Rebuilding

 Once upon a time ...

There was a thriving and active blogging community - on Blogger and on WordPress, and perhaps some other platform, as well.  We shared our stories and our ideas.  

We were gardening and raising livestock (many of us on really small pieces of property).  We were learning skills that would help us survive in, what we believed would be, a powered down society.  We were homeschooling.  We were empowering ourselves and our families.  

We shared our lives in a way that isn't done or isn't possible on other social media platforms.  

In the last several years, since I shutdown Surviving the Suburbs, my previous blog, I have lost contact with most of those wonderful people and their amazing and inspiring stories. 

I'm hoping to rebuild that community.

If you have a favorite - active - blog, please comment below.  I would love to add to my reading list (see lower right hand corner ... you may have to scroll a bit).  

Drying Herbs

There's something rather lovely about fresh herbs hanging from the ceiling.  

I am so thankful for my very prolific, and somewhat untamed, garden.  

From left to right:  basil, catmint, lemon balm, sage, and peppermint ... 

All are edible, medicinal, and magical.  What more could a girl want??  

It's What's for Dinner

The other day my very good friend stopped by for some coffee and spoon carving.  We were chatting about life, and she lamented that, while she enjoys cooking, she does not enjoy having to decide what to cook every. single. night. 

I'm, mostly, okay with figuring out what's for dinner.  After two decades of being the head cook and bottle washer, it's just part of the rhythm of my day, and on those days when I'm feeling out of sync, Deus Ex Machina will order pizza ... erm ... make dinner (it's not always pizza ... sometimes it's Chinese food).  

But ... eating out is expensive, especially when one has dietary restrictions - like no wheat, which is in EVERYTHING.  But also, I still have to decide what we're going to order, and then, there's the whole wait time and driving to pick it up.  Since we don't eat drive-thru sorts of food (see the gluten-free above - the only menu item in most fast-food joints that's GF is salad, and if I'm going to eat salad, I'll just make that here), it's more often than not faster (and more convenient, actually) to cook something here.  

So, those pizza days are rare, which means I have usually decided what's for dinner by noon, and sometimes, depending on what I've decided to cook, I've already started cooking (like if I'm planning on slow-cooker pot roast, it will go on the crockpot first thing in the morning).

Meal planning is often a topic of discussion for people in my circles and suggestions for making life easier for those of us who have to make that daily decision run the gamut from meal subscription services to cooking a whole week's worth of meals in a day and putting them in a special refrigerator or freezer.

I have a friend who asked advice from her friends on social media regarding how to make answering that daily question What's for Dinner? easier, and one of her friends suggested the latter above - prepping on Sunday for lunches and dinners through the week.  She says it takes her all day, but it's worth the time and effort saved during the week.  She even posted a picture of her prepped meal refrigerator.  I was in awe!  The whole set-up was incredibly impressive.

I am confident that I will never achieve that level of organization.

When my children were younger, I attempted to do some version of meal planning - to save time and money.  One incarnation of our meal planning entailed writing out on a calendar what we would make for dinner each weekday and who would do the cooking (one of my many failed attempts to get my kids helping with meal prep).  A grocery list was compiled and grocery shopping ensued.  

What we discovered is that we are (or maybe just *I* am) the kind of people who decide what we want to eat based on what we feel like eating that day.  So, the meal plan said "baked pasta" on Wednesday, but I didn't feel like baked pasta on that day.  It was the middle of August, and it had been a scorching hot day, and there was no way that I was going to heat up the house to bake pasta.  I didn't even want to boil water inside.  I'm pretty sure we ended up making a special trip to the farm stand that day and picking up corn and watermelon.  The corn was cooked on the grill, along with some hamburg patties.

I'm also pretty sure that the alt-meal wasn't even one we had considered when we made our plan.

But that's the thing I always wonder when I hear about people who make meal plans and prepare a week's worth of meals in advance.  How are they gonna know on Sunday, what they're going to want to eat on Wednesday?

Suffice it to say that I am a meal-prep failure.  

But I am a very good, figure-it-out-spur-of-the-moment kind of cook.  

I was 10 when the television show Three's Company debuted, and every time I cook eggs, I think of Jack Tripper, that first morning, when Chrissy Snow and Janet Wood found him sleeping in their bathtub, and the topic of roommates came up.  He needed a place to live.  They needed a roommate, but the lynchpin to his being invited to stay was that he could cook.  He made breakfast for them using leftover ingredients from the going away party for their previous roommate and a few things from the refrigerator.  I was always impressed with Jack's innovation in the kitchen.

And I guess that's the way I decided I was going to cook, because there have been many times in my life, when a very limited grocery budget, WIC subsidies, and food gifts (like frozen raspberries from my grandma) meant that I needed to be creative in the kitchen.  In fact, when I was a poor, married-with-children college student, a glut of eggs from the WIC program prompted me to learn how to make quiche.  Quickest, easiest, fancy food ever! 

