Fast, Frugal, Fruit-Flavored Oatmeal (or, how to use up the jam stuck to the jar)

April 17, 2013 5 Comments

When a jar of jam is depleted to the point that it’s difficult to gather up enough jam for a sandwich or a slice of toast, it’s tempting to just chuck it.  If you’re going to recycle or reuse that jar, though, you need to remove every bit of jam…and if you’re removing it, you may as well eat it, especially if this is not really “jam” but expensive organic juice-sweetened fruit spread…so maybe you stick that jar back in the refrigerator and open a new one to use in your sandwich.  Pretty soon there are a lot of almost-empty jam jars taunting you about how you never get around to scraping them.

Years ago I read in The Tightwad Gazette that the solution to this problem was to fill the jar halfway with milk and shake it, creating tasty strawberry milk (or grape milk or boysenberry milk or whatever).  It sounds good, but I found that cold milk doesn’t dissolve much jam; you still have to scrape the jar, and even then the jam tends to settle to the bottom, so you’re drinking mildly strawberry-flavored milk and then having a lot of cold clots of jam slide into your mouth.  Not so great.

I have now found a solution to the jam-jar problem!

  • Boil some water in your electric kettle or other boiling device.
  • Put some quick-cooking oatmeal in a bowl.  I don’t like to measure stuff before breakfast, but I use about 1/2 cup.
  • Pour boiling water into the jar until it is half full.  Don’t fill it more because you need to leave room for steam.  Hold the jar with an oven mitt.  Put on the lid and shake until all jam is loosened.  Alternatively, leave the lid off and stir the water with a spoon or butter knife until all the jam comes off.
  • Using oven mitt, pour jam-water from jar over oatmeal.  Stir.  If oatmeal is not wet enough, add more water.
  • Optional: Add some dried fruit, some milk, or some fat (butter, flax seed oil, coconut oil) to the oatmeal.

Making tasty fruit-flavored oatmeal and getting the jar clean without wasting water works for me!  Visit Waste Not Want Not Wednesday and Fabulously Frugal Thursday for other waste-reducing tips!

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Cute and Thrifty Kitchen Scouring Powder

April 10, 2013 6 Comments

My dishwashing method gets most food to wipe right off the dishes, but some things still need to be scrubbed–tea and coffee stains in mugs, blueberry-juice stains in bowls, and bits of pasta that stuck to the pot, for example.  I also like to scrub the cutting board really thoroughly after chopping onions.  Baking soda is a safe, affordable, environmentally-friendly scouring powder that does a great job!

The trouble with baking soda is that it’s packaged either in a cardboard box or in a gigantic plastic pouch.  The box isn’t damp-proof, so storing it anywhere near the sink is just asking for clumped-up baking soda.  The pouch, although it costs less per ounce than the little boxes, is just too huge to keep around our tiny kitchen.  Either type of package tends to dump out a huge amount of baking soda, whereas for scouring you need just a little sprinkle.

That’s why I decided to make my own shaker-top bottle with dampness protection, custom-decorated to coordinate with my pink 1950s kitchen!
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What to Serve for a Big Reception or Party (specifically, Easter)

April 1, 2013 4 Comments

I noticed my article What to Serve for Coffee Hour drawing more readers as Easter approached–probably people looking for ideas to make their church coffee hours following the Easter services particularly festive.  I have often taken charge of coordinating my church’s reception after the Easter Vigil (the night before Easter Sunday), and this year’s went particularly well, with the contributions of several parish chefs and the assistance of my extremely helpful eight-year-old Nicholas.  I’m going to explain what we served, where it came from, and where the leftovers went.  This might be useful in planning any kind of party for about 100 people. (We didn’t have that many at the Vigil, but we did on Sunday, and as you’ll see, the food stretched!)

The interesting thing about the Easter Vigil reception is that this festive, late-night party is just one of the events of Holy Week.  Our church commemorates the Last Supper with a simple meal of bread, cheese, fruit, and wine on Maundy Thursday, and the leftovers from that meal can be used in the Vigil reception.  Then, leftovers from the Vigil reception may be suitable for serving at coffee hour after the Easter morning service, when we have a big crowd to feed!  However, we can’t count on specific leftovers, so we have some people sign up to bring food specifically for the Vigil and for Easter morning.

