Oreos and Rain

Most of the snow is gone now and it has been raining since sometime last night. Once lunchtime came at work all I could think about was coming home and cuddling up with a book, a movie, 3 dogs, and a cat. Brian is working late tonight as he is on lookout for flooding across the roads. After working my way up the wait list I was able to pick up Multiple Blessings from the library on my way home from work.

I did chores and got attacked by the mean Leghorn rooster. I am so fed up with him I'd like to make him dinner but that would be a lot of work for 1 rooster. Plus, I just don't like the idea of the hens being out there without him. Today was the first time he's managed to get me good with his spurs and my hand was bleeding the prove it. Oh the joys of farm life!

About the oreos: I just love oreos. I think they're great. However, I sacrificed my oreo habit when I started trying to eat mostly local and mostly without HFCS. I found this great homemade version online and use it to get through the cravings. For some strange reason I wandered down the cookie aisle last night while shopping and somehow a box of double stuf (on sale) managed to get in my cart. I don't feel great about, and that is what I'm going to remind myself tonight. As I eat them, one by one. With milk. :)

Let's see... what else is new? Oh, I also got a couple of good books from the library about sheep so I've been studying up on lambing. Bonnie is due on the 23rd and although I am very excited, I am also about as nervous as a mama hen! The tentative plan is to let her lamb in the pen with the other ewes then move her and the baby(ies) to a separate, adjacent pen to allow them a little bonding time. We'll see how it goes.

How is the weather where you are? Have you, or your animals, been fooled in to thinking it is spring? What do you like to do on rainy days to pass the time? Or, how about this: what is your favorite guilty pleasure? Keep it decent!

Waste Reduction and Chocolate Muffins

I am very excited to be taking on the the Food Waste Reduction Challenge hosted by Crunchy Chicken (see sidebar for link). To start out I tossed any old food that I found in the fridge so that we can start fresh. Most of what I tossed were old dressings and sauces that we never use and brought here with us from the old house. I also threw out some shrimp and cocktail sauce from Christmas and one thing of leftovers from a restaurant. I plan to use my postal scale to weigh anything we throw out in February.

When I got to the freezer I was relieved not to find much that needed to be tossed. I did pitch some leftover cheesy potatoes we had frozen from our wedding. Then I came across the several bags of frozen shredded zucchini from last years garden. I had yet to use any of them. So, what's a non-wasting girl to do with all that zucchini?

Make muffins! Yeah, chocolate muffins to be exact. I pulled together a recipe from a few different ones to come up with the following:

Chocolate Muffins with (Shhh!) Zucchini
2 2/3 cups whole grain pastry flour (or whole wheat flour)
1 1/2 cups white sugar
1/2 cup cocoa
1 1/2 tsp. salt
3 eggs
1 cup shredded zucchini (could also use applesauce!)
1/2 cup water
1/2 cup heavy whipping cream (or milk)
1/2 cup oil
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1/2 cup chopped almonds and/or 1/2 cup Andes baking chips

I mixed the wet ingredients together first then added the dry. This was enough to make 24 muffins. I filled 12 muffin cups then mixed about 1/2 cup Andes mint baking chips in to the remainder. After filling the other 12 cups I sprinkled some tops with more chips and others with the almonds. I left some plain as well.

Bake at 325 degrees F for 20-25 minutes. These are delicious!! Let me know if you try them. I froze 8, took 8 to work, and left 8 for us to eat.

A Local Loaf

Today I picked up another order of local flours from Hampshire Farms (see sidebar for link). I got:

25# 100% whole grain bread flour
10# 100% whole grain pastry flour
2# cornmeal
5# sunflower seeds (dehulled)

Randy Hampshire, who filled my order was more than happy to show me around their farm. They have a USDA approved kitchen on site along with the brick oven that Randy built himself. It was very impressive! The farm also boasts a nice warehouse in an old grainery, where all of their flour and wheat is stored.

They also have, meandering around the pastures, a family cow. She is a nice looking Jersey and had a few other cattle keeping her company. I have given a lot of thought to having our own family cow and have thought about it more and more seriously lately. I don't think it is the right time for us, and it would take a lot to convince my husband. He probably has a point - it is a lot easier to find someone to throw in some grain for our animals then to milk twice a day when we want a vacation. In any case, of was jealous of Randy's family and I told him so.

Randy warned that I would want to use a recipe that calls for 100% WHOLE GRAIN flour, not just whole wheat or white flour. A Google search revealed this recipe, and I altered it in to the following for use in my bread maker:

1 Tbsp active dry yeast
3 3/4 cup whole grain flour
1 1/2 tsp salt
1/4 cup honey
3 Tbsp oil
1 1/2 very warm water

This is a big breakthrough for me: I now have the option of making a nearly 100% local loaf of bread for our everyday needs. Although Hampshire Farms is based 1/2 hour away from here the wheat for the bread flour was grown in an organic field only 1 1/2 miles down the road from our home. The honey comes from a local apiary, P.W.R. Beekeeping. I did use a non-local canola oil in today's loaf but only because I'm out of my normal Zoye Soybean Oil, made in Zeeland, MI from a lot of our neighbors' soybeans. Soy Beginnings soybean oil is also available so I have a couple options there. The only non-local ingredients are the yeast, which I buy in bulk, and the salt. We will be switching to sea salt as soon as our last never ending box of conventional salt is gone.

