January list for the Anyway Project

Domestic Infrastructure - these are the realities of home life, including making your home work better with less, getting organized, dealing with domestic life, etc...

• finishing the plastic on the crawl space insulation - I'm not doing it, hubby is -- and it's dependent on weather at this point
  
• sealing up the cellar foundation
• sealing up windows in the two storage areas off the kitchen
• de-clutter and organize art and craft storage
• curtains on the windows of one room for sound-proofing and heat retention
  

Household Economy: Financial goals, making ends meet, saving, barter etc...

• selling off a Les Paul guitar that hubby doesn't use much (ad posted)
  
• eating down the stores through January to reduce outside purchases (challenge)
• set up budget for our next travel vacation
  

Resource Consumption : in which we use less of stuff, and strive to live in a way that has an actual future.

• thermal pot cooking
  
• walking for shopping and volunteer work (use car as little as possible)
  

Cottage Industry and Subsistence:: The things we do that prevent us from needing to buy things, and the things we produce that go out into the world and provide for others. Not everyone will do both, but it is worth encouraging.

• designing reusable Christmas tags from photos I took of Williamsburg wreaths
  
• learning to make custom-sized socks
• starting next year's Christmas presents by using up my re-discovered yarn stash with a new knitting book I got
  

Family and Community: Pretty much what it sounds like. How do we enable those to take the place of collapsing infrastructure?

• co-learning with a celiac neighbor how to make polenta (an economical gluten-free "fast food"!)
• began planning to build an outdoor oven with neighbors
  

Outside Work: Finding a balance, doing good work, serving the larger community as much as we can, within our need to make a living.

• volunteer work with Peterborough Greenup's Urban Forest project (GIS mapping and data analysis) --> explore using iTree software for them
  

Time and Happiness: Those things without which there's really no point.

• Nordic walking to enjoy whatever sunshine we have this month and get fresh air
  
• fiction reading (second-hand or borrowed books)
• making digital photo collages of our year's travels for our scrapbook
• start an art journal
  

How I Did "Anyway" in December

Domestic Infrastructure - these are the realities of home life, including making your home work better with less, getting organized, dealing with domestic life, etc...

• finishing the plastic on the crawl space insulation - not done
  
• sealing up the cellar foundation - begun; 1/4 done
  
• sealing up windows in the two storage areas off the kitchen - not done
  
• de-clutter and organize art and craft storage - begun
  
• curtains on the windows of one room for sound-proofing and heat retention - done!
  

Household Economy: Financial goals, making ends meet, saving, barter etc...

• selling off a Les Paul guitar that hubby doesn't use much (ad posted) - awaiting final sale
  
• starting a monthly savings plan for charitable donations - done
  
• starting a monthly savings plan for travel funds - done
  

Resource Consumption : in which we use less of stuff, and strive to live in a way that has an actual future.

• Christmas baking using what I have on hand or have canned - done
  
• batch cooking - done - see post
  
• walking for shopping and volunteer work (use car as little as possible) - done
  

Cottage Industry and Subsistence:: The things we do that prevent us from needing to buy things, and the things we produce that go out into the world and provide for others. Not everyone will do both, but it is worth encouraging.

• making some heat bags for gifts - done
  
• Christmas baking and preserves for Christmas gifts - done

I also made some reusable bags and tags as a gift enclosing a gift.

Family and Community: Pretty much what it sounds like. How do we enable those to take the place of collapsing infrastructure?

• teaching a celiac neighbor how to make no-knead gluten-free bread - done - see post
  

Outside Work: Finding a balance, doing good work, serving the larger community as much as we can, within our need to make a living.

• volunteer work with Peterborough Greenup's Urban Forest project (GIS mapping and data analysis) - on-going
  

Time and Happiness: Those things without which there's really no point.

• Nordic walking to enjoy whatever sunshine we have this month and get fresh air - done
  
• fiction reading (second-hand or borrowed books) - done
  
• making digital photo collages of our year's travels for our scrapbook - 5 done
  
• plan some future art collage work - done and have gotten into doing Zentangles as well (which I can use in the collages)
  

Knitting So Far This Fall

I was watching so much television this fall, I decided to do something useful while doing it. Besides, I was taken by the opening of a new shop on Water St here in Peterborough called Needles in the Hay: they stocked Briggs & Little yarn! Briggs & Little is a yarn mill in the Canadian Maritimes. They take wool from sheep herders and spin it; some can go back to the sheep farmer if he/she want; the mill sells the rest. The heathery colours are particularly nice.