According to the Gospel of Luke, when the resurrected Jesus came to visit his disciples, he said, “Do you have anything to eat?”  I bet if I had just come back from the dead, that would be the first thing on my mind, too!  So when we get to the end of the long Easter Vigil service and “The Lord has risen indeed!  Alleluia!”, I want to make sure to have a good spread.

This year, here’s what we served after the Vigil: Read more…

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Mexican Pizza

March 11, 2013 2 Comments

I mentioned in my most recent multi-week menu post making Mexican Pizza, an easy and versatile meal that my mom makes frequently.  As I wrote that, it occurred to me to ask Mom if there is a recipe for Mexican Pizza or she’s just been winging it all along!  She has no written recipe, but with her input, I’ve written some guidelines for making Mexican Pizza.

To make one pan–a meal or main dish for 4-6 people–you will need:

  • 1 batch of freshly mixed cornbread batter, the amount that normally would bake in a 9- or 10-inch square/round pan.  Use your favorite recipe, but consider decreasing the sugar.  You could add a little chili powder if you want.  If you don’t have a favorite recipe, see below.
  • 1 1/2 cups (or 15-oz. can) cooked Mexican-flavored beans.  These might be left over from another meal, prepared by your favorite Mexicanating process, or  just plain beans plus 1 cup salsa.  Mom suggests this: Drain and rinse a can of pinto or red beans; combine with 8 oz. (1 cup) tomato sauce fortified with chili powder, dried diced onion, oregano, garlic powder to taste.
  • 1-2 cups grated cheddar or jack cheese.
  • Optional ingredients: peppers, olives, etc.
  • 9″x13″ baking pan, or cookie sheet with sides.
  • Grease for the pan.  I like coconut oil.
  • Optional cold toppings to add after baking: guacamole, plain yogurt or sour cream, shredded lettuce, cilantro.

Preheat oven to 425F.  Grease the pan.  Pour in the batter and spread it to cover the bottom of the pan.  If using a cookie sheet, start from one end and spread batter toward the other end until you begin having trouble getting it to stay together–it should be about 1/2″ deep and may not fill the whole cookie sheet.

Sprinkle beans and optional ingredients evenly over the batter.  Sprinkle cheese evenly on top.

Bake 10 minutes.  Check to see if you can lift the edge of the crust easily with a spatula.  If not, keep baking and checking every few minutes until it’s done–typically 15-20 minutes.

Cut into squares and serve with optional cold toppings. Read on for the cornbread recipe!

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My Coupon Organizer

March 6, 2013 2 Comments

This is a project similar to our recipe binder, using reused materials to make something that does not look perfectly polished but is cheerful and works well for our household’s specific needs. One difference is that this project started with a purchase of something specifically for the project: I bought this nylon thingy (specifically marketed as a coupon organizer) in about 1994. Originally I used it with the stiff paper tabbed dividers that came with it.

After about a decade, though, those tabs no longer made much sense with the kinds of food I was buying. I mean, it had a separate section for cookies–we hardly ever buy those, because we don’t need them, and when we want some they are fun to bake. Chips and candy also were separate categories. And there was one for meat, but now that we eat less meat that seemed silly. There was no category that seemed appropriate for beans, so I kept forgetting where I had put the bean coupons.

If I had realized this project would be so quick (about 20 minutes) and easy and fun, I wouldn’t have waited so long to get around to it! I was finally inspired 4 years ago when my son’s preschool chucked out a bunch of barely-used file folders in nice bright colors. We used them in all sorts of crafts! The cheery colors of my improved coupon organizer make me happy every time I use it!
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Could you feed your family on a food-stamp budget?

February 19, 2013 3 Comments

Food on Fridays linkupIn her Ash Wednesday sermon, my pastor mentioned someone’s suggestion to fast for Lent by eating only what you can purchase with the amount of money allocated by the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (“food stamps”) to needy families–approximately $4 per person per day.  The suggestion had been to do this for just one week, not for the full 40 days of Lent, implying that just one week would be enough to show you how very meager that amount is and how difficult it is to be adequately fed while spending so little.

