making

I'm taking some time while my good Mr. Dub is out of town to work on a Christmas present.

A few days ago I had a momentary glimpse, a vision, you might say, of what my front room would look like if I didn't have all my crafting stuff in there. It would be emptier for sure, but so much more peaceful and serene and there would be so much less accusation and guilt.

While I was rifling through my things looking for the supplies for this project I realized again just how much there is for how many projects and I felt a little overwhelmed and alarms started going off in my head. All I can do now is refrain from buying any more things and make all the still very awesome and cool projects I'm supplied for right now. I've managed to stop the too much shopping and not enough doing, because otherwise I'm no different from those crazies that get put on TV. Whenever I feel like getting more stuff for a new project all I need to do is go in there and remind myself of all I currently own and get going on some of it.

It's a lot.

Country bread

I am making dressing for Thanksgiving tomorrow, from scratch, for the first time ever - up until now I've always bought the packaged cubes or crumbs of bread to make "homemade" dressing with. I found a recipe that sounded good and decided to make it. The recipe calls for "country bread" which sounds fancy and perhaps expensive but I found a recipe in one of my cookbooks for "country loaf", had all the ingredients on hand, and figured "why not?" so I baked it! (What I didn't do was take a pic before slicing into it but you can't tell in the pic.)

It's different, and delicious! It's very large, about 12" in diameter, and if/when I made it again, I will divide it into two smaller round loaves to make it more convenient for sandwiches and toast.

Food Waste Report

There's a lot on the "thrown out" list today:

• more taco meat. I need to think about whether I should stop making tacos at home unless we have guests. Except for me, no one who lives here likes them, and I have a hard time getting through a lb. of taco meat all by myself before it becomes questionable.
• beet greens that turned to a black mush
• some not-so-fresh spinach
• 3/4 cup cooked rice*
• 2 Activia yogurt cups that expired in September*
• 1 can chopped mustard greens that expired in the year 2010*

This week's successes:

• made some very tasty potato salad with some homemade sweet pickles that were given to us last Christmas, some pickled peppers from a jar in the fridge, and some celery and green onions from the crisper bin. The potatoes were beginning to sprout eyes but I cut those off and the potatoes seemed fine otherwise. Do you find that Yukon Gold potatoes start to go bad more quickly than russet potatoes? It seems like I hardly have them in the house before I suddenly need to use them up quickly.
• made pinto beans and ham with the ham bone I had in the freezer and a random bag of beans that I think I got for free from the grocery store when I bought something else. I bought the ham a couple of months ago and trimmed lots of meat off of the bone but wasn't sure what to do with it after that. I'm glad I saved it because after simmering for hours with the beans I found a lot of meat to go back in with the beans. The ham and beans were so good, and really hit the spot when we got some cold weather. I made some corn muffins to go with them.
• found a recipe for a jam tart that I intend to make with a pint of strawberry-fig jam that we received as a gift last Christmas. The jam might very well be delicious, but it is kind of icky looking - brownish and chunky and syrupy - which is why we still have it. I intend to blend it up into a smooth paste and make the tart with it. If we don't like it, well, at least I tried.
• organized the kitchen pantry a bit and found some things that I had forgotten about.

Meal plan for this week:

• the rest of the ham and beans.
• chicken sausages from the freezer with leftover potato salad.
• cod from the freezer baked with pesto I found in the pantry. I will serve this with a long grain/wild rice mix I have in the cupboard.
• Thanksgiving Dinner.
• turkey paninis with pesto from the pantry and some cheese I have in the fridge. I might try my hand at making homemade ciabatta bread, or I may see if they have any on the day-old bakery rack at the store. I will make another potato salad with the remaining potatoes, pickles, pickled peppers, celery, and green onions to go with the paninis.
• turkey soup with leftover rolls.

*My good Mr. Dub bought these things and never ate them, and my Little Friend and I don't eat yogurt or mustard greens. (I don't think Mr. Dub eats mustard greens either. He bought the one can at least 2 1/2 years ago and never ate them.) He cooked the rice for his breakfast one day two weeks ago and then gave up on it before he finished it.
The blame for the rest of the thrown-out items rests fully upon my own shoulders.

goals for the week

I had some productive days this week.