Oh, one more nice thing: I was relieved to see that the 10 & 25# quantities came in a large brown paper bag with no plastic liner. The smaller quantities I got last time came in plastic and since we're trying to reduce how much plastic we use I was a little concerned. No worries!

Here is a pic of the pull out cabinets that came with our ancient farmhouse, a great feature that makes storing all of this flour much easier:



And Maci, she was jealous and wanted to lick the camera:



So, what local products were you surprised to find in your neighborhood? Are you at the point yet were you have entirely local meal options?

A Twinge of Self-Sufficiency

I like to play this game where I try to stock up enough food and staples that I don't have to go grocery shopping for a long time. After a lot of practice I finally got to where the only things on the list were dairy products such as milk, cheese slices, cheese sticks, and butter. Apple juice also had a permanent spot on the list. After a few good sales we now have lots of cheese and butter in the freezer and many, many gallons of juice in the pantry. We're down to picking up a gallon of milk here and there when we stop at the local meat market for lunch meat.

Today when I came home from work I walked in to the kitchen and sat my tin I Love Lucy lunch box on the counter as usual. From there I looked over towards the fridge and could see that two lines at the top of the grocery list had writing on them. Darn! I thought, what could we possibly be out of!?!

bagels
cream cheese

Bagels - hmmph! The last package almost got moldy before I pointed that out and my hubby quickly scarfed them down as a week's worth of breakfasts. I knew that I could make them from scratch because I did it before after reading Heather's post about it that linked to a good bagel recipe. So instead of curling up on the couch like I had been hoping to do (I've been sick since Sunday night) I busted out the bread flour and made 4 fresh, homemade bagels. It was a lot easier this time since I have the bread maker now and can use that for the kneading and rising. I only made 4 because last time some got hard before they were eaten. A full recipe makes 8 so it was easy to halve it. I might try making a full batch next time and freezing them but I'm worried that they might not freeze well.

On to the cream cheese. Of course we have cream cheese. There are a dozen packages in the fridge drawer, all purchased for $1 each on sale and dated as far out as March. I've been making a dessert a week and cheesecake has become a real favorite. What the hubby wanted was the cute little butter dish type of spreadable cream cheese just like the almost empty one on the top shelf of the fridge. The one growing more mold than a petri dish.

Last weekend I had spotted a little recipe for flavored cream cheese in the Miserly Meals cookbook. It just called for mixing 3 oz. of cream cheese with 2 tbsp. of strawberry jam. Brian nixed the idea of flavoring it but I whipped 1/2 package in the mixer and put it in the (freshly washed) dish.

So...
2 PM: 2 things on the grocery list
7 PM: Empty again. Score! 20 points for the baker in the family.

Self-sufficiency feels good! :) I'd love to hear your story on how you've come to take less trips to the store, or come to rely on yourself more than you did.

Homemade, Last Minute, Cute, Kinda Green Christmas Cards!

Okay so this morning I started shopping around for Christmas cards online. I've done this many times in the past few months and always got discouraged because the recycled cards are sooo expensive. I was going to give up on that idea and instead created a cute card with some caricatures of my family on the front. I was almost at the point of entering my credit card number to the tune of $50 for 50 cards. That was $30 for the cards, $4 for some matching gift tags I'd fallen for, and the rest was all shipping and handling (just to get them here in 7-10 days - kinda close!). Anyway, one of the last options before checking out was to download the caricatures for unlimited use on your computer. The cost was $1.99 per caricature or $6.99 for the whole group of six. I was a little concerned that the company wouldn't allow you to purchase just the images without an additional order but after deleting the printed cards and gift tags, only the download charge remained!! No tax and no shipping, just $6.99 total billed to my card.

When I got home tonight I used MS Works and Adobe Photoshop to recreate the cards I would have had printed. I typed a nice paragraph inside summarizing our year and wishing everyone the best, and left room at the bottom for a personal greeting and signature. It took me a couple hours to get it right but I'm very picky. Plus, I don't feel the greatest - I think I'm getting sick - so I didn't feel like doing much else anyway.

Anyhow, here's what I ended up with. I printed them on 100% recycled cardstock (up to 30% post consumer) that I had left over from our wedding invitations. As I have to do now is find some envelopes to fit, which I doubt will be recycled. I'll use some of the many return address labels my hubby gets free in the mail from places like Easter Seals instead of printing new ones.

If you'd like to try this idea, I did it at VistaPrint, just click on "Caricatures" on the lower left hand column. Once I paid for them I had to call tech support to figure out how to download them. You go to My Account in the top right corner, click the See More... tab, then My Caricatures, then Download. Mine showed up as a .zip file on my desktop so I selected all the individual files out of there and pasted in to my pictures folder for easy access. That's sounds super confusing so if you try this and need help I can guide you through it a little better!