Hmmm.  Well, three years ago I read this blog about a couple who ate on a food-stamp budget for Lent.  I remembered that they found it was not as difficult as expected.  Even at the outset, the author explained “What we’re going to do, and why it’s not so humble.”  Their budget was $6 per person per day, and she already knew that wasn’t much less than their normal grocery spending.  They ate pretty well.  BUT!  They were aware that they were coming into this experiment from a privileged position (jobs that allow them time and energy to cook from scratch, easy access to a variety of stores, a full range of kitchen appliances, a pantry already stocked with basics like spices, knowledge of cooking and budgeting) and that the exceptions they were allowing themselves (occasional restaurant meals, wine not included in food budget) would make it easier.

Of course, upon hearing this fast idea again, my data manager’s brain immediately began crunching numbers to estimate how much money per person per day my own family has been spending on groceries.  When I read the above blog, I had just begun tracking our grocery spending for a full year, and since concluding that experiment I hadn’t thought to compare it to a food-stamp budget.  Now I will: In 2010, my family of 3 people spent a total of $3,850.85 on groceries, which works out to $3.52 per person per day.  The current maximum SNAP benefit in our state for a family of 3 is $526 per month, which works out to $5.76 per person per day.  Food prices have gone up since 2010, but not that much.

Gee, those needy families are just rolling in benefits, huh?  Well, no, wait a minute! Read more…

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Shovel snow with a broom!

February 7, 2013 Leave a comment

This is a simple tip that I can see is familiar to a lot of the natives here in Pittsburgh, but it took me many years to catch on.  I grew up in Oklahoma, where winter precipitation tends to involve freezing rain, so a lot of what you have to clear from your sidewalk is ice.  Here in the land of picturesque, Christmas-card-like winter weather, however, the sidewalk is typically piled with fluffy snow.  It looks so pretty until you have to shovel it, right?

Wait!  There’s an earlier step that will make the shoveling so much easier, and you might not have to shovel at all!  You might be able to get your pavement completely clear and non-slippy without using hazardous sidewalk salt!

Simply sweep off the loose snow with an ordinary broom.  Keep the broom near the door so you can sweep the snow before anyone has stepped on it.  That way it’s not packed down, and it easily sweeps right off.  If you are going out while it’s still snowing, consider leaving your broom by the end of the walk so you can sweep your way back to the door when you get home.  You’ll want to use your “outdoor broom” or at least keep the broom outside until it dries, because it’s hard to get all the snow off of it, and if you bring it inside it will drip.

Depending on the depth and density of snow, you may still need the shovel to scrape the last of it off the pavement.  Alternatively, if the snow is more than a few inches deep, start by shoveling off most of it and throwing it to the side, then sweep the pavement before you walk on it to get that area completely clear before you move on to the next section.  (Ever walked on a sidewalk where the deep snow was shoveled off, but there’s a thin layer of ice across the whole thing?  That’s the result of leaving behind a little snow that was too hard to scrape up with the shovel–the sun melts it, and then it freezes.)

Sweeping is particularly useful for clearing outdoor steps, especially open-tread ones–just sweep the snow down between the steps!  My epiphany about the usefulness of brooms on snow came when I visited a friend’s hillside house during a snowstorm, and before I left I watched him completely clear his 30-some open-tread stairs of about 3 inches of snow in about 5 minutes.

This technique is so easy, a child can do it!  Nicholas proved this two days ago, when both parents were too sick to pick him up from school, so he walked himself home, responsibly using his new wristwatch and house key on a chain.  When he saw that we had not been able to clear the sidewalk, he swept it, then used the shovel to pry up the packed snow from his own footprints and others’ steps on the public sidewalk.  What a great kid!  (He is 8.)

Visit Your Green Resource for more articles on responsible living!

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Emergency Creamy Tomato Soup (healthier!)

