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?
Make the ___, buy the ___
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?
Feeling Philosophical: Start of a New Cycle
January 5, 2012 at 8:29 pm (Musings)
I’ve been going whole-hog on local foods, gardening, and blogging for about four years now. And you know what? I’ve “done that” now. It is hard to think of things to write about, hard to think of experiments that seem pertinent and fun. Even reading other blogs about local food are getting pretty dull. “My first all-local meal” just isn’t newsworthy anymore.
We’ve settled into a routine here, and I like it. I grow probably 75% of our produce: all our potatoes, squash, sweet potatoes, onions, garlic, greens, green beans, cucumbers, and snow peas. I can grow, trade for, or buy our tomatoes and salsa fixings within a mile of the house. Most of the rest of the produce we buy – cabbage, beets, parsnips, some carrots, fruit – come from nearby farms. I don’t feel much more of a need to experiment with growing methods, varieties, or weird vegetables, nor is “how many calories can I grow in 750 square feet” still an interesting question.
The meat we eat at home is 95% local and pastured – the other 5% is canned salmon and fancy salamis that we buy as a treat. Our dairy is local, non-homogenized, and packed in glass, and my sweetie uses it to make his yogurt. Local fruit becomes jam to sweeten that. Even our Friday night pizza is pretty close-to-home deal: home-ground local wheat, topped with regional sauce and cheese. And occasionally olives, from wherever olives come from.
The only things we buy in any quantity that are not “from here” are rice, carrots, avocadoes, raisins, chocolate, bread (I’ve tried and it’s just not right for sandwiches), olive oil, and our weekly (essentially vegetarian) sushi date. We love what we eat, and we feel good about where and how it is produced. We are quite healthy (especially when I pay closer attention to my food sensitivities) and are not setting ourselves up for cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and the like.
Our home energy usage has plateaued at around 40% of US average, if you don’t count that required work trip to Europe last year. I’ve tried pretty much every technique I can think of and am willing to explore. (Sorry; that does not currently include moving closer to work, keeping the house at 50 degrees, or never seeing my far-flung family again.)
So I think I’ve said pretty much everything I have to say about these topics, at least for the time being.
As I look around and ask myself “What’s next?” here’s what I find myself thinking about:
My life has been very gogogo for several years now. For some people, this is what makes life worth living. But, while I love solving problems and exploring various ways of sustaining a home, that constant effort is not, itself, sustainable for me. However, I feel like all the experimentation of the last few years has given me a solid base for a sustainable life. Now that I’ve got water, food, shelter, and heat figured out, it’s time to address the rest of the things that make up Life.
I want to hear the heartbeat of the land again. This used to be part of my daily existence, when we lived in a forest outside Kalamazoo, and though I’ve acclimated to the bright sunshine of life on a busy country road, I miss the forest terribly. Not just the trees and shade: the rhythms. Every place has its own character – the amplitude and frequency of the sine wave of its soul. Cities tend to have faster, sharper energy – that’s what can make them exciting places to live. The country moves slower, but can still have pretty sharp edges from the roads and tractors and chemicals and depleted soils. Forests tend to have longer, slower waveforms to their personalities – if you tune in, it makes it very easy to slow down, take a deep breath, and smell the maple leaves.
I often think our current house is too noisy – road noise, the fan on the fireplace, the furnace, the radon fan. But what I want is not silence; it’s tranquility. Have you ever noticed that tranquility can invade your home through an open window the same way a noise can? Have you ever been in a space that not only allows you to relax, but actually makes it difficult to remember what you were so stressed out about on the other side of the door? I remember all that, and I want to find it again. I want to re-learn my own soul and re-find my center. And I think when I do that, I’ll know what I want to do next.
I think a new pattern is emerging for me, and like timing your entrance into the swing of a jump rope, it will take time to see what the pattern is before I can join it. I want to learn about watersheds. I want to garden with trees, which will first require I watch patterns of sunlight and water and wind for an entire year. I want to explore community in a different way than just teaching isolated classes. I want to think about spirit and life and making a living and being with people I love. Mostly, though, I want to wait and see what the new pattern is.
I don’t think I’ll find it in spreadsheets, or how-to manuals, or excessive exertion of will. I think I’ll find it while daydreaming in a sunbeam, while canning tomatoes, while harvesting peas, and while tapping other ways of knowing outside of using my “thinky brain.” The heart and the gut can know, as well. And the people, places, and spirits you love can provide insights, if you listen to them.