Not meal planning has actually resulted in some interesting meal components.  The other night, I made hamburger patties, but we didn't have any buns or any bread of any kind, and so I cooked the patties with onions and barbecue sauce to make them more like a steak, and less like hamburgers.  

It's not something that I have ever had anyone else cook for me, in that way.  Neither is it something that I've seen a recipe for, and so I'm pretty certain that if I were someone who meal prepped and/or planned ahead of time, that particular meal component would never have been part of my diet. 

Thing is, when I am purchasing food, I don't think in terms of meals.  I think in terms of ingredients.  What things do we need so that I can put it all together, like a tasty puzzle, and make a meal.  Most of our meals are pretty simple and contain some stable ingredients. 

When I get ready to make dinner, it will have certain components.  Usually, some kind of meat, like hamburg.  I will often have a starch, like potatoes, pasta, or rice.  There will be some sort of vegetable, usually something green, like lettuce for a salad, or cabbage made into coleslaw.  

Last night I made fried rice with a 1/2 lb of sandwich steak cut into tiny pieces, eggs from our chickens, broccoli from my garden, onions, and some leftover rice.  I am getting low on Tamari (which is gluten-free soy sauce), which I usually add to my fried rice, and so, instead, I added curry powder for flavoring.  I also add sesame oil.  Sometimes I add fresh grated ginger or other vegetables.  

Tonight we're having the above mentioned barbecue burgers with the bread I made this afternoon and coleslaw using cabbage from the garden.  I will add some pickled jalapenos I made the other day to the coleslaw to give it a little zing.  

I also make all of my own dressings and sauces (usually a mayonnaise based dressing), which means, I will almost always have on hand: mayonnaise (and I hope to report soon that I'm making my own with our glut of eggs), an assortment of vinegars, milk or half-and-half, and all sorts of herbs and spices.

I can make a really good ranch-style "house" dressing that just tastes good on almost anything.  Tweaking the herbs makes that house dressing into a creamy Italian dressing, and my coleslaw dressing is good enough to eat with a spoon on some crackers.  

For me, having the ingredients to cook just about anything we're craving has been the best solution for "meal prep" and planning.  It means a little more daily planning, because I need to start figuring out what's for dinner in the morning to be sure that I have thawed meat, but it's easier, for me, to plan a little each day rather than spend an entire day cooking, or spend a half a day writing out what I plan to cook in five days, only to discover that no wants baked pasta when it's almost hot enough in the kitchen to cook without the oven, but turning on the oven would put the house in the hot-as-the-bowels-of-Hell region. 

How do you meal prep?  Be sure to leave your comment below!

Bread

When gluten free bread is almost $6 a loaf for 12 slices of bread, one learns to make one's own ... times two.  

Housewives are the Original DIYers

My family moved eight times in my first eight years of life.   It wasn't a big deal, because everyone I knew did the same.  We were all Army brats.   It wasn't until I was 10 that I realized that some people never move, and, for them, there is a place that they call "home" - a place where they have grown, a place that they leave (sometimes), and (often) a place they go back to ... a place they belong.

As an Army brat, I didn't have that kind of home.  I had a different place that was a "home" to me.  

My dad's childhood was very different.  He lived nearly his entire childhood in the same little house in the same little community, where his parents and several of his siblings, many of his aunts and uncles and cousins still lived.  In fact, still do.  His father built the house my dad grew up in when my dad wasn't much more than a toddler.  

The closest place in the world I had to a hometown was that old homestead where my dad was raised.  It wasn't the whole community to whom I connected, but rather just that deep mountain hollow, a few of the neighbors, that house on the hill (my Granny's house), and those many people who lived there.  They were my family.  That was my home.  It was the one place I always felt like I really belonged.  

From the time I was around eight until I turned fourteen and my dad retired, my family would make the nine-hour drive from where we lived in the deep south to that little homestead in the Appalachian mountains.  Spending time on my grandma's farm with all of the animals and my cousins, who just lived up the road, was an idyllic summer for this suburban kid.  

It was about as quintessentially down-home as it could get.  They had a television set, but didn't have cable TV, because there was no cable TV service back in the hollow.  Neither was there much with regard to television reception, and Hee Haw was viewed through a veil of snow. I couldn't even see it to say who was heeing, and who was hawing.  In short, we had to find (and usually did) other ways to entertain ourselves.

Summers in the mountains were warm, not the face-melting hot of central Alabama, but warm enough that by the end of the day, especially after Granny had heated up the house cooking dinner for the many of us, inside was the last place anyone wanted to be, and most evenings, after dinner was eaten, and the farm had been tended, most of the adult males could be found outside on the front porch, in the cool of the evening, chewing tobacco, whittling a stick, and telling a tale.  Honestly, better than TV - not that I had much choice.  See above.

