May 20, 2012 at 7:49 pm (green living, You must try this)
Come buy it! Gardens, root cellar, and all! See the full listing here.
The only reason we even considered leaving this house is because we found a passive solar home on the edge of a forest. The new place is pretty amazing – it would have to be to top the current place – and we’ve been trying to buy it since November. (Short sales…fuguddaboudit)
April 22, 2012 at 6:41 pm (Cooking, local food, Musings)
Dinner tonight was accomplished in about 15 minutes, largely by opening cans and jars. Honestly – it feels like cheating. But it’s all good stuff: tomato sauce (commercial, but local from small farms), home canned diced tomatoes and smoked pork, and hominy (no idea where from, but it’s just corn – no weird ingredients). Oh, and a huge double handful of fresh spinach from the garden, and some chili powder and cumin. Bring to a boil, drop in the thermal pot sleeve, and let “steep” for ten minutes. Way yummy – and basically instant.
I’ve been thinking a lot about instant food lately, sparked largely by my tour of the Jiffy Mix factory in nearby Chelsea, MI. It’s an awesome tour – I highly recommend it if you like seeing how things are made. (Coolest factoid of the tour, for me: they build the box around the paper liner!) I also couldn’t resist buying the “Tour sampler pack” of 24 little blue boxes of mix. Muffins, cakes, cornbread, biscuits, pizza dough – all for 50 cents a box. I made the cornbread a couple nights ago as a snack – good gravy, that stuff is addictive! Light, sweet, with an amazing crackly crust because I baked it in cast iron. And it was so easy to make: dump in bowl, add an egg and a sploosh of milk, stir, bake for 10 minutes.
And it hit me: no wonder people buy this stuff. It’s so easy.
But…it’s sweet and airy because the flour is white, the corn degerminated, and a fair dose of sugar added. Seriously overpackaged. The muffins, especially, are full of artificial flavor and color – things I would rather not eat at all.
I think a lot of us homesteader types value work and time-on-task because difficulty stands as a proxy for other values, like anti-commercialism, quality, and “homemade-ness.” But if I think about tonight’s dinner, I wonder, where is the balance between arduous doing-it-yourself and convenience? Tonight’s dinner was not a lot of work…tonight. There was plenty of work that went in at other times, though: when I canned the tomatoes, when I stewed the pork. But you know what? It’s worth it. It’s not money in the bank; it’s time in the pantry. Sealed in a jar and banked for use on a night when I desperately need wholesome, high-quality food with a minimum expenditure of energy.
And that’s got me thinking about my own Jiffy mixes. Measure corn meal, flour, baking soda, salt, and maybe buttermilk powder into a pint jar…just add an egg and water and bake! Or vegan gingerbread: flour, brown sugar, spices, baking soda…just add oil and soy milk. You could whip up half a dozen jars in the time it takes to make the recipe once…and then you’d have it there and ready to go. No recipe, no thought, no measuring…and no artificial ingredients, white flour, or other things best left on the “treat” menu.
April 17, 2012 at 6:22 pm (Health, Musings)
There’s an exit off I-90 in western New York for “Lackawanna,” and it’s always sounded to me like an extreme case of lethargy – “wanna” being the desire to do, be, or obtain anything. I’ve definitely been feeling some lackawanna lately, largely due to the pilot roll-out of a monumental, complex, and difficult year-long project at work. Add to that the ongoing (or stagnant) effort to buy a particularly wonderful house in the woods (a process which started over six months ago), and I tell ya: I’m tired, physically and emotionally.
The rollout was April 3, and I keep waiting for my wanna to come back. It’s taking its own sweet time, I tell ya. Several weekends have gone by with absolutely no desire to garden, cook, see people, talk with friends, or anything else fun – let alone not-fun stuff like cleaning the house, sorting out closets, or doing the taxes.
This is such a strange feeling. Think of the thing you most like. Chocolate? Sex? Watching your kids play? Now imagine absolutely not caring if you ever experienced that thing again. It’s like waking up in somebody else’s body. You hardly recognize yourself. I think it’s only hit me the last couple weeks because the previous few months, I’ve been so busy and tired that my entire emotional range was “muscle through work,” “come home and hide,” and “asleep.”
But now I know I’m starting to get back to the place I like to live my life. How do I know?
Friday, I didn’t want or need ten hours of sleep – for the first time in at least a month.
Saturday, I stuck my digging fork into the compost pile, unearthed wriggling knots of happy earthworms, and smiled that I had helped make that compost happen.