I don’t think that that sort of thing lends itself well to sharing on a blog. Certainly not this blog! So I hope you’ll forgive me if I remain a bit mum about all that. I may still post here from time to time – if we get the new house, I think restoring the passive solar rock pile could be a great topic for this blog – but I think I’m more or less ready to mothball Eat Close To Home.
But hey…anything could happen. 
Maybe I’ll see you around.
How to downsize a transport network: the Chinese wheelbarrow | Energy Bulletin
January 5, 2012 at 4:10 pm (Energy, green living)
Ok – I totally, TOTALLY want a Chinese wheelbarrow now! Especially if I’m going to need to schlep yards of dirt into my new garden…down a narrow, winding path on a hill.
How to downsize a transport network: the Chinese wheelbarrow | Energy Bulletin.
Pressure cooker review: Why didn’t I get one of these years ago?
January 3, 2012 at 9:33 am (Gear)
I know tons of people who love their pressure cookers. I’ve heard the great stories of 12-minute beef stew and the energy savings. It’s just never made it to the top of the list. Well – it finally did, and now I wonder what took me so long!
Get at leat the 6 quart - you can't fill it as full as a regular soup pot.
I got the Presto 6-qt stainless steel pressure cooker. I chose the Presto over the Mirro and the Fagor available at my local store because the Fagor seemed to have extra plastic switches and such that seemed less likely to last the rest of my natural life, and the saleslady said Mirro quits making parts for old models every 10 years or so. Presto, on the other hand, has changed their design little enough that it’s still easy to find parts for 30 year old pots. I’m not 100% sure, but it might use the same weight as my Presto pressure canner.
I’ve done two trials so far, and am quite happy with it. First, I made brown rice. This requires a “pot-in-pot” method, according to the manual. You put 1c. rice and 1.5c. water in a glass or metal bowl (my stainless Farberware bowls are perfect for this), cover with foil, and put that on the rack inside the pressure cooker. Two cups of water go in the pot under the rack, then the lid goes on. It took about 5 mins to come up to pressure, 11 mins to cook, and 10 mins to depressurize at its own pace. So, 26 minutes for brown rice. Not a stunning time-savings compared to a regular pot (~40 mins), but enough to overcome the mental block we have that “brown rice takes a long time and will delay dinner if we don’t have rice already made.”
The rice came out pretty well, though I think I will add an extra 1/4c of water next time (and try to make more than 1c at a time). The rice grains were very separate and a little chewy…almost, but not quite, too al dente for my tastes. It was certainly better than the sometimes-overcooked rice I make in a regular pot. As a bonus, there was no mess, either. I seem to be incapable of cooking rice without it boiling over and coating the stove and pot with starch. This stayed tidily inside its bowl.
The second thing I made was stewed pork. You know how I looooove my stew, right? Usually, anything I stew takes about 3 hours. The instructions indicated that anything sliced would cook much faster than whole roasts, so by triangulating between a couple of recipes, I determined that my country ribs should cook in about 15 minutes. Well, 15 minutes at pressure; again, it took 5 mins to come to pressure and a full 15 minutes to depressurize. But after that half hour? BAM. Fall-apart tender pork.
This puts stew back onto the weeknight menu! I will probably still can some, for the savings of freezer space, but wow – this is just fantastically useful. I think if I were just setting up my kitchen, I would make this my standard mid-sized pot. Though for that, I’d consider getting the Mirro, because it has a plain glass lid so you can use it as a regular pot, too. In any case, it reduces cooking times dramatically, and it reduces energy use from 3 hours to 20 minutes…that’s pretty impressive.
I am so sold on this! Next thing to try: beans. I made red beans and rice the other night, and it took about an hour and twenty minutes. My handy book tells me that would have taken 2-4 minutes. Well, if I’d soaked the beans first. But still…that beats an hour all hollow. No need for canned beans ever again!
Comparing duck eggs and chicken eggs
December 27, 2011 at 6:23 pm (Cooking, local food)
Last week, my friend Tony gave me two dozen duck eggs to try. I’m really glad to have had a chance to try them – I’ve often wondered how comparable the taste is. The short version? They taste almost exactly the same, though the yolks taste…yolkier, I guess.
I must confess: I was a little leery of them. Especially when I opened the carton and got a strong whiff of duck pond – but that was just because the eggs were not fully washed. Tony assured me they wouldn’t taste “gamey,” so I tried them a couple different ways: fried over-hard, in pumpkin bread, and in an almond cookie recipe that called for beating the yolks and whites separately.