February 6, 2013 5 Comments

Okay, it wasn’t really an emergency.  It was just that our eight-year-old Nicholas really wanted creamy tomato soup for dinner when both parents were recovering–more weakly than we’d hoped–from a stomach virus that the kid had several days earlier.  Daniel and I both were very sick Monday, a little better Tuesday, and then I went back to work yesterday but regretted it by mid-afternoon.  On the way home, I was dizzy and gurgling ominously in the lower abdomen, so instead of stopping to buy the chicken soup Daniel had requested, I went straight home, thinking I would go to the store later.  Nicholas was excited to go to the store and had decided he wanted tomato soup.  We even had a coupon for new Campbell’s 100% Natural (the existence of which makes me want to stop buying their other soups, because you see what they’re saying there?).

But I never got better enough to leave the house.  An hour past our usual dinnertime, I was still lying around moaning and had just added heartburn to my list of woes.  I didn’t even feel capable of heating up and stirring canned soup if we’d had some available.

Daniel to the rescue!  His first step was looking at a recipe for creamy tomato soup in the Better Homes & Gardens New Cookbook, which he describes as, “where I look when I want something classic and American.”  The recipe called for a large can of diced tomato.  What we had was homemade marinara sauce.  Since Nicholas is a fan of the creamy tomato soup at Panera Bread, which is Italian-flavored, we figured this would work.  Daniel cut the recipe in half and used it as a guideline for how to combine milk and tomatoes without curdling.  The result was this recipe: Read more…

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10 Lessons Learned from Rewiring an Old House

January 2, 2013 1 Comment

This is a guest post by Ben Stallings, my brother, who is a permaculture gardener, home energy efficiency auditor, and owner of a curbside recycling business in Kansas.

I spent most of my spare time in 2011 rewiring our 1920 house, replacing the old knob & tube wiring with modern nonmetallic cable that meets code.  Now I’ll take a look back at what I learned from the experience, in case any of you are thinking of attempting the same thing!

1. The electrician’s bid was reasonable.

When we first bought our house and tried to insure it, we found that the insurance company we wanted to use would not insure us because of the potential safety hazards of our knob & tube wiring.  I got a bid from an electrician to rewire the house, but it seemed laughably high: US$7,000.  (That’s almost 10% the cost of the house.)  It was clear from his attitude that he didn’t want the job, so I figured the bid was inflated. Not so, it turns out.  The materials don’t cost much, but the labor is very intensive.  I know I wouldn’t take on another job like this for $7,000.  At the time we didn’t have that kind of cash on hand, but now that we do, if I had to do it again, I’d pay the electrician to have it done. Read more…

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How to Salvage Over-baked Brownies

December 11, 2012 3 Comments

This past Sunday, we brought the food for church coffee hour.  In addition to carrots, spinach dip, hummus, cheese, and crackers, my son wanted to bring brownies.

Things Not To Do When Baking Brownies:

  • Don’t agree to do it in between two hours-long shopping expeditions, on a day when you are still recovering from a back injury–or in any similarly stressful, painful, and/or tired condition.  Choosing to do this is likely to lead you into doing other Things Not To Do because you are not thinking clearly.
  • Don’t top the brownies with pieces of candy (in our case, peppermints and Tootsie Rolls left over from Halloween).  At least, don’t do this if you are making relatively shallow brownies.  Maybe it would work if you added the candy later.  But don’t set it on top of raw batter 3/4″ deep.  The candies will sink to the bottom and melt and stick onto the pan.
  • If you are making Honey Bear Brownies (a recipe which I highly recommend when made as written) and discover that you don’t have enough honey, don’t just substitute sorghum syrup and expect that it will work.
  • If you failed to follow my advice above and you did make brownies with Tootsie Rolls on them, don’t forget about that when you are looking at the brownies to see if they are done yet.  Those puddles of boiling dark-brown liquid are molten Tootsie Rolls, not pockets of brownie batter that’s mysteriously still not solidified.
  • Don’t test brownies for done-ness by poking with a chopstick until it comes out clean, as you would a cake.  Brownies are supposed to be gooey.  The way to tell that they are done is that the edges pull away from the pan a bit.  Don’t put away the cookbook without reading that fact, clearly stated in the recipe which you have made many times.
  • Don’t forget to set the timer.  Even when you have decided to turn off the oven and let the brownies sit in there a moment longer, set a timer.  Otherwise you may realize 15 minutes have gone by and they are now very dry-looking.
  • Don’t leave the suspiciously dry-looking brownies sitting out uncovered for 17 hours.  As soon as they have cooled, put the lid on the pan or cover it with foil.  Better yet, cut the brownies at this point and store them in another container.  That way, if you’ve made brownies you are physically unable to cut, you will find out about it sooner, instead of when you are trying to serve them.

