Feeling Useful

My last day of work was Friday, and I've had a very productive and happy day today.  I came downstairs to the smell of breakfast - always a wonderful thing.  Though it was a very strange one (shitake mushrooms, bacon, and sweet potato omelettes a la *B*), it wasn't too bad.  And I didn't cook it, which is always appreciated.  I conquered my fear of pie crusts and made a crust for a hubbard squash custard pie. It was delicious!  Though it was just a little green, which is strange.

We went with my family this afternoon to a local oyster roast.  We've gone every year since I was a little kid.  Even Miss F was eating fried oysters.  Probably not the most healthy way she could have eaten oysters, but I'm happy to have another shellfish eater in the house :o)

My brother dropped bales of straw off from his fiancee's farm, so *B* has been working away in the garden today.  He made three straw bale gardens in which to grow garlic.  He had picked up four bags of lawn trimmings from the side of the road the other day, so he mowed them into the beds as the last lawn mowing of the year.  He also took apart our canopy and cleared off our deck.  It's so nice to have the outside of the house decluttered, just as it's nice to be decluttered inside.  Even Miss F was raking up leaves with her child-sized rake.

Many of our summer crops have died off, but our jalapenos and lima beans are still hanging on.  I'm not sure how long the limas will last, but they still look good and are just now filling out.

Since it's so cold, I finally got up the motivation to fix an old winter coat of mine.  The last time I wore it, I was 60 pounds heavier, and two buttons of six were missing with two buttons hanging by a thread.  Rather than taking it to the tailors (which I can't believe I've done before), I found some thick black thread in my fabric box and sewed them on myself.  I've known how to do it for a long time, but I couldn't bring myself to cut off the two buttons that were still intact until today.  I think I did a pretty good job, and it'll be a lot warmer than my leather jacket if this winter is going to be as cold as they say it will.

Homesteading and Homemade Food

Aside from attending the renaissance festival, my weekends have been taken up making pumpkin puree, roasting pumpkin seeds, baking bread, making pasta, and canning.

The pumpkin seeds are so delicious.  A quick boil in salt water and baking in a baking sheet with some olive oil makes them crispy, salty, a little oily and just plain delicious.  They don't last long in our house.

This year, we had four San Marzano roma tomato plants.  My mom had one.  Her one plant produced more than our four combined - times five!  She was sick of dealing with the plant at the end of September, so she let us have whatever we wanted if we ripped it out for her.  We got almost 45 pounds from that one plant!

 

We laid all of the tomatoes out on the table in front of a window.  The red ones we picked out and threw into a freezer bag.  The rest, we let sit.

  

So when it came to sauce day, I knew we'd be set.  We'd have enough tomatoes to fulfill our needs all winter.  What I didn't realize was that I didn't have the equipment to deal with all of this at once!

Within ten minutes of putting the tomatoes into all of these pans, the black pan started to smell terrible.  Because of how the bottom of the pan was formed, the tomatoes instantly burned to the bottom.  So we pulled the tomatoes that were still good off and filled more pans.

 

The whole process was a bit stressful.  I kept having to shift sauce around from pan to pan in order to keep it from burning but to keep reducing.  I kept cooking and straining tomatoes for six hours.  I bet if I had a large stock pot, this would be a much easier endeavor.

 

In the end, though, it all worked out pretty well.  I would totally do this again next year if I'm properly prepared.

After the tomato sauce ordeal, I apparently had canning amnesia, because I bought two half-bushels of apples.

I'm thankful that apples last a long time, because it took me a couple of week to get around to processing them.

 

About half way through processing, I mentioned to my dad that it was really difficult to push the apple pulp through the sides of my strainer with a spatula.  I wanted to get a food mill one day.  The next day, he stops by with my grandmother's Foley food mill.  She used to use it for making ketchup.  My grandfather gave it to me to use since he wouldn't be using it.  It really makes work easier!