Sunday, I ran my fingers through the dirt of my garden, and thought it might be nice to put some seeds into it.
Yesterday, I decided I wanted to see some pansies blooming at the front of the house.
Today, along with the pansies, I couldn’t resist buying onion plants and poking them into the ground. And the avocados I bought over the weekend are ripe, and making guacamole sounds like fun, not a chore.
My physical stamina is still low – an hour of slow puttering in the garden feels like an aerobic workout – but that should return quickly now that the major source of stress is gone.
So maybe it’s time to leave Lackawanna and head back to my usual homestead!
April 5, 2012 at 6:01 pm (Food security, Food preservation, Root cellar)
Tags: Root cellar
I have something like 50 pounds of potatoes sprouting madly in the root cellar! What should I do with them, besides plant them?
On a side note, all of the Kennebecs are sprouting, but very few of the Yellow Finns are.
March 12, 2012 at 9:08 am (Community, Food origins, local food, Preserving Traditions)
Really fun Preserving Traditions event yesterday – maple syrup tasting! See all the details at the PT blog: http://preservingtraditions.wordpress.com/2012/03/11/maple-syrup-tasting-notes/
February 16, 2012 at 6:42 pm (local food, You must try this)
For a Valentine’s Day date, Scott and I went to La Marsa in Ann Arbor – and WOW, was it good! Feeling celebratory – and a bit ambitious – we got the “Sampler Platter for Two.” Here’s the breakdown:
<understatement>None of it was at all bad.</understatement>
There was also just a ton of food. It should have said “for six” – because after eating until we were stuffed, we took home (no kidding) three and a half POUNDS of leftovers. I had two lunches out of the salads, spreads, bread, and some of the meat, and tonight, we chopped up the grilled vegetables, meat, some extra cabbage, and some cooked rice and had a really tasty stir-fry. Which will probably also be my lunch again tomorrow. 
So, very tasty, and highly recommended. And hey – does anyone know if Halal rules guide how the animals were raised, or just how they are slaughtered?
February 5, 2012 at 11:31 am (Community)
Ok – tapping the VURD*. What are your favorite resources that facilitate sharing, swapping, bartering, etc.? My homemade noodles for your homemade socks; my oil for your grain; I’ll grow the tomatoes and you can them…that sort of thing.
(*”Vast Unpaid Research Department”)
February 2, 2012 at 11:30 am (Community, Food origins, local food)
Hi folks – Wanted southern Michigan folks to know that there’s a new root and grain CSA starting up: Stone Soup CSA. The food will be grown organically by a cooperative of Amish farmers near Homer (Shettlers, who sell at the A2 farmers market are one of the families).
The CSA will include:
I don’t know the specific varieties, but all will be “good keepers.”
My spin on this: I would like to organize the use of grain mills for members. I have two mills, and am hoping others would be willing to bring theirs, to a central location (probably the Pittsfield Grange) on pick-up days to mill grains into flour. So don’t let your lack of a grain mill impede keep you from getting in on this winter staple CSA! If there is interest, I might also pick up an oat roller (to turn groats into oatmeal).
Please let me know in thecomments if you are interested, if you can bring a grain mill or roller/flaker, and what you’re interested in milling.
I imagine on pick-up day, we could also arrange swaps of popcorn for wheat, onions for corn, etc.
Please note: I AM NOT ORGANIZING THE CSA. I’m just organizing grinding for members. Contact Shana at http://www.localharvest.org/stone-stoup-grains-and-roots-csa-M49390 for information and sign-up.
January 24, 2012 at 7:31 pm (Uncategorized)
Some foods store better than others. What foods do you think are so awful in any preserved form that you’ll only eat them fresh?
January 17, 2012 at 4:36 pm (Food preservation, Musings)
I’ve been hearing a lot about Bake the Bread, Buy the Butter by Jennifer Reese. (Sharon Astyk has a nice review posted today.) I want to read the whole thing soon, and see what her conclusions are. One item mentioned in the review above mystifies me: Reese thinks Del Monte peaches are as good as home-canned. Not a chance! But then, she apparently thinks all canning is too hard to bother with, so that would definitely color one’s opinion of whether home-canned peaches are “worth it.”
If anyone’s still out there reading this blog, tell me – what do you find you find “worth it” to make yourself, and what would you prefer to buy? What kitchen/garden tasks are fun to you, and which do you abhor?
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