If you have failed to follow all of this good advice–like I did myself–you may find that what you thought was a pan of brownies is actually a 9″x14″ sheet of rock-hard stuff welded to the bottom of the pan.  Read more…

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Great Shoes at a Fraction of the Price!

December 6, 2012 Leave a comment

I’ve had some shoe trouble in the past couple of years, since Keen stopped making that style I raved about.  All I want is a pair of black leather shoes that are comfortable for walking, don’t smash my high arches, look good with skirts or jeans, and don’t have Velcro.  (I hate that ripping sound Velcro makes–and on shoes, it always gets full of dust and hair and debris so that it looks awful and may actually stop working.)  I don’t want to pay more than $50 unless the shoes are made with fair labor and/or in an environmentally friendly factory.  Why is this so hard?!  I live in a major city with many shopping options, including a large independent shoe store less than a mile from my home, other shoe stores, major department stores like Macy’s and Kohl’s, and DSW Shoe Warehouse which has an enormous selection and sends me substantial-discount offers several times a year.  It seems that the current trends in shoe styles just aren’t very compatible with my preferences.

Instead of replacing my everyday shoes every year or two, as I’d prefer, in just over 2 years I’ve bought 5 pairs of black leatherish shoes (one pair actually is made of some kind of techno-mesh), and only the third pair was comfortable.  These are some slip-on shoes with a little elasticized criss-cross strap near the toe, Clarks brand, that I got at DSW.  The only problem with them is that the heels wore down rapidly, so after about 6 months they had holes all the way through the heels and I couldn’t walk on wet pavement without getting wet socks.  At that point I began shopping for new shoes but continuing to wear these in dry weather.

I don’t actually like shopping for shoes, so it’s easy to procrastinate–while hurting my feet by wearing bad shoes as I run around doing more interesting things.  When I finally got myself to some shoe stores, I wasn’t finding anything I liked, and both times I grudgingly bought the most-acceptable shoes they had, those shoes turned out to be really uncomfortable after ten minutes of real walking.  A lot of the time I was wearing my plaid canvas sneakers with white rubber toes–which are cute but don’t really look right with business clothes–just so I could walk comfortably.

Then I remembered to actually try the affordable, resource-conserving alternative that is available right in my neighborhood where I walk past it every day!! Read more…

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Sphagnum Moss Diapers

November 29, 2012 1 Comment

This is a guest post from storyteller Doug Elliott, whose free e-newsletter offers occasional stories like this one. Doug’s storytelling DVD, and his books about nature for children and adults, would make great holiday gifts!

Sphagnum moss sure is an amazing plant! I’ve been hanging out in some wetlands lately, and with our son Todd attaining his 20th birthday, and a bunch of my friends having babies, I couldn’t help but reminisce about this old rolling stone’s moss gathering activities a couple of decades ago.

Camper’s Pampers

I just couldn’t get it out of my head!

Ever since I had seen the article in that old National Geographic Magazine about the Cree Indians, I hadn’t been able to get that picture out of my head. It showed a young Cree mom diapering her baby with sphagnum moss. sphagnum moss

Wow! What a concept! I knew sphagnum moss well. I had seen it many times in my wanderings in wetland areas in various parts of the country. I had marveled at its pale green color and its soft, absorbent, spongy texture. I had picked it up by the handful and marveled at how much water I could squeeze out of it. One time I did a test with a bunch of dry sphagnum and a sensitive scale. I found out that it would hold 12 times its own weight in water. Read more…

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Multiple Shopping Lists: Key to Grocery-Shopping Sanity!

November 14, 2012 6 Comments

My grocery-shopping strategy attempts to maximize the quality of food we get for our money, and one key tactic is shopping at multiple stores. Since I have limited time and don’t like to waste gasoline, I want to make sure that in each shopping trip I get all the things we need that are best-priced or best-quality at that store, but I don’t want to be stocking up on stuff “just in case we need it” only to find that we already have several of those in the pantry. Over the years, Daniel and I have worked out a system that makes it easy to keep track of our grocery purchasing plans.