Since June, we've put up 16 quarts and 15 pints of peaches, 6 quarts of green beans, 16 half-pints of strawberry jam, 14 half-pints of peach preserves, 12.75 quarts of tomato sauce, 6 half-pints of tomato paste, and 41.5 half-pints of apple butter.  Every time I can something new, I only see the bit that I just did.  I feel a little good about it, but it still doesn't feel like enough.  Well, that changed today.  I went downstairs to put more apple butter in the pantry, and there wasn't enough room.  Over 1/3 of our pantry is home canned, and that is amazing.  Our strawberry jams are rapidly disappearing, though, because they are *B*'s favorite.  We will definitely be canning a bigger batch next year.

This past Saturday, we bought three fresh chickens from a local farmer.  These chickens are sustainably and humanely raised.  It’s the same farm where we get our pork.  The chickens look more bird-like than any other chicken I've ever bought.

 

I chose fresh chickens so that I could part them out myself and be able to use as much of the chicken as possible while giving us an easy source of meat on busy nights.  Part of using the whole chicken was rendering the fat.  I’ve never done it before, but we tend to eat skinless meat, so it seemed like a good idea.  I followed the tutorial on Penniless Parenting and it was fantastic!  The result was almost ½ a cup of shmaltz and some tasty fried chicken skin.

 

I've also been doing a couple of little projects.  I made homemade pasta on a whim using the 3 cups whole wheat flour to 1 cup water ratio to put into some chicken broth for an impromptu chicken noodle soup when *B* was sick.  I didn't consider myself a chicken noodle soup person in years gone by, but I am definitely a homemade chicken noodle soup person.  I realized it's just the canned stuff I can't stand.

 

I've made two batches of crackers now using the recipe from the Prudent Homemaker.  They're really good, but I'm having a hard time rolling them thin enough to be cracker-like.  For now, they're tasty pita-like bites.  I added 1 tsp of garlic the last time, and it made it brilliant.

Since it's getting cold and Christmas is coming, I picked up some yarn at our local store for a scarf for Miss F and presents for family.  I was amazed that the scarf took me just over 24 hours to make.  In a day, she got herself a new scarf to go with her red, pink, and white winter hat.

A New Farmer's Market

*B*, Miss F, and I started going to a new farmer's market.  It's much further away than the one in our town, but for some reason our market closed early in the middle of September.  It's probably for the best, because the new one we found is MUCH bigger and has many more items. 

We buy coffee there from a local roaster who employs people with developmental delays and sends some of their profits to charities overseas.  There are at least three times the number of farms, many more meat and egg producers.  They know us and Miss F even plays with one producer's daughter while we're there.  There are three pastry/bread/yummy food vendors.  I know two of three vendors.  I grew up with the son of one of the vendors.  His mom makes delicious jam.  The other vendor happens to be a couple I used to know.  I babysat their children when they were young, and it's now amazing to see them move onto a new stage in their lives now that they're empty-nesters.  They make the most brilliant food - bacon, cheddar, and scallion scones, ham and gruyere croissants, pumpkin tiramisu, and plenty of pastries.

Since we've found this farmer's market, we've been stockpiling winter squash and pumpkins.  We love all things pumpkin, and we love soup made from butternut squash.  This year though, we also picked up a hubbard squash and a cheese pumpkin.  We're going to see how they taste.  If good, we'll load up on them to feed us through the winter, since the market only goes until the end of November.  My mother's husband had this work shelf sitting around that he made a number of years ago.  They gave it to us, and it makes an excellent squash storage shelf.  It's wonderful to see it so full!

Navigating the Choppy Financial Waters of Insurance

As I thought about this post, all I could think of was the beginning of Monty Python's The Meaning of Life:



*B*'s parents bought him a used car when he graduated from college.  They've been making payments on it as well as paying the insurance since then.  They just paid it off, so now it is our responsibility to start paying insurance, which is more than reasonable.  I got a quote from the insurance agent that my parents have used since I was a very young child.

But something told me to shop around.  I learned that another insurance company cost less than half what I pay for the exact same coverage.  I'd actually save money after having added his car.

