Further adventures to saving some green

Last Friday, for no reason at all, I went off about being "green" in a "recession." I put the first word in quotation marks, because I hate the term, and I put the second word in quotation marks, because the term has become artificial. But I'm not here to rail on the functions of the Federal Reserve Board...

I'm here today to discuss my absolute favorite eco-friendly ingredient: baking soda.

Chemistry first: Made from limestone, ammonia and salt, there is apparently enough raw materials to make tons of the stuff without endangering supplies. The result from the reaction is NH4CL and sodium bicarbonate (baking soda). Now, the NH4CL is apparently water-soluble and breaks down into ammonia (one of the initial ingredients) and HCL, hydrochloride. I thought this was the same as hydro-chloric acid, but I can't find any Internet outrage on how Arm & Hammer is dumping hydro-chloric acid everywhere. Maybe someone can fill me in on the production process.

Assuming then, until I'm filled in otherwise, that baking soda is as close to green as you'd expect something man-made to be, how does baking soda work? A little more chemistry (sorry): everything in this world has a pH (maybe rocks don't, I'm not clear on this). pH measures your acidity or lack thereof. A low pH means you're acid, and a high pH means you're alkaline (or base). 7 is neutral. Most dirt, odors and things we want to get rid of are acid. Baking soda, in all its sodium bicarbonate goodness, is alkaline. When you meld the two, magic happens.

Experiment: put one teaspoon of baking soda on a plate. Add a few drops of vinegar or lemon juice. Watch it fizz, baby!

So what can you do with this alkaline miracle? Oh, my friends, what CAN'T you do?

1. Heartburn: an excess of acid in your stomach needs about 4 ounces of water mixed with 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda. It doesn't taste great, but the results are immediate. Side effect: burping.

2. Scrubbing bubbles: forget all those expensive cans of toxic cleaning products. Mix baking soda with some liquid soap to make a paste. Slather the paste all over your sink, bathtub, wherever. Let it sit for an hour, then wash off with a wet washcloth. Very little scrubbing is needed. For nasty mold stains, wash the paste off with a 50-50 mixture of vinegar and water. Fizzzzzzz. No toxic fumes, very little money spent.

3. Oven cleaner: I think we all know by now that oven cleaners are the WORST. But the bottom of everyone's oven looks pretty icky by the end of the holiday season, so what's a cook to do? Layer on that baking soda -- about 1/4" -- all over the bottom of your oven. Just dry, just out of the box. Spray it down with water until all of it is wet. Come back and spray every couple of hours. Spray one more time before you go to bed. The next morning, that baking soda should be disgustingly brown with all the stuff it wicked up off the bottom of your oven. Just wipe it off, then rinse the oven down with a 50-50 vinegar water mixture, which will remove any excess baking soda.

4. Stinky carpet: If you're potty training a dog, this will come in handy. Layer on the baking soda over the "mistake," and let it sit for an hour until dry. This should wick away a lot of piddle and neutralize alot of the odor. Vacuum, and if you still have that puppy smell, spray down with vinegar.

5. Wooden carving boards: I love my wood carving boards, but I hate trying to cut fruit or bread on one that still smells like onion. Mix baking soda with enough water to form a paste. Slather it on the cutting board and leave it for an hour. Rinse. Cooks Illustrated determined this was the best way to clean a cutting board, and they tested it against soap and bleach. Do not use bleach!

Those are 5 of the hundreds of uses for baking soda around the house. It is odor-neutralizing, stain-bleaching, dirt-removing, and provides scratch-free scouring.

Have a great weekend!

Thoughts of Tucker

Today begins a weekend of cold, blustery, rainy weather (why is it always on the weekend?). Nothing says cold weather like freshly baked cookies. The oven warms the house, and that yummy smell greets you at the door as you pull off your jacket. mmmmm.

But today I made cookies for... Tucker! He's been so extra-specially cute lately, and he happens to be out of treats, so today seemed a good day to spoil him. :-)

Usually I make the recipe featured on Threadbanger's Decor-It-Yourself. Meg's recipe calls for you to mix up 1 egg, 1/3 cup peanut butter, 1 tablespoon of honey, 1/2 cup mashed banana, and then add 1 1/2 cups rice flour.