We keep a separate shopping list for each store. The moment we open up the last package of a staple food, use up something we’d like to have more of as soon as possible, are notified of a sale, or think of a food we haven’t had in a while and would like, we write it on the appropriate list. Any coupons for that store (or for a specific product on that list) are stored with the list. I keep an eye on the lists and decide when it’s time to visit a particular store, and then I take that list and coupons and put them in the outer pocket of one of the cloth tote bags I am taking to the store.

It’s easy for me to remember which store is the best place to get a particular thing, because am the primary grocery shopper and have a great memory. Daniel isn’t so good at this, but a large proportion of our foods give him clues by being store-brand products or in reusable containers labeled for refilling with bulk foods at the East End Food Co-op. Other things, though, he would sometimes write on the wrong list or, worse, decide that when I was around he would tell me what we needed so I could write it on the correct list–and then he might forget. Recently, he thought of a solution: Read more of this post

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Pumpkin Burritos

November 13, 2012 3 Comments

It may seem somewhat obvious that, if you can make Butternut Squash Burritos from the same recipe as Sweet Potato Burritos, you could also make Pumpkin Burritos.  But if you’re among the many people desperately searching the Internet this month for new and different ways to serve the remains of your jack o’lantern, it might not occur to you to search for squash or sweet potato recipes as well, or you might be nervous about modifying those recipes to use pumpkin.

Daniel made Pumpkin Burritos for us last night, so we can assure you that this recipe works!  To convert our pumpkin into pumpkin puree, we used these instructions as a guide, but we were not starting with a small pie pumpkin like they recommend; our son had begged for a big pumpkin to decorate our porch this Halloween, and I bought one that must have weighed 25 pounds before we scooped it out.  After being carved and displayed for two weeks, it was a bit moldy on the inside, but I couldn’t help seeing it as $7 worth of food–and I suspected it would make a lot more pumpkin puree than the 3 cans we could buy for $7.50.  I sliced the pumpkin into wedges with a cleaver, then used a paring knife to cut off all surfaces that had been exposed to the air; there were only a few spots where I had to dig deeper to remove yuckiness.  Daniel baked it in the oven as directed–microwaving would have been more complicated because we had so much pumpkin it would have had to be in 3 or 4 batches in the microwave.  We got about 11 cups of finished puree, and it tastes fine, at least as good as the canned stuff.

For each burrito, you will need: Read more…

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Four Weeks of Pesco-Vegetarian Dinners (late autumn)

November 5, 2012 3 Comments

Menu Plan MondayHearth & Soul Blog HopFrugal Days, Sustainable WaysEat, Make, GrowFood on Fridays

Here is what we made for dinner (and a few lunches) the past four weeks, using many vegetables and mushrooms from our community-supported agriculture share in a farm here in Pennsylvania.  I hope it gives you some new ideas for meals based around the local foods of the season!

I plan our menu a few days ahead, based mainly on what we already have in the house from the farm and from stocking up at sales.

Week One:

  • Sunday:
    • Lunch: Grilled Cheese Sandwiches and apples.
    • Dinner: Seven-year-old Nicholas and I ate pizza at his friend’s birthday party.  Daniel had leftovers.
  • Monday: We celebrated an excellent parent-teacher conference with dinner at Curry on Murray, a newish Thai restaurant in our neighborhood.  Everything was delicious!  It’s a bit more expensive than we’d like, so this will be a special occasion restaurant for us.
  • Tuesday: Honey-Apricot Tofu, Salty String Beans, and rice.  This is one of Nicholas’s favorite meals lately.
  • Wednesday: Daniel made a Brown Rice Salad for the church potluck; I planned it thinking he would use onion, red pepper, and carrot from the farm.  However, when he cut open the red pepper he found that it was moldy!  He called me at work, and I picked up another pepper at the grocery store on my way home, and he diced it and mixed it into the salad which had been marinating all afternoon. Read more…

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Milk: What kind we buy, and why

October 31, 2012 6 Comments

I love saving money, yet I routinely buy half-gallon cartons of milk that cost twice as much as the cheapest milk in the supermarket!  Furthermore, two half-gallon paper cartons cost more than one gallon plastic jug, for the same amount of milk!  What am I thinking?!