Things I've accomplished:

• Cleaned up a few little piles of stuff that I had made of things I wasn't sure what to do with. They had been there so long that I'd forgotten what was in them. I've sorted, made decisions, and then filed, shredded, put away, and otherwise dealt with everything in those piles. I also went through my "regular" piles of stuff and did the same thing; these two piles - by the telephone and on the desk - are a sort of holding area for things that I use all the time like my address/telephone books and temporary things like coupons, school notes, business cards and other bits and bobs that I might (or might not) need in the near future.
• Went through two desk drawers and pulled out and shredded old bills and insurance documents that I no longer need to keep.
• Found a place very near my home that accepts plastic bottles and cardboard for recycling. (The recycling bins at our elementary school across the street only accept paper.) In the true spirit of recycling and frugality I have turned sturdy, waxed cardboard boxes into recycling bins for paper/cardboard and plastic bottles. I have yet to create a system/routine/habit whereby I actually take these items over there in a timely manner, but it's still a tiny step forward. The goal there is to not turn the garage into a hoarded-out trash heap propped up by good intentions.
• Made some delicious but simple meals out of ingredients I had on hand, which was good because that instantly freed up some room in the budget to get the big, acorn-laden oak trees in our front yard trimmed.
• Searched for and printed out recipes to use up some of the things in the pantry that will otherwise never be used. I've realized that although some of the responsibility is mine, other people do play a part in this by buying items for themselves that they don't have a plan for or never get around to eating, or by people outside my family giving food items to us as gifts that I don't know how to use. It is my responsibility to eliminate food waste coming out of my own kitchen and at the same time not become intolerably controlling of the other people I live with or an ungracious receiver of thoughtful gifts from people who care about me.
• Kept myself caught up on daily tasks like laundry, dishes, and tidying up. It really is true that when you have fewer things you have less mess to clean up at the end of each day.

Goals for next week:

• spend time each day with Jake discussing algebra and the Spanish language.
• clean up the pine needles out of the flower beds and rain gutters.
• organize and contain our camping gear. This includes trying to get the musty, mildewy odor out of the family-size tent.
• get everything out of James's closet and put painter's tape around the shelves and trim in anticipation of painting the walls in there.
• Organize and contain more efficiently the items that James has kept.
• work on handmade Christmas gifts for extended family members.
• order supplies I still need for other handmade Christmas gifts.
• call a couple of dear friends and set up a time that I can visit with them.
• stop dilly-dallying about whether or not I should continue with a nasty book I've been reading and just throw it away.
• finalize the menu for our Thanksgiving dinner, study the sales circulars and shop for the ingredients, prepare as much as possible ahead of time, and make meal plans that use up the leftovers.
• make and pressure-can stock with the turkey carcass on Black Friday.
• make a Christmas card list and start collecting addresses.

pantry cooking

Today I cobbled together some online recipes to make a pot of soup that I am calling:

Enchilada Soup

1 lb lean ground beef (I used a pint jar of pressure-canned ground beef)
2 tablespoons dehydrated onion flakes (or 1/4 cup chopped yellow onion)
1 clove garlic, minced
1 14.5 oz can diced fire-roasted tomatoes, undrained
1 11 oz can whole kernel corn, undrained
1 15 oz can red kidney OR pinto beans, rinsed
1 15 oz can black beans, rinsed (I used some cooked black beans I had in the freezer)
1 20 oz can red enchilada sauce
1 cup beef broth (I used 1 cup very hot water and 1 tsp. beef base paste)

Brown the ground beef with the onion and garlic. Add the other ingredients and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer 10 minutes. Serve in bowls and top with tortilla chips, shredded colby-jack cheese, and a spoonful of sour cream if desired.

Makes 3 quarts of soup which I have placed in the freezer for dinner on cold wintry nights.

Cucurbits

Cucurbit:  (ky-kûrbt)

n. 1. Any of various mostly climbing or trailing plants of the family Cucurbitaceae, which includes the squash, pumpkin, cucumber, gourd, watermelon, and cantaloupe.

2. A gourd-shaped flask forming the body of an alembic, formerly used in distillation.

 

I've known for 30 years that I am allergic to watermelon and cantaloupe, and have figured out in the last 10 years that cucumbers really do a number on me too. I'm talking itchy, watery eyes, itching and swelling tongue, mouth, and inside my ears. My stomach and intestinal tract are also not happy when I eat those foods.