When I lived in Nova Scotia, there was a cluster of sheep farmers about 15 kilometers up the road from me who I got to know quite well. I learned to spin from them; I got raw wool from them. One woman, Janetta Dexter, specialized in collecting double-knit patterns and knitting double-knit mittens from her own yarn. In a double-knit mitt, colours are carried behind the face of the knitting. This produces a very warm mitten.

She published a small booklet of just the patterns. Later she shared them and some others in Flying Geese and Partridge Feet by Robin Hansen. The patterns you see here, starting from the top left and going clockwise, are: Shining Star (front) and Fleur-de-Lis (back), vertical strip on mitt body and Peek-a-boo on the cuff, Salt and Pepper in the wristers, Candlelit Windows in reversed colours, and Northern Star.

After the third pair of mittens, I found my old stash of wool! So the green and white pair are knit from that.

After Christmas I want to start making socks. I have books, needles, and sock yarn on the way.

The Wrap is a Gift

These bags contain presents. These bags are reusable and were made from off-cuts when I remodelled some old drapes to smaller curtains for my husband's studio. The tags are reusable too! I designed some tags in Inkscape, using some vintage Santas off the Internet, and laminated them. Names can be written on with dry erase markers, then later wiped off and used next year.

Turning 1 Pound of Butter into 12 dozen cookies

I found this great recipe a couple of years ago on the Internet. Of course I've lost the link. But I decided to give it a try this year since earlier this fall I bought a pound of unsalted butter in stick form on special. The basic recipe calls for one stick of butter and makes three dozen cookies. I also wanted to make cookies with the cookie stamps I have: a tree of life, a dove, and flower/sun. I used one stick of butter for some oatmeal cookies earlier in the week.

Here's the basic recipe:
Cream together in a bowl: 1 stick of unsalted butter, 3/4 cup of organic sugar (or use yellow, brown or white). Beat in 1 large egg and 1 tsp vanilla. This goes fast if you can use an electric mixer.

Mix together the dry ingredients in another bowl: 2 cups white whole wheat flour or unbleached flour, 1/2 teaspoon baking powder, 1/4 tsp sea salt.

Add the dry ingredients gradually to the butter/sugar mixture and blend well. I used a wooden spoon for this.

Preheat your over to 350 deg F. Line cookie sheets with silicon sheets (or parchment paper).
You can form your cookies by rolling them out, slicing them from a log, or forming into balls that you press flat with a cookie stamp. The first two methods require you to chill the dough, which make the cookie stamp method appealing. Whatever method you use, bake for 10 to 12 minutes or until cookie edges lightly brown. They will firm up more as they cool on a wire rack.

Cookie stamping: form the dough into balls and place on your prepared cookie sheet. Press flat with the cookie stamp. The cookie should go to the edges of the stamp and be about a quarter-inch thick.

Additional variations: It's nice to have a variety of cookies at holiday time, I think, so I tried two of the variations to the recipe.

Chocolate Mocha Cookies: Add 1 tablespoon of instant coffee and 2 tablespoons of cocoa powder to the dough. I used two tablespoons less of the flour so they wouldn't be too dry.

Ginger Spicy Cookies: Substitute 1/4 cup of molasses for 1/4 cup of sugar. Add 1 teaspoon of ginger, 1/2 teaspoon of cinnamon, and 1/8 teaspoon of allspice to the dough. You might want to add two tablespoons more of flour as well so the dough will be less sticky. I had to flour the glass cookie stamp I used so the cookies wouldn't stick to it.

Pecan Chocolate Chip Cookies: Add 1 cup of chocolate chips and 1/2 c finely chopped pecans (I would try pecan meal in these) to the dough and drop by rounded teaspoonfuls onto your cookie sheets.

The Mouse Count Begins

Every fall mice invade the pantry and undersink area. We have an old porous foundation and that's how they get in. This year my husband is sealing it up so the invasion has come late, but there must still be an opening or two they can get through.

In the past I've put out mouse bait and poison cakes. The mice just seem to make a mess of them and pass on the word that there's tasty treats to be had inside this house.

Last year instead of spending money on bait I got a couple of old-fashioned traps. I had some peanut butter that was starting to go stale so a dab of that became bait. The first evening we're sitting in our living room and we hear a SNAP!. Sure enough, there's a mouse in the trap under the sink. A day later we had one in the pantry. Once the trap was sprung, peanut butter gone, and so was the mouse -- one up for them.

Last year's score: Me: 4 Mice: 1.

After the fourth mouse, we never saw trace of another.

Two days ago I saw mouse sign under the kitchen sink. Last night I set out the traps. The old peanut butter is even staler. This morning I had a mouse. The trap is baited again.

It's a great way to use up old peanut butter.