All fine and dandy, except I only had about 1 cup of brown rice flour, and I wanted to use up 3 bananas that had been sitting in the freezer for a while. 3 bananas is a bit more than 1/2 cup. So, throwing caution to the wind, I supplemented the remaining flour with almond meal, and I used all the bananas. The dough was way to gloppy to roll out for cookie cutters, so I just used my handy little cookie dropper thing.

20 minutes at 350 resulted in these:

They're a bit bigger than I would normally make them, so the 2nd batch was smaller and baked for 30 minutes at 300 (which is the normal temp and time for the unaltered recipe).

The test subject was given the "new" cookie:


And test results show our focus group was pleased with the results:


So, all is well in the world of Tucker, and he has a couple dozen treats to get him through the next couple months.

Chewy Dog Treats

Mix together until smooth in a large bowl:
3 bananas (smashed / black)
1 egg
1/3 cup of peanut butter
1 tablespoon of honey

Add 1/2 cup at a time a mixture of the following:
1 cup rice flour or brown rice flour (do not use regular flour, as dogs really should not consume wheat)
1/2 cup almond meal or hazelnut meal

When everything is blended, drop onto a cookie sheet (greased or with parchment or a baking stone) about the size of a small cotton ball. Spacing is not an issue, because these cookies do not spread or rise.

Bake at 300 for 30 minutes.

Try a bite yourself -- they're not as sweet as we like cookies, but I can see why Tucker likes them!

Always twirling

Oh my hooks have been twirling lately! Remember the pumpkin bags? Well, they're multiplying, and now I have a little pumpkin-y patch:

Up until now, the bags have been one color at the base, another color for the body, and then the same base color for the drawstring. No more!

I branched out into mixed colors, as you can see here. And here:

I'm loving this pumpkin look. So much so that I put one up on etsy, just to see if maybe other people liked it as much as me. If this one sells, I may make a bunch in Xmas-y colors and call them ornament bags. Obviously, if you think someone would like this, direct them to my etsy page.

But it hasn't been all drawstring pouches here. I'm halfway done with the Xmas gift for Shanti's grandfather. I'm making him a scarf based on the pattern in Crochet Me, Shades of Plaid. You can see a finished version here. A close up of a finished version is here. And you can see one in progress here.

My WIP is here:

Nice manly colors perfect for winter, I think. The base part is done and measures a little over 5'. You make the base, and then you weave in crocheted strands to make the plaid pattern. Ingenious idea, that. Here's a close-up of the base:

The camera is a bit wonky lately. Those colors should be a dark green, a dark red, and a dark plum. The first photo is a bit more color-accurate, although that photo would indicate an inherent brightness that does not exist right now (we are socked in with fog at the moment).

And so that is what my hooks have been doing. How about you?

Last Days In The Garden

Maple seed pods

Remember the beautiful elm with all the red leaves? Gone with the warmth of late summer, I'm afraid. Instead, we have the beautiful elm in all its winter finery, ready to take on the snows and storms of the season. Of course, all those achingly gorgeous red leaves went somewhere. And at Shunn Family Farms, they go into the garden.

I've already shown you how we mulched the pathways between the garden beds with leaves, but we also use them to re-build the lasagna garden beds. For those who don't remember what those are, there's a very simple rundown here. And the woman who started the whole lasagna gardening concept, Patricia Lanza, has her blog here.

We made our first lasagna beds last fall and planted our beans, peas, melons and cucumbers in them. All those plants THRIVED. I checked under some of the beds this year, and the soil in there is so rich, it's black.

This is my lasagna bed for beans at the end of the season. We just added a layer of leaves on top, then a layer of artichoke leaves (they're green -- nitrogen-heavy -- and they break down quickly) and then a layer of soil. As compost is ready out of the compost tumbler, we'll top each bed off with a layer of compost.

