled three of the raised beds, but ran out of the ‘special dirt’.

Dave, ever helpful, brought over two wheelbarrow loads of our compost and put it in the 4th bed – the neighbors eyed it with apprehension. A few weeks later? Bed #4 had foot high plants while the ‘special’ dirt beds were just a few inches high. Our homemade compost outperformed the purchased dirt by leaps and bounds!

So, who you callin’ dirty? Make your own dirt!

Next week we will wrap up the series with a discussion water conservation techniques. See you then!

Helpful books…

Oh…Cheese

Posted on January 19, 2012 by Christine

Years ago, in my college biology class we had labs that were tied to the classroom experience. Some of them were ‘in the lab’ and at least two were ‘from home’. In one, we measured some kind of difference with plant growth – dark versus light exposure or water versus no water. Real basic, real simple.

The second ‘at home’ lab was making cheese. The instructor was quick to point out that you didn’t need to be successful at making cheese – but instead to simply try and follow the directions.

I bought the rennet, followed the directions, and failed miserably. And that, folks, is my entire experience to date making cheese.

Now I’ve been thinking of learning how to make cheese off and on ever since. Especially recently with prices rising on everything, I can’t help but dwell on it. Could I make tasty cheese for half or even 1/4 the price?

Organic, natural living aside for a moment – I’m a busy woman, I need it to have some kind of super-savings, or super-flavor, for me to consider taking up more of my time making something that I can easily buy at the store.

The first thing I needed to do was create a price point comparison. No, I’m not kidding. Don’t you folks all do the same thing? ;-> (yes, I know I’m obsessive)

I Googled: how do you make mozzarella cheese

One of my favorite sites popped up – Instructables – I LOVE this site. The specific link was How to Make Great Mozzarella Cheese.

The ingredient list consisted of:

1 gallon milk
1 rennet tablet
2 teaspoons citric acid
water and supplies

Okay, so right there…milk. That stopped me in my tracks. Milk is currently over $4 per gallon here. As I paged through each step on the Instructables website, I looked for anything that would tell me how much cheese I would end up with. It looks as if I can expect somewhere between 1-2 pounds of cheese per gallon of milk.

Now…I can get milk from any Aldi’s on the Kansas side for $1.99 per gallon.

I then turned to the task of obtaining rennet. Amazon has really become a great source for all kinds of things – and at reasonable prices when you consider that no travel (at 21mpg in my van) and no taxes are involved.

I found an Junket rennet tablets for custard and ice cream – 8 Ea
available for just $3.99. Or you can buy the combination suggested below for just $15.94 plus shipping.

If you are really serious about cheese-making, consider getting the Junket Rennet Tablets 8 Ct. – 12 Unit Pack
which at 24.99, nearly cuts in half the price point for rennet.

Citric acid drops quickly in price if you buy in bulk. You can get Citric Acid 100% Pure 4 Ounces
for about $5.46, Now Foods Citric Acid, 1 -Pound
for 12.87, and Spicy World Citric Acid, 5-Pound
for $19.23.

And then there is the whole Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25…

Obsess much, Christine?

Shut up, you!

For now, I’m settling for the simple tri-pack of rennet, citric acid and cheesecloth…along with this book

The tri-pack should be enough to get me started and later, if I’m successful and totally cheese-obsessed I can go for the bulk purchases.

What caught my eye about this book, though, is the idea of making my own butter as well, which is currently $1.99 a pound best price, and often far more expensive than that. Not to mention the idea of making yogurt. It might take a while to get Emily into it – I made the mistake of introducing her to the Go-Gurt type yogurts (full of sugar, artificial flavorings and covered in cartoon characters) and she doesn’t like the taste of other more healthful yogurts.

And of course, I will be reporting on my successes (and failures) as we go along. Stay tuned!

Chicken Update – Just Look at Those Birds!

Posted on January 18, 2012 by Christine

With Dave at work full-time, and my steadfast refusal to fill what I deemed as a confusing and difficult water container, the birds have been regularly running out of water.

Now before you start waving your fists and calling me a bad chicken mama, I’ll add this…I’ve opened the gate and they have full access to the pond. As long as no bird-brained idiot falls in, they are just fine drinking out of that.

Dave and I have our passive-aggressive moments, although he usually says, “Passive? To hell with that, it’s just plain aggressive!” The water issue definitely became a bone of contention.

We had started with a one gallon watering container that I found reasonably easy to use. We then transitioned to a 3-gallon container whose workings seemed weird, messy and confusing. So I stopped using it. I tried a couple of times, never really understood it, got messy when I didn’t want to be messy and put my foot down. He wanted it, he had to fill it.

And that wasn’t a problem until he: a) started working full-time, and b) was away before the sun rose and returned after it had set (negating any possibility of chicken care during the work week).

A week or so ago I stomped my foot regally and insisted he “fix the chicken water problem.” The 3-gallon waterer lasted maybe three days before it was out, chickens had taken over our backyard, and I wasn’t budging in my resistant stand (heck, I read Dr. Seuss’s story The Zax from the Sneetches and Other Stories, I could be just as intractable as those doggone Zax had been). Dave must have realized that the end of the world would come and I’d still be just as stubborn as ever, so for the chickens’ sake, he bought a 5-gallon watering container and also fixed the 3-gallon container, whose top piece had popped off.

Now the girls will have 8 gallons of water available, which should be plenty to last them through the week.

He also installed another roost, so that they have plenty of room inside at night. Chickens like to be elevated, it makes them feel safer.

And speaking of elevation…here is Emily, climbing about in what will be her future treehouse. I just know her daddy will build her a fantastic one…I’m drawing up the schematic in Excel as we speak…

So which am I…passive…or aggressive?

Hmmmm….