 

I've never had a problem with zucchini. Not long ago I realized that is because I always eat zucchini cooked, not raw like I would eat watermelon or cucumbers. Did you know that heat - otherwise known as "cooking" - denatures the proteins that causes allergic reactions in people? It's not a foolproof fix, but it lets me eat a bit of an otherwise totally off-limits food.

 

I thought pumpkin was okay for me. Not so. Having food waste on my mind yesterday, and realizing that I was waiting for two pumpkins to go bad so that I could finally throw them away (pumpkins that my Pretty Girl and my sweet little Buttercup picked out at the pumpkin patch) a light went on and I decided that I would roast them and puree them and freeze them for pies and other pumpkin goodies. (Did you know that the demand for pumpkins in the U.S. each Halloween equals 1.1 billion pounds, most of which is discarded and headed to landfills after the holiday? Meanwhile, children are starving right here in our own communities...)

 

Well, after cutting open and gutting them and generally fiddling with them trying to get them ready for the freezer,  I now know that that whole Cucurbitaceae family bothers me greatly. The skin on my hands was so itchy they were throbbing. I sincerely hope that this doesn't mean I have increased my sensitivity to pumpkin and that I will still get to eat some pumpkin pie next week. Because pumpkin pie is my favorite, and it will really be disappointing if I can't eat it anymore.

I think the word "cucurbits" substitutes nicely for any cuss word.

throwing it out

More food waste this week:

• a few wilted, slimy green onions.
• some (more than some, actually, more like quite a bit) freeze-dried strawberries that had turned black.
• a cup or so walnut halves that I found in the cupboard that had gone rancid.
• three bananas from the freezer that turned to black liquid when I thawed them to make banana bread.
• a moldy orange.

I need to be more careful and aware about what I'm buying at the store and then have a more definite plan to use what does come home from the store with me. I am learning something about myself and that is I am very random. "Spontaneous" sounds better though, don't you think? But honestly, I have all these random things in my fridge and pantry and no idea what to do with them. I think it comes from my long-standing habit of buying ingredients rather than meals and will be solved by better meal planning and recipe organization and plain ol' care and thoughtfulness.

It is also taking me some time to get used to buying less and cooking smaller meals which I need to do now that most of my children have flown the coop. I don't have a good sense yet of exactly how many potatoes to peel, for example, and it's getting tedious trying to eat up all the dinner leftovers for lunch every single day.

I also need to have a meal plan and recipes for "food storage" items like the freeze-dried strawberries before I buy them instead of impulsively buying them because they look interesting. Because as it turns out, none of us ever choose a handful of freeze-dried strawberries for a snack or meal.

This week's successes:

• gave away some powdered fruit drink to someone who will use it. We didn't care for its bitter grapefruit taste. When I bought it I was under the impression it was orange or tangerine flavor.
• ate the last bowl of bordering-on-stale cereal from a box that had to be either eaten or thrown out. Cereal is something we don't eat much of now that my older children are gone.
• made nearly all meals from the pantry, fridge and freezer instead of buying lots of new groceries.
• ate all the lettuce that was threatening to turn pink by adding it to whatever I was eating at lunch. Why does iceberg lettuce turn pink when all other greens turn brown or black? It's a mystery.

On this week's menu:

• more lemon-poppy seed muffins for breakfasts and snacks, made with two lemons that have been hiding under some other stuff in the crisper bin. I have no idea how long they've been there but they still look fresh.
• chicken salad sandwiches made with green onions and craisins on homemade rolls.
• ham and pinto bean soup. I will use up the "trimmings" of the ham to make stock and use it in the soup. I will make cornbread to eat with this.
• chicken and rice soup using some single-serving size packages of frozen rice/veggie mix. I have no idea where these came from and it's not something I would ever buy but they are taking up valuable real estate in the freezer. (I have had three young adults, each with their own cars and money and agendas, living with me for months in the last year so it's entirely possible that one of them bought these things and I haven't totally lost my marbles.) I also have homemade chicken stock in the freezer that will be used up in this soup. We will eat the soup with leftover rolls from the chicken salad sandwiches.
• I need to figure out what to do with some leftover homemade macaroni and cheese. I wonder if it would turn creamy again if I add a little more milk while reheating it? And then added some ham chunks to turn it into a new dinner?