Let me know what you think!

Back


Front


Inside Top


Inside Bottom


Images were definitely more clear when printed!

Greening Your Dishwasher

So a little more than a year after moving in and rearranging our kitchen to make room for a dishwasher, it is finally up & running. And I sure am loving it. I have lived without a dishwasher for most of the past 4 years and I really thought that maybe I wouldn't use it much once I had one - WRONG! With all the baking I do now I still have quite a few things to hand wash but it is very nice to just put the rest of the dishes right in there and have it all done for me. However, I was a little worried about how environmentally friendly this was going to be so I thought I'd do a little research. Please see the links to my sources thoroughout.

Apparently, if your dishwasher is more than 10 years old it is worth investing in a new one. The energy cost of running such an old machine is prohibitive. One article I read mentioned possibly donating an old machine. In my opinion it would be much better to call someone who will cut it up for scrap and find uses for the motors, fans, etc. Our dishwasher is not new and it is not an Energy Star model but it is only 2 or 3 years old. My Dad gave it to us after he installed a new one only to find their was a malfunction in his plumbing, not in the dishwasher. Anyway, the front says it is a "whirlpool - Imperial Series". A word of warning, according to the TreeHuggers article the new dishwasher with dirt sensors can actually use MORE energy than those without.

How you run your dishwasher will play a big role in the amount of energy it uses. If you can, have someone adjust your hot water heater's thermostat down to 120 degrees F (also see this & join this). Here's the obvious advice: run only full loads. This has been harder then I thought with the bottom/top filling up faster than the other. So what if you have to hand wash a few plates to even things out? Try not to pre-rinse most of the dishes if you can help it. I have found that usually the dishwasher does a good job without rinsing first, just scrape off any chunks of food (preferably in to your compost bin!). If your dishwasher has a delay or timer feature, or depending on when you're home, consider running it during off-peak electricity hours. Call your utility company to check out their options and programs, don't just assume you'll be saving a lot of $$$. Another common sense tip is to avoid the heated drying cycle and allow your dishes to air dry. Open it up and dump any water that is sitting on the bottom of cups, bowls, etc. Then leave the door cracked overnight and things should dry out. Alternatively, grab your dish towel and wipe any wet surfaces as you put them away.

Okay, on to the fun part: detergent. This biggest thing to avoid is using a detergent with high levels of phosphates. These are the components used in fertilizer that cause algae to grow in unwanted places and create a lot of damage to fish & wildlife habitat. The Michigan Environmental Council put together a nice list of phosphate levels in different detergents. Check the side of the box for more accurate levels. The partial box of Cascade PureRinse powder that my boss gave me has this lovely statement on the side of the box:

PHOSPHORUS CONTENT: This Cascade formula averages no more than 6.4% phosphorous, in the form of phosphates, which is equivalent to 1.0 gram per tablespoon.

6.4% !!! That's actually 2 points higher than the content listed in the aforementioned article. I found this option
here (available in gel, powder, or tablet, scented or unscented) and several options on Amazon.com

If you do have products shipped to you try to order in bulk and consider requesting limited packing materials. Most manufacturers' websites have a "find a store" feature now. There are also several recipes out there for homemade detergents. This is the route I plan to take since I'm already making my own homemade laundry detergent and it works great. The gals over at The Dollar Stretcher (which is a site I have loved for years and highly recommend!) suggest a 1/2 & 1/2 mix of borax and baking soda. If that sounds a little too simple for you, and it does to me, then look here.

It seems that phosphate-free options are more likely to cause a cloudy appearance on glass, and who doesn't love a good rinse aid anyway? You may already use white vinegar, and there are other options (see links on the bottom of that last article).

I will post more here once I figure out what works for me. I hope I've gathered together some useful information. Feedback is more than welcome! :)

*Update: I just found this great post over at One Green Generation.

Breaking Bread

Unfortunately I'm not referring to socializing or dining when I say "breaking bread". I've finally turned out two good batches of homemade bread and plan to stop buying the store bought stuff all together. There are a few problems though.
First, my hubby noted that the bread, although soft, is very crumbly and therefore is hard to eat while driving or even while sitting and reading a book as I like to do on my lunch break. We both end up with crumbs all over the place.
Second, we tried to use this bread in place of a hot dog bun, which we usually do with store bought bread. I've found buns usually go stale before we use them. This bread just broke right in half instead of folding nicely around the hot dog. Now I'm sure I could come up with a recipe for homemade hot dog buns but unless they freeze well, we would never use them in time.
The final problem, again related to the bread's form, was found this morning when I pulled a couple pieces out of the bread bag I had reused. They broke in half just from that. What a mess!
As I said, this bread is nice and soft and has a great crust. Does anyone have a recipe they like that produces bread with more of a dinner roll consistency, or is most homemade bread like this? Any help would be greatly appreciated!