Which got me thinking about life insurance.  This same agent had talked me into buying whole life insurance when I was 20 years old.  Everything I've read has said this is the worst type of insurance to have.  It's very profit heavy for the agents while very light on benefits for the consumer.

So now I'm stuck between loyalty to a company that I've done business with for over ten years and saving money.  I was really conflicted until I realized this:  the money I save was roughly equivalent to two months salary for me.  TWO months.  Do I really want to work at night, missing my husband and daughter, out of loyalty to a guy that I see no more than once a year?  I feel guilty that I'm going to sever that relationship, but sometimes you put your big girl pants on and do what needs to be done for your family.

Back to Basics Budget

I tutor students in the evenings in order to help pay our bills.  *B* doesn't make enough for me to stay home without it, but we have a small overage when I tutor.  Rather than being prudent, we were using the extra cash for fun things or miscellaneous expenses:  a dinner out here, a coffee there, a store-bought gift for a friend's baby shower, that kind of thing.  Eighty-five percent of the time, the purchase is food related.  In the summers, my tutoring drops off significantly (though not completely).  As of this week, my tutoring drops from 4 days a week to 2, and I just hit a scary realization:

We can't technically make our bills this month.  

I've been ignoring our budget for far too long, and somehow (though not really somehow, I'm the one who did it), we've wracked up a moderate credit card bill.

We tried swearing off these miscellaneous purchases completely.  We've tried setting goals like "if we don't go out to eat this month, we can get this very modestly priced item that we've wanted."  (The item in question is a mason jar sealing attachment for my FoodSaver that costs less than $10.)  We've tried giving ourselves a very small budget of $20 a month to allow for a few splurges.  But it always ends up that our willpower fails us.

I really have no idea what I'm going to do.  We need to find the power to loose the hold our temptations have on us.  We need to plan ahead - rather than stopping for dinner at 6 pm because we ran errands at 3:30 pm, we should have had food with us, eaten beforehand, or *gasp* waited the twenty minutes to drive home and thirty minutes to get some good food on the table.  (That was tonight.)

Going out to eat needs to be something we just DON'T THINK ABOUT anymore. 

The other part of my problem:

Pride

Rather than admitting that I can't afford something, I'll find a way to "make it work".  We buy it anyway, then I realize later that there is no way to make it work if it means shorting your mortgage. My mom was (is) the same way.  She would buy things (mostly food) in the exact same way, and then she and my dad would have a huge argument when he found out what she was doing.  While *B* and I don't have arguments about it, I feel massively guilty.

Rather than making a gift, printing up some baby related IOU cards, or admitting to a friend that I couldn't afford a baby shower gift for her, *B* and I bought a $50 gift from her registry.  My thinking was that I know she spent at least that much - probably more - on the gift she gave us.  But she and her husband make at least twice what we do a year, and we all know it.  Since she's such a good friend, wouldn't I think she'd understand that we're on a tight budget?

It seems what we need are a little humility, some honesty (with ourselves and others), and creativity.  Starting tomorrow (June 1st), things are going to be different because they HAVE to be different.

What a Find!

*B* and I decided to start cooking with cast iron since our encounter at the market fair.  My mom had three cast iron pans when I was a kid.  They were all part of the Wagner 1891 set.  I recently found out that this was made around 1991 as a celebration of the company's 100th anniversary.  It's not the same quality as the great "Wagner Ware" that I hear so much about.  But we decided to use them anyway until we could find some of the good stuff.

That day came!

We went to a flower and jazz festival Saturday, one of our annual traditions.  We decided that we'd actually go into the shops on Main Street for once.  We went into a little church-run thrift store, and made a bee line for the housewares section.  A quick once over revealed nothing, but as we were walking out, I spotted two cast iron pans on a bottom shelf.  *B* flipped them over, and there it was - Wagner Ware!  They were a bit neglected looking and very crusty on the bottom, but the price was right.