Over-hard: Like all really fresh eggs, the duck egg yolk “stands up” far out of the whites. I like to break my yolks and cook them all the way through, and when prepared this way, the egg cooked exactly like a chicken egg. The yolk didn’t spread out evenly, so one end of the fried egg was almost entirely yolk. I’m actually not a big fan of egg yolk, and I ended up not eating that last couple bites. I may or may not have eaten it if it were a chicken egg. It wasn’t that it tasted bad; it just tasted very much like yolk, and I’m not terribly fond of that flavor. (In my world, hot sauce, goat cheese, and olives were invented to cover the taste of egg yolk.)
Baking: The duck eggs were great in baking, once I figured out how many to use. Several of the eggs were as big as my palm and had double yolks – easily equivalent to two full chicken eggs. Some were the size of a small chicken egg. So I fiddled and estimated, and they worked fine, both as whole eggs and as separate yolks and whites. The whites beat up into a nice meringue. (Wait…is that the egg white spelling or the dance? Bah.)
The only other drawback – and it is slight – is that they don’t break neatly. The shells are less brittle than chicken eggs. Breaking them is tough; you crack them, and then really have to stick your thumbs in to pierce the membrane. This invariably detaches bits of shell, which then try to head for the bowl. The whites are also…ropier? You know on a chicken egg, right at the end, there’s that stringy bloop of egg white that you either have to sever, wait to drop, or throw away? That’s much more pronounced on the duck eggs. It’s stickier, and when you try to smoosh it out with your finger, it sticks to your finger, and pretty soon you’ve got a cat’s cradle of egg yolk between your fingers, the egg shell, and the bowl. You can sort of wind it up with the egg shells and pitch it all on the compost, but it seems like a bit of hassle and waste. Only a bit, but still.
The verdict: If I had a choice, I’d pick chicken eggs. If I didn’t have a choice, I’d take duck eggs and be very happy to have them.
Thanks, Tony! It was a fun experiment!
Selling a bunch of stuff on Craigslist
December 22, 2011 at 6:24 pm (Uncategorized)
All in great shape – just getting ruthless with emptying the closets.
- Women’s shoes and boots - generally around size 7, though the Sorels are an 8 (too big for me)
- A roll-away bed
- An ashiko hand drum
- A Smile Time Angel doll
- A small exercise ball
- Snorkeling gear – two full sets with wet suit, mask, fins, and snorkel – one for someone 6′/200# and one for someone 5′ 6″/150#
Give the gift of fine pre-owned goods!
Buying a passive solar home!
December 16, 2011 at 10:52 am (green living, Musings)
So…some big news here. We have put in an offer on a new house! I know that might seem odd, given all I’ve done to this homestead, but check out these features:
- It’s in the woods, but there’s a place to garden, because it opens onto a wetland (fen or peat bog, not sure which). This also means it’s really quiet and peaceful – my main complaint about the current house is road noise.
- It’s a passive solar design – actually won an award for its design. On sunny winter days, it needs no other heating. Not that Michigan gets a ton of those, but every bit helps.
- The design includes a 50′ long solarium on the south face of the house, which heats the upstairs and gives the house a ton of natural light, even though the main living space is earth-bermed on 3 sides
- It’s just gorgeous! It’s an incredibly peaceful place – very grounded and relaxing.
There are a few down sides – it’s further from work (though closer to a town) than our current place. The vegetable gardening will be OK but probably not great. I plan to do more perennial gardening, though. We may need to trim or cut down some trees…but we want the solar collectors to be shaded in the summer. No sense pumping heat into the house when it’s 90 degrees. So we have lots of thoughts, but it’ll take a while to figure out the best approach.
It’s also a short sale, so though we have an agreement with the sellers, it won’t be official until their bank agrees to the price. That could take months; we wouldn’t close until spring.
South face of the house. Solarium, with rock pile solar collector beneath.
Living room - the whole lower floor is one open living/dining/kitchen space. Three sets of French doors and a large picture window open onto the solarium.
Solarium. See the vents above that draw heat into the bedroom above? We'll need to shade this in the summer so we don't roast.
View of the wetlands.
We had the home inspection yesterday, and it checked out pretty well. Some sign of termites, but it might be an old, inactive infestation (we’re having an expert in to check). The inspector is also concerned about mildew/mold in the “rock room” passive solar collector. The owners say it smells musty when they open the vents to let that air in. We can tell that water is getting in down there, though, and wonder if that would go away if we took care of the water issue (the downspout discharges on the panels, and has warped the furring strips and destroyed the caulk) and got the air moving down there again. The danger is that it wouldn’t help, and that we’d be pumping mold spores into the house in the meantime. We are going to see if someone at the architecture school has any ideas. Worst case scenario is that we seal off the ventilation loop through the rock pile and retire that part of the passive solar system. It might still help with some radiative heat, or we might just have to chalk it up as a loss.
