November 20, 2008 at 10:13 am (Changing habits, Energy, green living)
Tags: fireplace
We’ve been using the fireplace a lot so far this fall. I’d guess we’ve used it as our primary heat source every weekend day we’ve been home, and 50-75% of the weeknights we’re home for more than 2-3 hours. We let the furnace come on during the night and first thing in the morning.
So how’s it going? First of all, we are keeping the thermostat about 4 degrees cooler than we’ve ever done before and it doesn’t feel any colder in the house. I attribute this change to the insert’s design: it seals the chimney flue completely, whether there’s a fire going or not. We’re simply not losing as much heat up the chimney. So now we keep our “at home and awake” temp at 63 or 64 degrees and we feel as warm as last year’s 66-67 degree setting. Overnight temp is 57 degrees instead of 61; morning temp is 59 degrees instead of 62-63 (and we might actually take that down a notch).
It’s taking some adjustment to the way wood heats: unevenly. (Read on…) Read the rest of this entry »
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October 3, 2008 at 6:47 pm (Changing habits, Energy, carbon budget)
Wow, we are just not doing that well on this. I never would have guessed that we’d drive an average of 3000 miles every month! And most of that is not stuff we’re willing to give up…too many friends live out-of-state. However, my husband’s taken his last regularly scheduled quarterly trip out of state (or is there one more?), so that will save about 1300 miles every 3 months.
Prius miles this month: 3275 (+1550)
Truck miles: 145 (+5)
Gas this month: 74 gallons (+32)
Air miles this month: 0 (0)
Elec (household): 283kwh (+85)
Elec (hot water):163kwh (+170)
Propane this month: 143 (+143)
Wood this month: 0 (+0)
Total carbon to date: 8336lb
Goal for June ‘08-May ‘09: 18500lb
So…1/3 of the year is gone, but we’ve used almost 1/2 of our carbon budget…and we haven’t used the heater at all yet. |
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Note: Wood and propane are listed as quantities bought, not quantities used. I don’t have a good way of knowing how many gallons of propane we’ve used, so I’m just listing it as a lump sum. All I can think of for the electricity spike this month is canning.
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October 3, 2008 at 12:02 pm (Changing habits, Cooking)
What I’ve learned so far today:
- Fire is hot. No, really. It is. When people say, “It’s like sticking your head in the oven,” they are not talking about reaching into the warming box attached to a 350 degree electric range. They are talking about six or seven hundred degrees of wood-fired scorchyness that will threaten your eyebrows. Not that I’d know anything about that.
- Everything around the fire is hot. Way hotter than anything around the aforementioned electric oven.
- 600 degree cast iron pan + 150 degree water = splatter that will not stop
- 600 degree cast iron pan + oven mitt = near demise of oven mitt
- Just because there’s a beautiful bed of coals in the new fireplace, it doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to cook on them with your current equipment.
*sigh* Live, play with fire, learn…
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September 28, 2008 at 7:02 pm (Changing habits, Food origins, Musings)
Tags: butchering, chickens
For a long time, I’ve thought that if I’m going to eat meat, I should be able to kill the animal I’m eating. It just seems like the honorable thing to do. However, I don’t know how to hunt, and I don’t know anyone who raises livestock. This spring, however, my dear friend Suzie told me of a conversation she’d had with someone she’d met at a conference. This woman, Lori, and her husband, Floyd, and some neighbors raise about 75 chickens each year, then get together one day in the fall to butcher them. Lori graciously invited not only Suzie, but me to come out and help this year.
Chicken Day was yesterday, and I’d like to tell you about it. Some of the description will be a little graphic, but there are no pictures. Still, I’ll put it after a cut so you can skip this post if you want to. But really – I’ll be talking more about my thoughts about meat eating, so don’t be put off! (If you want a really nice photo essay of the process of slaughtering chickens, please see Angie’s excellent posts on prep, slaughter, dressing, and packaging chickens, plus her husband’s post on building a mechanical chicken plucker. I used the same methods, only varying a little bit in details like the wooden trough instead of a cone.)
Read the rest of this entry »
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September 22, 2008 at 10:18 pm (Changing habits, Cooking, recipes)
Tags: vegetarian recipes
Well, y’all seem to be digging on my original vegetarian menu, so I thought I’d take another crack at it. This version is, if anything, easier to cook than the last bunch. I resort to frozen mixed veggies a fair bit, but you could always use fresh, if you like. As we’re heading into winter, there’s also a soup each week.
The same rules apply: I assume you know how to cook. Meals serve 2 adults dinner, plus either 2 kids for dinner or one adult lunch. At least 2 meals each week have minimal prep and can be ready in under 30 minutes. Some of the ingredients will “push” you – give them a try!
Week 1.
- *Not-Quite Succotash or Calabacitas
- *Grilled something, corn, slaw
- Potato kale chowder
- Baked beans, corn cakes, greens
- Winter stir fry (cabbage, apples, kale, potatoes)
Week 2.
- *Teriyaki stir fry
- *Homemade pizza
- Mexican bean soup
- Squash stuffed with whole grain pilaf
- Asian cabbage salad with tofu
Week 3.
- *Garlic relish (or curry) stir-fry
- *Domino soup
- Melted onions and green beans (or asparagus)
- Asian-style noodle soup
- Roasted root vegetables
Week 4.
- *Easy zesty minestrone, a.k.a. Swiss Army Soup
- *Cheater’s Spanish rice, a.k.a. Swiss Army Soup
pt. 2
- Corn cakes with peppers and feta
- Split pea soup
- Tempeh cutlet with arame and noodles
Download the full menu and recipes (PDF)
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September 19, 2008 at 1:49 am (Changing habits, Cooking, Energy, green living)
Tags: solar cooking, solar oven
I ordered a Sport Solar Oven in June. They’ve been swamped with orders lately, so I just received it a week ago (first week of September). The shadows are across the entire front of the house when I get home this time of year, but I had a day where I got home at 4:30 and could toss some potatoes into it to give it a trial run.