Why lasagna beds? 1. Almost no weeding. Because you build up the layers every fall, you remove the possibility of seeds from the previous season's weeds taking root. And, because a hallmark of this type of gardening is to mulch heavily, you prevent wind-blown seeds from taking root during the growing season. 2. Rich, rich soil. Like I said, our plants in these beds did amazingly well (remember all those cucumbers?). 3. No digging, no weeding, just mulching. This is an ideal way to garden for people who don't have a lot of time. You build your beds once, and then you come back to mulch a few times throughout the growing season, and then you build up some more layers every fall.

Now, because you're building in new soil every fall, I'm not sure if crop rotation is still required. I do rotate my crops between beds, based on plant families (solanaceae, cucurbits, brassicas, etc.). I've also been asked about crop rotation and companion gardening; I don't companion garden, so I don't know if crop rotation is needed for that gardening method.

4 new lasagna beds, all neatly in a row. These will compost over the fall and winter and be ready to plant come springtime.

We have some things growing in the garden. These are the broccoli plants and brussels sprouts, nicely recovered from the Great Hen Attack of September, 2009. Shortly after this photo was taken, Shanti attached plastic sheeting to the greenhouse frame, so now it has walls.

Baby arugula is coming along nicely. This week is meant to be sunny and in the mid-60s, so hopefully, these little seedlings will take off, so I can harvest arugula leaves well into winter.
And the cover crops. This is the newest group planted. Buckwheat sprouts first -- within a few days -- and then slowly the legumes grow in.

We also laid down clover seed, and we will do that regularly over the next few weeks to ensure even germination (and to replace whatever the blue jays eat). Hopefully I will have pretty photos of our nice, green clover lawn in the springtime.

Of course, the end of October brought a certain holiday with it. This is our next door neighbor's decorations. They had them up all month long!

And, while fall takes baseball away, it brings in football. Here is Shanti playing with Jordan, Taylor, Nyle and Scott.

Go Taylor!

Scott and Nyle, still decked out in their
Halloween costumes from the night before!
(they even still have their make-up on)

Taylor, practicing her throws with Shanti.
Soon she'll be better than the boys...

Being Green in a Recession

The announcement was made yesterday that the US is no longer in a recession. This has to do with the country's economic growth (like a paramecium, I suspect), but people still don't have jobs, foreclosed houses still sit empty, and I read today that people aren't spending.

Other than spending money at Shannon & Gene's Northbrook WineStyles, I say good. People shouldn't be spending -- they should be saving. People's ideas of what it means to be eco-friendly are changing. In the beginning, it was all about "buy this" and "buy that." I think people are starting to catch on to the eco-friendly things you can that will actually save you money, and that's the kind of green we all like.

1. Buy in bulk. It's cheaper, because you're not paying for all that packaging. It's much more eco-friendly, because there is no packaging to throw away. Bring your own re-usable, clean containers to the store, weigh them (so the cashier doesn't charge you for the weight of the container), write the bin number on the container, and fill up. What do I get in the bulk section? Flour, popcorn, nuts, sugar, baking soda, baking powder, olive oil, canola oil, honey, molasses, pasta, oats, cornstarch, chocolate chips, all of my dried herbs and spices, salt, vanilla, soy sauce, dried beans and lentils, and sometimes sesame sticks (which are a particular weakness).

2. Make your own food. Nothing says wasteful like packaging, and that includes the packaging on frozen meals and fast food meals. If you're buying coffee from Starbucks, going out for lunch and heating up pre-packaged food at home, you are flushing your money away. Make your own lunches and dinners. If you're strapped for time, make several dinners ahead of time on the weekends, package them up and they're ready for you. Make your own coffee and save the specialty drinks for the weekends. And when you do go to get your Venti White Mocha with 2 extra pumps and an extra shot (that is Shanti's drink), bring your own cup -- most coffee places give you 5 or 10 cents back for that. Packaging is waste, both a waste of money and an increase in trash. Plus, when you buy the raw ingredients to make your own meals, you have control over where those ingredients are sourced, meaning you can keep a lot of the money you spend local.