Doing a Door-crasher

Today (a Saturday) Staples here in Canada had a door-crasher on 500 GB external portable drives for $40 (25-30 per store) and netbooks for $150 (25-30 per store). I went to the farmer's market and then made my way over to Staples at 8 am.

There was a good cluster of folks there already and I saw my neighbor Sherry there. She had commandeered a teenage friend of one of her kids to join the line with her so she could get two netbooks (there was a "one per family" limit). She'd driven by the store at 5 am and seen 4 people there, so she went home for some breakfast and then came back. She'd already made a Tim Horton's run and gotten a box of Timbits for the crowd of about 20.

We gabbed about a bunch of things so the time went fairly quickly. At least it was 1 degree above freezing (Centigrade) rather than the -15 C it'd been throughout the week in the mornings. Sherri's feet were still getting cold though. I was wearing my Blundstons and doing fine. That's what she want to get; another friend of hers swears by them as well.

About ten to 9 they passed out coupons for the drives and netbooks. Though people were clumped around the door, we all knew who had been there first and things were really orderly (that's how Canadians are!).

Once I had my coupon, I went to my car and had some of my coffee. Then I went inside and one clerk had a stack of drives at her register so people who just wanted those could go through the line fairly quick.

The shiny black drive is sitting on my desk now waiting for hookup to I can transfer stuff from the 320 GB drive to it. The 320 drive then becomes my private storage drive and the 90 GB drive I was using for storage and backup will be dedicated to backups (and consequently not hooked up and running all the time).

Gluten-free bread making

I'd been promising my celiac friend Sherry for some time that I would walk her through a recipe for gluten-free bread dough from Healthy Bread In 5 Minutes a Day. So last week we made a date to do it this past Monday afternoon. Doing this is also one of my goals in the Anyway project.

A couple of weeks ago I walked her through a whole wheat bread recipe from the same book (or at least my variant on it which works really well with the organic, locally-grown whole wheat flour we get from Merryland Farms). Its four ingredients (flour, water, yeast and salt) make it simple enough that she get one of her teenagers to mix it up. We made English muffins and a baguette from half the dough; the next day she made pizza for her husband to take to work from the other half of the dough. Everything was eaten up within 24 hours!

Sherry, unfortunately, cannot eat whole wheat bread because she is a celiac. Her diet has to be free of gluten. Another friend of hers makes gluten-free loaves for her, which she carefully rations a slice or two a day. But the friend never makes pizza, and that is the one thing that Sherry craves.

The recipe is extensive: three kinds of gluten-free flour, water, xanthan gum, eggs, honey (we used organic sugar instead because she was low on honey, yeast, salt (we substituted sea salt for kosher salt), and neutral-flavored oil -- which we forgot to put in initially and had to add fifteen minutes into the primary rising. It worked out fine.

We let the dough rise for two hours while Sherry looked after some baked beans, we had tea and hot cider and talked a lot about community, sharing, and stockpiling food, she started a lasagna sauce, and we drove to Honda dealership to pick up my CRV with totally reconstructed rear brakes after the left rear brake caliper stuck and burnt out everything.

When we got back, she turned off the smoke alarms before heating her oven to 500 deg F since it was overdue for a cleaning. The gluten-free dough has to be handled gently. We found patting out thin circles for personal pizzas worked much better than rolling them out. I also did the patting out directly on parchment paper after incorporating a fair amount of flour into the intial balls. She was freezing the pizza shells partially baked, so they only took five minutes in the oven. While I was busy shaping, Sherry was equally busy get done pizzas onto a cooling rack, putting in a new pan, and setting up another pan for me to put them onto. We ended up using one piece of parchment paper four times. After that it was too browned to be reused again.

The last time Sherry had attempted to make gluten-free pizza had been an exercise in frustration: the dough constantly fell apart as she tried to move it from a board to pan and stuck to everything. Using lots of flour in the shaping and patting, rather than rolling, directly into the pan going into the oven minimized the falling apart. The dough only stuck to the shaper's hands and that was a quick wash-off after the last pan went into the oven.

We used up all the dough as pizzas. Sherry is looking forward to a dozen or more pizza meals. She can make one up and take for lunch when she's out housecleaning (she does it with green supplies like baking soda and vinegar) and she'll no longer be tempted to go off her diet on pizza nights at home!

A Thermal Cooker Trifecta

Soup This past Sunday was the Quaker potluck in a space that doesn't have a stove, though it does have electrical. Rather than get out my crock pot, I used my thermal cooker for soup. It also had the advantage of being a deeper pot so there is less likelihood of leakage while transporting. Another Friend brought chili in an oval crockpot and he had some mess to clean up.