Gun Control – What’s YOUR Stand On It?

Posted on January 17, 2012 by Christine

There are few other topics that will ignite a passion in people for or against like the topic of gun control. I had forgotten this, and was taken by surprise when one of my clients reacted almost violently to the topic.

I can’t say how we got on the subject – I think it had evolved from politics (another doozie of a hot topic) but somehow we began to talk about guns and gun ownership. Now my client hails from Australia, which has significant gun control, and she said, “The only people who have guns are some farmers, and you have to show a very good reason why you need a gun for your farm (hello…dingoes, anyone?), the police, and criminals. No one else should have a gun. Why would you need a gun?”

I will admit, I didn’t expect as strong a response as the one she gave. She was practically shaking at the thought of how here in the United States, at least here in Missouri (not sure about laws in other states), that to my knowledge, most gun ownership does not require a permit unless you are talking about a conceal and carry.

I held back from telling her that the number of guns in this country outnumbers the citizens by about 3 to 1.

Instead, I tried to use an example. “Did you hear on the news about the young woman who shot and killed an intruder who was armed with a knife, with her alone in the house with a 3 month old child?” She hadn’t, and I gave her some of the details of the situation as I had heard of them on ABC News.

Her response?

“That dispatcher shouldn’t have told her that (that she had the right to defend her child), she should have told her to aim for his leg.”

Now the poor woman (my client) was already nervous enough about the subject of guns. I certainly was not going to ruffle her feathers with a lesson on how difficult it would be to wing someone when they are coming in a door with a knife in hand and aiming to disarm, injure, and probably kill you. This isn’t the movies folks, it takes a lot to stop someone – and if I had been her, I would have been aiming center mass.

What shook me about this whole conversation was the drastic disparity in belief systems. If someone broke into my house with a weapon, I would automatically assume it was a life or death situation and believe me, I intend on surviving it. And while it would be horrendous and emotionally devastating to take a life, I would absolutely do it in order to defend my life, and the lives of those in my care.

She assured me that she too would defend her children to her dying breath. I couldn’t help thinking that would come far quicker than my way of handling things, but there you go.

She comes from a culture where guns are not widespread, not a perceived ‘right’, and dangerous as hell. She shook her head at my description of responsible gun ownership – which I have firmly in place from my memories of growing up in my dad’s house where weapons had a respected and known presence.

I look at gun ownership as one of our essential freedoms in this country – whether I choose to own one or not – but I’m curious, what do YOU think?

Comment, send me a email through the Contact Me or start a new topic in the forum. I’d like to hear your thoughts on this subject.

Tempura Batter – And Those “Oh…Duh” Moments

Posted on January 16, 2012 by Christine

Well, strip me naked and beat with a limp noodle.

On second thought, don’t, the image (even to my twisted and slightly off-kilter mind) is far too…unsuitable…for the masses.

So the other day, Dave emails me and asks, “What are we having for dinner?”

I gave him my usual response, “I don’t know, what are you planning on cooking?”

Is it bad that I don’t cook dinner for my husband? I mean, I do most of the laundry and the cleaning, but I just refuse to cook dinner. Have I lost points in your eyes? Have I? Have I?

His response back was a long-suffering (yet digital) sigh, “I’ll fix orange chicken. I’ll stop by the grocery store and pick up tempura batter on the way home.”

And let me tell you, that orange chicken was excellent, it truly was. It was so yummy that we (me in other words, the royal ‘we’) decided we had to have Dave make tempura again, just a few days later. This time I went to a different store (okay, okay, the evil empire known as Wal-Mart) and found a different kind of tempura there. I bought two boxes, clucking over the price of $1.84 per box. It seemed like an awful lot to be spending on batter mix and it made me curious, how do you make tempura batter from scratch?

Life can be hectic, and I’ve got a lot of irons in the proverbial fire. So it did not pop back into my brain to find out the answer to my question until several days later.

I Googled it – make your own tempura batter

The results were…embarrassing. Now the recipes vary, by leaps and bounds, but I just sat there and thought, “Oh…duh.”

Here is one of the recipes…

Ingredients:

1 egg

1 cup ice water/cold water

1 cup all purpose flour, sifted

Preparation:

Beat an egg in a bowl. Add ice water in the bowl. Be sure to use very cold water. Add sifted flour in the bowl and mix lightly. Be careful not to overmix the batter.

Yeah…embarrassing.

So, to recap. I spent $1.84 on a box of flour with, according to the ingredients on the box, a little bit of corn starch added in.

Are you kidding me?! It would cost me, what, 20 cents to make this?! Highway robbery!

Now the recipes are, as I said, numerous. Here is a great link to a plethora of them…

I am stunned over the price of my ignorance. It isn’t hard to add two or three ingredients together, mix this up, and use it. Yet here I was, and have been, spending a huge percentage more on something that took me: a) seconds to look up, and b) pennies and all of two minutes to create on my own.

It is at moments like this when I truly wonder if I was living under a rock for 35+ years. Surely no one else besides me has managed to get to the age of 41 without figuring these things out.

Surely every one of you is having a nice little laugh at my expense right now.

“Why Christine, didn’t you know that tempura batter is the easiest thing in the world to make? Why in the world would you pay over nine times as much to pull it out of a box and STILL have to prepare it?”

Grrrr….

I’m taking my toys and going home now…to pout.

p.s. Dave heard my rant about tempura batter and put together the following feast…

I think the man is certifiable. There is only two adults and one child in this house! There was sweet potato, onion, broccoli and shrimp with an array of sauces: orange, ponzu, blue cheese, and homemade mayo. Mmmm…

We ate our fill, and here is what was left…

Leftovers, anyone?

The Deadly Nightshade

"I don't like grass. I'm not a cow, I can't eat it." – Christine