3. Check the thermostat. 65 in winter and 80 in summer. I'm shocked at how hot some people keep their houses in winter. Wear a sweater! This tip alone will save you hundreds every winter. In the summer, let your body get acclimated to some of that heat. No, I don't like when it's over 100 either, but 80 is a full 20 degrees cooler than outside. Any larger difference, and your electric bill will be horrendous, and you're leaving yourself open to illness.

4. Watch your water consumption. And I don't mean what you're drinking (which should be a gallon a day). Only run your dishwasher when it's full. Only run the washing machine when it's full (and hang those clothes up to dry). Take shorter showers and install a low-flow shower head that has a quick shut-off valve. We bought ours from Niagra, and it allows you to shut the water off while you're soaping up. Yes, this involves spending money, but this $30 purchase will save you money in the long run. We've had ours for almost 5 years. Now, the biggest water waster in your house is that toilet. This house follows the "if it's yellow, let it mellow" rule, and I think everyone should. Especially if you live by yourself -- if you're grossed out by your own pee, you need to go to a therapist.

5. Walk, bicycle, skateboard, roller blade when possible. There's no two ways about it, if you use methods of transportation other than your car, you will save money on gasoline and increase your health. Take the bus when you can, and look into carpooling 2 or 3 days a week. Sitting in traffic is more enjoyable with someone else. The walking part is key, though. If you're getting in the car to drive two blocks to get a pint of Ben & Jerry's, you'll be spending a lot more money in medical bills down the line.

There, those are 5 ways to greenify your life without spending the green in your wallet. Have a great weekend!

P.S. I really want to touch on #2. I've heard so many people whine that they don't have enough time to make their own meals. I used to have a 90-minute commute to and from work. I had enough time every morning to have coffee and make a big salad for myself for lunch. I didn't get home until 8PM every night, and I still made dinner for Shanti and me. I understand that some people don't want to eat that late, so then you make a few dinners ahead of time. The time you invest in making your meals is subtracted from the money you spend on them. When you buy something pre-packaged, you are paying for a convenience (and packaging and marketing). To save money, you have to spend some time -- the upside is that you learn to be more efficient with your time, while the price of packaged food just goes up.

Thoughts on several things

Now that the tomato plants are gone, baby, gone, I'll have to rely on my stockpile of pre-made tomato sauce all through fall and the impending winter for fresh tomato-y goodness. I did, however, rescue a small batch of green tomatoes before I canked the plants. It's become a tradition here at Shunn Family Farms to start and end each tomato season with yummy fried green tomatoes (FGTs).


These are said tomatoes. I was going to take photos of the whole process of making the FGTs, but instead I stuffed my face and didn't take anymore photos. It's an easy recipe:

• Slice tomatoes anywhere from 1/4" to 1/2" thickness. I discard the ends, because you really want all the slices to have "open" tomato on both sides.
• Dredge in flour
• Dip in milk or egg or water or some combination of those. I used milk this time.
• Dip in breadcrumbs, panko, cornmeal, almond meal, or something similar. Cornmeal is traditional, but we only had breadcrumbs in the house.
• Ask husband to deep fry them up for you.
• Top with sea salt if desired and enjoy.

I had actually made a "real" dinner to go with these appetizers, but I was too stuffed from FGTs to eat dinner.

This is what we made, though: potato leek soup. All from the garden. Those are Shanti's all-blue potatoes and the last of my leeks. This is by far Shanti's favorite soup, and it was all gone by the next evening.

Milk. Thanks to Chelsea, Shanti and I visited a farm outside of Jacksonville and purchased a gallon of raw (unpasteurized) milk.

History first. Most milk (and dairy products) you get is pasteurized. I've heard two different stories as to why milk is pasteurized (heat-treated so as to kill any bacteria): 1. Because milk was left on our doorsteps, it had to be pasteurized to stop bacteria from spreading in the warm weather, and 2. Due to the industrialization of the Western world, cows were being pastured near factories and eating run off, so the milk had to be pasteurized to kill the nasty things living in the cows. My guess is that pasteurization resulted from a combination of these things and more, like lack of refrigeration.