The soup was based on the harvest I have on hand: tomatoes ripening in newspaper, delicta squash in storage, canned tomato stock, lightly salted vegetable stock, dried chard, and dried zucchini slices. I add some mixed dal and curry and produced a hearty, warming soup for lunch. After bringing it all to a boil, I set the pot in the vacuum sleeve, closed the insulated lid, and went for an hour long walk. I checked the seasoning when I got back, brought it to a boil again, and set up for Meeting. The soup cooked through meeting and announcements and all but two servings was joyfully consumed. I put those two servings in the fridge and rinsed out the cooker preparatory to its next use.

Rice Once I got my thermal cooker and found out how easy it was to cook rice in it, I donated my rice cooker to a thrift store. It was also far easier to clean and you never have to worry about it burning. It takes 45 minutes to cook brown rice in the cooker. Just bring 2 cups of rice in 3 cups of water to a boil, set it in the sleeve, cover and forget it. Supper got a little bit delayed, but the rice stayed fluffy in the cooker. We always use leftover rice in fried rice, under stir-fries, or perhaps even in a rice pudding. After supper I put the remaining rice in a container and cleaned out the cooker for its next use.

Steel-cut oats Usual recipes for steel-cut oats (the oat grains are cut into pieces rather than rolled flat) call for a half-hour boil. There is also the ease with which the oats will cling and burn to the bottom of your pot. I used the same proportions of water and oats as called for: 4 parts water to 1 part oats and did up 2 cups of steel-cut oats for a week of breakfasts. I also added hemp hearts, nutritional yeast, ground flax seed, and wheat germ (a round teaspoon of each per quarter cup of oats) as I do for my usual oatmea. I brought this to a boil and set the pot in the vacuum sleeve, closing the lid. After 4 hours they were nicely cooked through. It was bedtime then, so I simply took the pot out of the sleeve and set it in our "walk-in" fridge (the enclosed porch in December - March).

I moved the finished oats to containers this morning (Tuesday) so I could used the thermal cooker for tonight's supper of Southwestern stew. To used the oats, I microwave them for 2 minutes with fruit then top with some yogurt -- a very hearty, rib-sticking breakfast!

First,, cut a delicta squash in half lengthwise...

That's how my session in making squash granola begins. Kathie's recipe is an adaptation of one that uses applesauce. I, in turn, adapted hers to what I have on hand.

When I cut open a delicta squash (commonly called a sweet potato squash here in southern Ontario), I get a half cup of seeds or more. I save all my squash seeds, because you can toast them for a lovely snack, hulls and all. You can also use them instead of bought-at-the-store pepitas (hulled pumpkin seeds). Sesame seeds make me gassy, so I substitute half a cup of ground golden flax seed and half a cup of oat bran for those. I did use sunflower seeds as called for in the recipe. I didn't have any brown rice syrup, but I did have a can of date syrup from Syria.

I wasn't making the granola just for myself. I have two friends on wheat-free diets and cans of this granola will be in their Christmas bags from me. I added coconut flakes, dried cranberries and raisins to fancy it up a bit.

So to start, I cut a squash in half and take out the seeds. I set them on a plate to dry after pulling them off the fibrous stuff and rinsing them for the next batch of granola. I use seeds from previously cooked squash for this batch. I cut the squash in 3/4 inch slices and put them in a covered glass dish with some water. Ten minutes in the microwave cooks them. I let them cool while I get everything else together. I scoop the squash from the rind and mash it for the granola. I usually get over a cup of mashed squash; what I don't use for the granola will go into soup, pancakes, cookies, or waffles.

Here's my recipe:

Mix the following dry ingredients together in a bowl:
5 cups old-fashioned rolled oats
1 cup raw sunflower seeds
1 cup dried squash seeds
1/2 c ground golden flax seed (I use a coffee grinder to do this)
1/2 c oat bran
1 cup coconut flakes -- break up long pieces
2 tsp cinnamon

Mix the following wet ingredients together in a saucepan and bring to a boil:
3/4 c cooked, mashed orange squash
1/2 c honey
1/3 c date syrup
2 tablespoons olive oil

Pour over the dry ingredients and mix well. I can fit this into one fairly large lipped cookie sheet (or "jellyroll pan", though I never make any cake in it), but you may need two pans. Bake in a 300 deg F oven for 45 minutes, stirring every ten minutes.

After it is baked, add the fruit:
3/4 c dried cranberries
3/4 c raisins

This makes three coffee tins (originally holding 12 - 16 oz of coffee) of granola. You can also put it into pint jars. I'll probably do that to put them by for the summer!