 

We have a #6 pan and a #8 pan.  Apparently there was a newlywed set of these pans including a #6 and a #8, so they're fairly common.  I would like to find a #3 pan to round out the set.  According to my (quick glance around the internet) research, they were cast between 1935 and 1959.  I was a little disappointed that they weren't older, but I realized that at best, they were almost as old as my grandmother and at worst, older than my mom.  That's not bad at all!  And the cooking surface is soooo smooth.  It's wonderful.

I was so excited that I wanted to get them reseasoned right away.  While the inner seasoning was alright but slightly scuffed, the outer surface was very rough, and I'm very nervous already to use cast iron on my glass-top stove.  I successfully reseasoned my Wagner 1891 griddle a couple of weeks ago, so I felt confident that I could do it.  I threw them (and the smallest of the Wagner 1891 pans) into the oven.  I put the self-clean cycle on for two hours, and look what happened!

The old seasoning blew right off in a puff of red and grey dust.  When I did the griddle, I used olive oil.  This is the finish it gave me, plus some layers of bacon grease due to weekend breakfasts.

For my "new" pans, I used flax seed oil as recommended in this blog post.  It smelled terrible in the oven, but this is what I got after 4 coats of oil.  Isn't it beautiful!?

When I Get Around to It

Over the past three years or so, there has been a growing list of things I wanted and needed to do. We still haven't bought a heater or molding from our mold incident to fix our room. Our wedding quilt lay folded for a little over a year on my dresser. Because of body image issues, I just about refused to look at, organize, and hang my wedding photos. There are nicks in the paint in each room that I wanted to fix, but that means I'd have to cut a sample of paint from the wall and get the paint matched. The faucet in the downstairs bathroom is leaking and needs to be replaced - it took only one night to fill up the sink  I need to sort through my clothing and start a summer/winter rotation.  Since my dad is moving out of the home I grew up in, I had to clean out my old bedroom. All of these things, and many more, nag at me, but I never seem to have the time to fix them.

I'm making it my goal to knock out a big chunk of my to do list this year. *B* has been instrumental in this task. While he was home on paternity leave, he pulled out our wedding photos. While they're not as great as I would have liked, they're all I have. So I'm in the process of framing them and putting them into albums. The other night, we hung our quilt.

 

Last week, my younger brother helped me move all of my belongings out of my dad's house. I sorted through five or six totes full of tchotchkies, keepsakes, and memories from my high school days.  I put everything into piles: keep, toss, and donate.  I whittled a mass of belongings down to a select pile of things to keep.  I was able to donate a huge box of old belongings.

I'm happy to finally start chipping away at this massive list and feel productive in this year "off".

First Day on a New Job

Yesterday was my last day as a teacher.  As far as last days go, it was fairly stressful.  A class that I had a very difficult year with in terms of parent interaction was still hanging on.  It was great to teach them because it helped me and them grow. 

But since they're high achievers, their parents would call my boss (or more often my boss's boss) if they had concerns rather than coming to me.  I thought it would be over since it was the end of the school year.  It turns out they were upset about grades they hadn't even seen yet.  So I spent my last few hours, not with coworkers enjoying our time and the end of year brunch, but putting out fires so that I might be able to come back in good standing to teach in the future.

But today is a new day, and it's my first day on a new job. 

I am a home maker, a (soon to be) stay at home mom, a domestic engineer.  It actually feels rather empowering to have the time and resources to dedicate to ensuring my family's health and happiness.  I'm excited that *B* and I won't "need" to eat out as often because we're both exhausted from work/school/second jobs.  I'm excited to be able to plan healthy meals, teach my child and watch the child grow, and to keep my home (somewhat) presentable.

I know that I really have no idea how the next few months will go, but I'm confident that I can pick it up quickly.  But for now, I'm off to start my new job, with a thorough organizing of my workspace as first up on my list.

Garden

*B* has been diligently working in the garden this season.  I must admit that I've done little more than ask for certain foods to be planted.by and large, the rest of the garden is his this year.

*B* has been putting vine scraps that we don't want growing into a trashcan.  I noticed that there were some ants around the top of the can.  I don't know if you can see it, but the left side of this pile is swarming with ants.  No wonder they're getting into our house!