Many states -- New York included -- do not allow the sale of any "raw" dairy. In California, most places sell at least a couple brands of raw cheese, and we had started buying quarts of raw milk in glass bottles from the Whole Foods. Oregon's laws are different; raw cheese is allowed, but not the sale of raw milk. The loophole is that you can buy a "share" of a cow, and your dividend is a gallon of raw milk a week.

Anyway, this farm had a couple extra gallons, and I purchased one of them. Milk for Shanti's coffee, milk to make my yogurt.

Now, what is different about this milk? First off, pasteurization changes the flavor completely. There is no sour taste in your mouth after drinking raw milk. Secondly, pasteurization kills bacteria -- both good and bad -- and also the vitamins in the milk. That is why grocery milk advertises that it's supplemented with vitamin D: it needs to be added back in after pasteurization. Naturally occurring vitamin D is far more bioavailable than lab-created vitamins. This has something to do with molecular bonds, I think, and the way the atoms or molecules spin one way. Anyway, you can look that up.

Back to what is better about the raw milk. Thirdly, it comes in glass. If you don't think plastic containers change the flavor of your food, get a quart of milk in the wax container or plastic and then get a quart in glass. Most stores now sell a super expensive brand in glass bottles. The taste difference is shocking; like the difference between Velveeta and real cheese.

Fourthly, for the raw milk to be safe, the cows need to be pastured. That means, eating grass, not corn. Cows do not eat corn naturally, it's like a junk food for them. But it's cheap feed, so most dairy farms feed corn. Because the cow's digestive system can't process corn properly, it becomes a breeding ground for e. coli. The e. coli comes out the back end of the cow, and you end up with e. coli in the water runoff, and that's how that spinach got contaminated a few years ago. It wasn't the fault of the spinach farmers -- it was the fault of dairy farmers next door. So, the few cows on this farm eat grass and walk around and do cow things. Whatever those might be. A lot of chewing, I think.

Lastly, I strongly prefer to support a small farmer rather than a factory farm (although we'd been buying our milk from Organic Valley, which is a cooperative of local farmers), and it was nice to meet the farmers and see their hens running around.

And now I'm on the list in case there are extra gallons and for farm-fresh butter too!

One last word on raw milk. I would only buy raw milk from a small farmer (although we did buy unpasteurized milk from the Whole Foods when we lived in L.A., and I had no idea where that farm was). Am I taking a chance with salmonella poisoning? Yes, but no more than anyone who BBQs beef and likes it rare. And no more than anyone who buys produce from an unknown source (like at the big chain grocery stores). I'll tell you, the fresh taste of the milk, the thick layer of cream on top that Shanti puts in his coffee, the knowledge that the cows are treated like pets and not slaves -- all of this is worth getting the unpasteurized milk straight from the farm.

Until Monday...

Crochet On Time!

Hey, look at that -- it's Tuesday, and I have a crochet project to blog about. Amazing.

Remember when I bought all that discount yarn at Middleford's sidewalk sale? That was where I got the yarn came for the sweater from hell project. I also got rayon ribbon yarn at the same time, and I said it would be for holiday gifts.

Sure enough, I've already started! Hoorah!

I'm making cosmetic/jewelry bags.

(This is the color corrected photo -- look at how sloppy and red-toned the first one is. Oooops -- you'd never know I work in graphic design for a living...)

Anyway, I love these bags. I made the pattern myself, and I think they look like little fall pumpkins. Love, love, love them! They work up in about 3 hours, and the yarn is so silky smooth that the drawstring ties move really easily.

What else is going into people's holiday packs? Liisa & Shanti's Back Alley Blackberry Jam, my Newly Famous Pickles, Cherish Your Friends Cherry Jam, and cookies. Always with the cookies! There will be variance among what people get. Some can't have sugar, some wouldn't want a cosmetics bag, etc.

So that's what's twirling 'round my hook. If any of you reading this have hook-related (or, god forfend, knitting needle related) projects, I'd love to see them!

Till Thursday...