They came out great. I used garden-fresh Russian Banana fingerling potatoes sliced about 1/4″ thick, tossed with a little olive oil, salt, and fresh rosemary. Put them in an 8″x8″ pan, covered with another one, and threw it in the oven with the reflectors on. Two hours later, they were done. I probably could have even taken them out sooner, but I was cooking the rest of the meal indoors.
I’m really impressed with this kit. It includes everything: the oven, reflectors, 2 pots (sadly, they don’t fit when the oven is on the side for catching low-angle sun rays), a water purification indicator…even an oven thermometer. My oven was about 275 degrees during this trial run – very respectable. I couldn’t get my homemade box oven to break 150.
I want to use it more, but it will take planning ahead. There are only certain things I’m willing to leave in it all day – vegetables, mostly – and I just realized that my best sun is in the front of the house in view of the road. I don’t think people would steal it, but I’m not quite willing to take the risk. We have a pretty high-traffic street.
Peak Oil Hausfrau has a nice running list of things she’s cooked in her solar oven (different model from mine – hers gets a bit hotter). It’s very inspirational, and great to see some real-life uses of this low-impact tool. I don’t know if I can bake in mine, but it’s got me thinking how many of the things I cook that could be done in the oven if I plan it right.
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August 17, 2008 at 4:16 pm (Changing habits, Food origins, Musings)
Do you ever sit down and realized just how much you’ve changed over time, even though you still feel like the same “you” you were fifteen years ago? And wait…fifteen years? Was I even alive then? Wait – I was not only alive, but I was doing something meaningful and being kind of an adult fifteen years ago?
Whoa.
Care to dive into my food habits over the last decade and a half? It’s really interesting to see how my definition of healthy eating has changed over time and paychecks. More after the cut… Read the rest of this entry »
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August 6, 2008 at 7:57 pm (Changing habits, Energy)
Tags: carbon diet
July had a few surprises. First, we drove more than we did in June (a total of about 3600 miles) and we used way more electricity (526 kwh up from 283). A lot of this was unavoidable – or at least, not things we were willing to avoid. Over 1500 miles on the Prius and 100+ miles on the Explorer were due to a quarterly trip my husband takes. He carpooled most of that distance, though, so two other people didn’t rack up any miles for that trip. And, since he was gone, I had to drive the Explorer – though I worked from home 2 days, which saved about 4 gallons of gas.
The electricity was from two things: a/c (it got humid enough to warrant it several nights) and canning. And our hot water usage was back up to 157 kwh. Not sure why that is…I’ve been sticking to the shorter showers.
On the other hand, we didn’t fly at all this month, so that helped our overall carbon balance a lot.
Read the rest of this entry »
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July 26, 2008 at 6:57 pm (Changing habits, Cooking, Energy, Food origins, Food preservation)
Man, it’s nuts how good I feel when I Get Stuff Done. Highlights from the last couple days:
- Strawberry and blueberry preserves (I wanted to crawl face first into the pint of strawberry)
- Chopped holes in clay and planted 5 tomatillos, 4 tomatoes, and 1 pepper plant that I got for free Friday at an end-of-season sale
- Good yard sale find: down/feather “mattress” or super-thick comforter
- Cut and burned all the Canada thistle that was going to seed in the back (witness the ten thousand minute puncture wounds on my forearms)
- Good-bye and good riddance to the hot tub, my most expensive mistake to date
- Great conversations toward some very interesting consulting work
- Started playing with the Kill-A-Watt and discovered that toasting my breakfast uses more power than leaving the fan running 18 hours straight
- Made sag daal for dinner…oh so tasty! And just for fun, figured out that it costs about 50 cents a serving, including rice. I think I paid $7 last time I had it at a restaurant.
In other news, he doesn’t know it yet, as he’s been out all afternoon, but my sweetie’s first batch of homemade yogurt came out really well. I bent the no-sugar rule to sample one spoonful topped with the cherry preserves I made last week. His assessment of “almost obscenely good” is pretty spot-on.
I did the math, and a quart of homemade yogurt comes to about $2.25 plus the price of homemade preserves. Enough to flavor a quart runs from 35 cents (blueberry) to 85 cents (organic strawberry). A quart of his old favorite yogurt – available only in 6-oz cups – would be $5.50; the price of my favorite just jumped to $6/quart. With the quantities of yogurt we eat in this house, we’ll easily save $20-25/month.
The homemade yogurt and preserves aren’t organic, but they are local (including the sugar) and made with essentially no waste. The milk even comes in glass bottles. The real impetus for doing this was to quit throwing out all those little plastic cups. In addition, his fave is trucked in from California and mine from Pennsylvania. By switching to homegrown, we’ve cut about 3000 food miles per quart.
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July 24, 2008 at 7:38 pm (Changing habits, Cooking)
Tags: canning
So, by working Craig’s List a little, I was able to find canning jars. I found a listing for an estate sale that ended last week. They listed canning jars among the items to be sold, so on the off chance they had some left, I wrote. They did, and mostly pints, which is what I wanted. I scored 44 pints and 10 quarts for $12. w00t!
I’m thinking this will keep us in salsa and fruit-on-the-bottom yogurt fruit (“conserves” is the recipe term, I believe) for a year. I also plan to try canning chicken and vegetable stock now that I have a pressure canner.
If I give you jam, do you promise to give the jar back?
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