On a good bug note, it looks like a ladybug laid eggs on this plant.  There were tons of pupating ladybugs there today.


*B* has had this cactus for many years.  It's thriving and putting out new pads all the time.


The honeysuckle I got a couple of years ago is really taking over.  We need to find a way to trellis it further than we already have.  It's a native honeysuckle, so we don't want to cut it back too far.


My Mister Lincoln has some buds on it.  I'm hoping to get a good crop of red roses this year.



My JFK rose is doing fantastically.  One is almost ready to open, and four more are on their way.


*B* planted red clover in with our asparagus to help out the soil.  I thought it would never flower, but it's proving me wrong.


I tend to get bit up by bugs in the summer.  Knowing our luck, the baby will inherit my "sweet meat".  This year we're trying a potted citronella plant on our table to help keep the bugs away without having to spray. 


I'm a hoarder of mint.  I've got four main types (spearmint, variegated peppermint, pineapple mint, and chocolate mint), and the little pot down in front is called Mexican mint, but it's tarragon.



The downside of being a mint hoarder is that it sometimes appears where you don't plant it.  This is a tote of arugula that was taken over my mint.


This is one of *B*'s babies.  It's called crosne or Chinese artichokes.  It's related to mint, but you eat the tubers.


This hard to see group of plants is scorzonera.  The leaves and roots are both edible.


Another *B* plant is stinging nettle.  I won't touch it because it can hurt, but it's apparently very nutritious if prepared properly.


The last of the weird plants is this grove of sunchokes in our former compost pile.  It will put up pretty flowers, it's hard to kill, and the tubers are apparently delicious!

 
Speaking of tubers, this is something I picked up off of pinterest.  It's a bin made of potatoes.  *B* made a chicken wire bin and filled it with layers of straw, soil, and seed potatoes.  Apparently, two pounds of seed potatoes can produce up to 25 lbs of eating potatoes.  When the greens die back, you pull the wire away, and all of your tasty potatoes come falling out!


For a while, I thought these were junk seeds that volunteered.  It turns out that *B* did a three sisters experiment this year.  We'll see how it goes.


The tomatoes took over our raised bed last year, so this year we did the lazy man's raised bed:  *B* opened two bags of potting soil and stuck our tomatoes straight in.  They look pretty happy.


We have royalty purple pod bush beans in the open cold frame.  The seeds were two years old, so I'm just happy they germinated.


We didn't pay attention to the rhubarb this year, and it took off on its own.  I'm not sure if it's even edible at this point.  But it sure looks happy.


We have one whole pepper this year.  It has flowers, but I'm not sure if it'll end up making it.


Our garlic should be ready to pull soon.  This is garlic that overwintered, so I have no idea what to expect.


Our snap peas are doing well.  We got a full snack for our first harvest.  We've got three varieties (sugar ann, sugar snap, and sugar daddy) and they're coming in perfectly staggered.


I read a post over at Choosing Voluntary Simplicity about perpetual celery plants.  At the end of the season, we're going to dig them out and bring them inside.


One of the easiest ways to get good carrots and parsnips is to replant the tops after you've eaten them.  The short carrots came from seeds.  The tall ones came from organic market carrots.


We had snow peas in our seed stash.  We don't love snow peas, but they're pretty good in stir fry.  We hate our hibiscus plants, so *B* let the snow peas climb the hibiscus.  If something comes of it, great.  If not, oh well.




This is my only raspberry bush to really take off.  The other ones are only about 8 inches tall.  I have no idea why one is happy and the others aren't.


The blueberry (which is just to the right of the above raspberry) is small, but slowly getting bigger.



*B* adores nasturtiums both for their taste and look, and this is the first to flower this year.


My mom made this strawberry planter for us two years ago.  The strawberries we have in our front yard are junebearing, whereas these are everbearing.  We've already had 8 or so berries off of it this year.

*B* has worked so hard on this garden.  I was convinced that with me expecting a baby, nothing would get done.  The way things are going, we have a very nice supplement to our purchased food!