Several years ago, Daniel and I decided that milk that is healthier for us and the Earth is worth more money.  The extra expense was hard to swallow at first, but the fact is that my overall thrifty shopping habits lead us to spend less on groceries than the average American family of our size, even with the expensive milk.  Also, we don’t use as much fluid milk as many American families–it’s mostly for cereal and coffee in our house, and it’s unusual (though hardly against the rules) for any of us to drink a whole glass of milk.  We get most of our calcium from yogurt and non-dairy foods.  Using less milk allows us to spend more per ounce without breaking the budget.

Here’s what milk we buy, when, where, and why: Read more…

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What to Do with Bread Heels

October 23, 2012 11 Comments

Some people consider the ends of a loaf of bread to be the best parts. My family, though, prefers the middle slices. Daniel often will eat the heel that is at the top of the bag, but by the time we get to the bottom of the bag, the other heel is less appealing. (This is despite our policy of keeping the bread in the refrigerator most of the time. That prevents mold, but the last bit of the bread does get very slightly damp so that it isn’t so appealing, especially if a fresh loaf  is available.)

We go through at least a loaf of bread a week, thanks to our seven-year-old’s fondness for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, so every few months I notice that there are a lot of bread bags with one heel in each one, lying around in the back of the refrigerator. What to do with all of them?

Cheesy Vegetable Bread Pudding!

Read more…

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Clothesline Hangers for Basement or Porch

September 12, 2012 5 Comments

In my article on line-drying laundry, I verbally described these handy clothesline hangers that can be made out of scrap lumber and installed in any place that has exposed rafters/joists in the ceiling.  I finally decided to share some photos of them, since this is the kind of thing that really is easier to understand if you can see what I’m talking about–particularly if you never saw one before.  (I am sorry about the poor lighting–our basement is dim, and I made this post on a sudden inspiration, using my iPad which has no flash–but I think they’re better than no photos at all!)

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The way to make these is Read more…

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EASY Homemade Baby Food!

July 25, 2012 2 Comments

This is NOT a paid endorsement.  This is my unsolicited review of a product I liked.

This is an idea that’s been around a while (both my mother and Daniel’s say they had something like this when we were babies in the early 1970s) but I hardly ever see today’s parents doing it or talking about it.

Instead of buying baby food in those little glass jars or the horrible plastic packets that have come on the market recently, instead of spending time cooking and pureeing and freezing and storing foods especially for your baby, just feed your baby some of the foods you’re eating!  If the food requires biting or chewing that your baby can’t do yet due to lack of teeth, use a convenient hand-powered grinder to turn it into baby food!  It’s very easy and allows you to make baby food anywhere, on short notice, in exactly the amount you want, without using any electricity.

Our son Nicholas did not get any teeth until he was nearly a year old and didn’t have molars for months after that, so he needed mushy foods for a long time.  We had a busy schedule–Daniel was working full-time outside the home, and I was working part-time and was a Girl Scout leader–so making healthy meals for ourselves was a bit of a struggle already, yet we needed to provide some kind of tasty nutritious mush for the babysitter to serve Nicholas at lunchtime every weekday beginning at six months old.  Luckily, we had found a KidCo food mill, very clean and in the original package, for $1 at a yard sale before he was born.

This handy gadget turns almost any food into a soft paste–but with a little bit of texture–in about one minute. It’s really wonderful! Read more…

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I don’t wear makeup.

July 18, 2012 16 Comments

I used to wear makeup.  From age 12 to 16, I added more types of makeup to my daily routine each year, and I went through that daily routine even if I wasn’t planning to leave the house.  I continued for a while into college before I realized that the insanely stressful life I was leading there did not allow time for makeup and many other students did not wear it–but I felt that college was an exceptional situation, so I still wore makeup to church, to my summer jobs, and whenever I went back to visit the town where I grew up.  After college, I wore makeup to work and church and social events very consistently at first, but over time I began to wear less and less, until at age 31 I quit almost completely.  Why? Read more…

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