So…if you know anyone looking to buy our existing homestead, with a nice, sturdy, well-insulated 4 br house near Ann Arbor, Michigan, surrounded by lots of excellent garden beds…let me know!
Great day at the homestead
November 12, 2011 at 4:18 pm (Greenhouse, Musings)
What a gorgeous gift of a day! Nov. 12th, but sunny and warm (60, by mid-day). Last week’s snow jolted us into realizing a number of chores that really needed to get done before winter set in, and we did pretty much all of them today.
Our neighbor, Gary, came over with his tractor and moved the giant pile of wood chips (20yd dropped off for cheap by a local tree service) to the various plantings that needed a fresh coat: the oak berm, the berry berm, and the apple/raspberry bed. When he was done, he moved the remaining chips (8 yd?) to a back corner of the property so they’re out of the driveway. As he did that, Scott and I started to take the pergola “roof” down, which lets the sun into the house and also keeps the pergola from collapsing under the weight of snow – I don’t think 4 year old willow fencing can handle a foot of snow!
This is always a shaky job – our ladder is just barely tall enough to get to one end of the pergola, and it sinks into the ground. It’s nerve-wracking and not terribly safe. Finally, Gary says, “I can’t take it any more! Scott, get in the bucket!” And in a move that looked more dangerous (but both guys swore it was better than the ladder), Scott gets in the bucket of the tractor and Gary lifts him up level to the top of the pergola, which we can then dismantle in record time. (I’m on the roof at this point, managing the slats that hold the screening on the top of the pergola, thinking I’ve got the safest perch of the bunch.) And heck, while I’m up there, I cleaned out the gutters, too.
When that was done, we trimmed a couple branches overhanging the deck, and finally called it a morning. After showers and lunch, Scott ran off to do Scott things involving coffee, and I decided to flop on the couch with a book, or the internet, or something. But! The living room is cold.
No worries! There is wood, and a fireplace. But! There’s so much ash in the fireplace that it’s hard to keep a fire lit. No worries! There is a shovel, and a tin for the ashes. But! Now the ash tin is full. No worries! It is beautiful and sunny, and I can go dump them out by the greenhouse.
Oooh, greenhouse. I wonder how things are going in there? Pretty well, as it turns out. There’s actually a serving of green beans to be harvested, and the winter savoy cabbages are starting to head up. Hmm, cabbage – that reminds me, I was going to transplant the Storage #4s from the garden to the greenhouse to compare how they keep “live” to in the root cellar. Did I mention it’s beautiful and sunny?
And so on, for at least another hour. And now the cabbages are transplanted and watered, one water barrel is empty (I don’t think they’re big enough for warm thermal mass, and since this one is on the north side, I’m betting it would freeze, making it the wrong kind of thermal mass), beans harvested, greens for dinner picked, and three cookie trays of herbs (oregano, rosemary, and sage) are drying on the kitchen table.
I’m a couple hours late to my flop on the couch, but so what? Now I’ve got fresh green beans to eat as I putter online.
Cheap doorway renovation
November 6, 2011 at 10:20 am (green living)
Our breezeway (between the garage and kitchen) is essentially unheated, and we quickly discovered the year we moved in that it poured 45 degree air into the house all winter. We quickly threw a curtain in the doorway – this was a remnant of “window quilt” fabric my mom had given me years ago, covered with a piece of cloth to dress it up a bit. It was simply tacked onto the wall on the breezeway side – serviceable and not too hideous.
In the breezeway, there’s a door to the garage, and one to outside. The outside door has always leaked like a sieve (I can hear Grandpa saying “You could fly a kite on that draft!” ) and we decided it was time to take care of that. So when we took the old door down, we reused it to replace this curtain. I just finished repainting the door today (still have to do the trim) and I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out!
It’s still a fairly leaky door, but there’s actually less daylight showing around the door in this location than in its old frame, and we’ll weather-strip it soon, too. It’s at least as effective as the old curtain, and I have to say I’m pleased that it looks a little more “finished” than the old curtain. This also frees up the curtain for other uses – I might make thermal curtains for our bedroom, for example.
For this project, I also discovered “Paint Pods” (sitting on the shelf, lower-right). They are intended to be used to paint large swatches on a wall to test colors, but I thought they would be perfect to do this tiny amount of painting. Instead of spending $13 on a quart of paint for this tiny job, I used the $4 Pods (red and white). The one downside is that this is not “scrubbable” paint by any stretch – wipe it with a damp cloth and pigment comes away on your cloth. On the up side – much cheaper and much less leftover paint, and I don’t expect I’ll be washing this door very much.