Today I spent a lot of time thinking about those nights, sitting on the porch and watching my grandpa and uncles whittling a stick.  I don't recall anything, in particular, that was ever carved out of those wooden sticks.  Mostly, I just think the whittling was a meditation, or just something to keep their hands busy so that they could justify the sittin' a spell and spinnin' a yarn.  As the saying goes, "Idle hands are the devil's playthings."

I was channeling those ancestors of mine today - although my whittling was a bit more practical than therapeutic.  

I've been planning this project using wooden spoons for a couple of weeks.  I told Deus Ex Machina about it, and I also told him that I thought I wanted to carve my own spoons rather than purchase them.  

I know.  Wooden spoons are cheap.  We can get them 3/$1 at the Dollar Store, but this is a very special project, and to me, it felt more right to have this hand-made piece rather than something that was carved in a factory, probably by a machine that is operated by someone who works very hard to churn out these millions of spoons that will be sold for pennies.  I felt like my project needed a more personal touch.

This past weekend, while we were splitting firewood, Deus Ex Machina split a birch log into some spoon blanks for me.  

Today was sunny and beautiful with a lovely breeze.  I could smell the ocean.  I grabbed my Mora knife, went out in the shaded front yard, and started shaping one of those blanks.  It could only have been better if I actually had a front porch.

I thought a lot about my grandpa and my uncles sitting out on that porch and telling stories while they whittled.  I can't remember any of their stories, but I do remember their voices, and their postures, and the comfortable way they carved a big stick into a little toothpick.

I found the process quite relaxing, and I knew, probably for the first time, why.  Why they would sit for hours into the dying day and just shave those slivers of wood off the larger piece.  Thoughtfully.  Meditatively.  They had no where to go, and that stick wasn't gonna whittle itself.  

At the end of the day, I have a very lovely wooden spoon, and I am happy with the result.  The fact that it actually LOOKS like spoon is pretty cool, to me.  I just need to sand it a little, and maybe use a fancier carving tool than a Mora knife to hollow out a bowl for the spoon.  It's pretty perfect for the project I'm working on.

And I am thrilled that I can now add spoon-carving to that growing list of skills I have, and ... you know ... I think I might start making all of my wood spoons. 

Spending a couple of dollars on a few spoons isn't going to break us financially, but knowing how to do something, how to create a thing, and actually being able to do it ... for free! ... is the one of the most empowering feelings in the world.  That I can make my own stuff is incredibly satisfying - especially from a self-sufficiency/survival point of view.  

And bonus, if I ever get lost out in the woods, and I have a knife (and maybe an ax), I can make a spoon with which to eat all of that foraged food I will be harvesting.

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Last week, we ordered some pork from a local farmer.  What I asked for was a couple of packages of Italian sausage, a couple of packages of garlic sausage, and several packages of breakfast sausage.  There's a theme here - we like sausage.  Not just charcuterie, but seasoned ground meat.  

It's a very small, family-run farm.  We have to pre-order the pork via FB messenger.  Then, they package it up for us, and we drive to their farm (it's not close) with cash in hand, and pay when we pick up the meat.  

So, we drove out, paid the farmer, grabbed our bag of pork, and came back home.  There didn't seem to be any reason to check the order at the farm.  I mean, it was typed out ... on FB messenger.

When I got home, we had Italian sausage and garlic sausage, but what was supposed to have been breakfast sausage was unseasoned ground pork.

It's the same price, and so I couldn't really be angry, except that I didn't want ground pork.  A few days earlier, we had picked up our cow-share, and so we had plenty of ground meat (beef) in the freezer.  I don't need ground meat.  I need sausage.

So, I found a seasoning recipe for sausage in the Google cookbook, and I just mixed up my own.  

It's delicious!

And next time I order pork from that farm, I'll probably just ask for ground, unseasoned, and season it myself.

Also, BONUS:  the recipe calls for a couple of herbs that I have growing in my garden - sage and thyme.  So, I was able to add fresh herbs, from my garden, to the mix.  Herbs are expensive, and so growing and using my own saves us a lot of money.  Plus, there's the whole, empowerment and self-sufficiency aspect.  

After I mixed the seasoning really well, I cooked up a couple of patties.  It's delicious.

 

Repairing

This post originally appeared on my blog - Surviving the Suburbs - in April 2014.  

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The rake handle broke last fall. 

I liked that rake a lot. I was kind of bummed.

The broom was started to look rather worn, and so we decided to get a new one. 

Then, the question was, what do we do the old one? 

I fixed the rake.

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I still have that rake.  I still USE that rake, and, interestingly, the replacement handle has held up better than the original handle.

I took this picture today.

I might pick up some spray paint and paint the handle to make it last a bit longer, but honestly, she's still going strong.  

Which, I guess, is the best argument for repairing rather than replacing - when one can.  

And repurposing (using the broom handle to repair the rake) is also pretty cool.

A new leaf rake, the metal kind, like this one, is $40.  The only thing wrong with the rake was that the handle broke, and so, by fixing it rather than replacing it, I saved $40.