Drying Oregano

I've been giving my dehydrator a lot of work lately. Earlier this week I dried oregano from my garden.

It ended up yielding exactly a pint of dried oregano. Honestly, it's oregano in there, not salsa.

I told Lawrence that I thought it would be enough to last us all year. He disagreed. Apparently he has big plans for drinking oregano tea this winter. It is a tea that he used to drink growing up, whenever he got sick. It has very powerful antiseptic properties, that can't be argued. But, his plans for drinking it for pleasure. Ugh. I think that it tastes awful. I can gulp it down for medicinal purposes, but can't imagine savoring a cup. He enjoys it however, so I will dry more oregano!

Using Even the Smallest Bits Up

What do you do with those little chunks of soap that are too small to be easily used? Do you just throw it away? It seems rather wasteful to do so, especially if you are springing extra for natural soap. One thing to do is to chuck all those small bits into a bowl and save them up til the bowl is full. When the bowl is full, pour them into a small pot, add a bit of water and melt them down. Pour that thick soap into a container to mold it (in this case I used the same bowl that we had stored the small bits in).

Let it harden for a day or so and pop the block of soap out out of the bowl.

Then cut this block of soap into bar sized portions.

After you cut the bars let them harden for a few days and then use for hand soap or put it back in the shower or bath.

One word of caution: if you use commercial "soap" it is a detergent and not a true soap. So it won't melt like the other real soap will. See those white parts in the soap? Those are little bits of hotel soap bars (I didn't use those, Lawrence did, by the way) that were thrown in there. So, while they didn't melt, they still work for cleaning purposes and make it visually interesting. In fact, when I had the cut bars sitting on the cutting board I had several people ask me if it was some kind of dessert or fudge! I don't remember clearly, but I think that Anne Frank did something similar to this, but maybe she made shampoo or something different from soap bits and gave them as a Hanukkah gift to her mother or maybe a sister. Anyone remember?

A Morning at the Park

I'm a little behind here, but we spent Sunday morning having some long overdue family time. We woke up when it was still dark to drive out into the hills and see the sunrise. We ended up leaving a few minutes to late, but even so, it was heavy cloud cover and we wouldn't have seen it anyway.

We headed to a local county park and found a tanglebox, even though it is officially over for the summer. We picked wild blackberries; though the season is ending there were still ripe berries and a few almost ripe ones.

We picked about six or seven cups worth.

Then after skipping rocks, playing ball and just having fun together we headed home. On the way we stopped at another county park that's on the same road and found a letterbox and the girls climbed a three trunked tree.

For dinner, I made several things that have been inspired by blog I read. I made potato samosas and plum chutney, which Riana made a couple weeks ago and I used those foraged blackberries to make a blackberry cobbler using Melinda's husband Matt's recipe. It was a delicious dinner and a fun day.

Drying Zucchini

Since this is my first year having a dehydrator, I'm trying different things with it. I'm sure some will work and some won't. One thing I've heard that some people really like and some don't is dried zucchini. I figure that the only way to know which side I fall on is to try it myself.

The benefit of drying foods is that it doesn't require any energy to maintain it once it is dried. If you freeze vegetables, then you must ensure that you have a steady supply of energy to keep your freezer going. Considering the seemingly unstable times up ahead, I think that preserving in ways that don't require using a freezer or fridge might be a prudent idea. If things improve and go just fine, then nothing's lost by having done it this way either.

My two smallest kitchen helpers helped to toss some of the zucchini slices in soy sauce (Bragg's liquid aminos here) and garlic powder, then placed them on the drying tray. We only did two trays of flavored, the other six were plain.

Here they are all hydrated.

Then, voila, hours later, they've shrunk!

Dried zucchinis are then put into glass jars for storage and kept in the basement in my cool, dark pantry area to be thrown into soups and stews during the fall, winter and spring.

The flavored zucchini slices were supposed to be a kind of flavored zucchini chip, but I found the taste to be a bit over-powering as a snack and they slices don't stay crispy. They absorb enough moisture from the air to stay leathery rather than crispy, even if they come out of the dehydrator nice and crisp. Within a few hours they are leathery. So, they will all be used in cooking.

The Attack of the Tomatoes

This is where the bulk of the tomatoes went. Into canned, chopped tomatoes. We did six pints of jalapeno salsa and then I oven roasted some, but burned many. My friend April and I each ended up with the equivalent of 17 quarts in a combination of quart and pint jars, but mostly quarts.
I didn't take any pictures of the canning process because neither April or I had ever canned tomatoes before, so I was concentrating on not messing it up. It took us three days to can that 100 pounds of tomatoes; I swear they were reproducing in those boxes. I'm thinking of doing some sauce next week, but haven't committed to the idea yet.

So, there's the scoop on the tomatoes. I think I have enough chopped tomatoes to get us through the bulk of the year.

A Bounty of Tomatoes

I have a couple of posts in my head that are spin-offs from my family cloth post of nearly a week ago (sheesh! where does time go?). I've been busy with other things, though and haven't gotten around to doing posting them. I will get to them eventually, so stick around.

On Friday my friend April and I strapped our combined five children into my van and headed out to a local u-pick farm for tomatoes and also ended up getting zucchini, jalapenos, and eggplants as well.

These are rows and rows of tomato plants.

All of the kids helped pick and really sped up the process. You can't see the two of us, but we were really picking, too; we didn't set the kids up with buckets and drink iced coffees and holler for them to pick faster.

Here are the slightly more than 100 pounds of tomatoes that we got.

In the next day or so I will post about the preserving we have done.

The Deeper Meaning of Family Cloth

A post and comments on two blogs that I regularly read made me mull over our choice to use family cloth (aka family wipes or cloth tp). The reason behind it is not simply to be thrifty. We have three girls and one mom in our family (the dad, of course, doesn't go through nearly as much as we four females do). That adds up to a lot of toilet paper use. One day about two years ago as I was replacing yet another roll of toilet paper, I thought how much we were going through and how much paper and waste and money it added up to. I also remembered a post about family cloth that I had recently read on an email list. When I thought that I had all the materials we already needed for wipes and with the addition of two waste baskets and two smaller baskets, we would be set, I decided to at least try it. I knew that I wouldn't need to convince Lawrence too much, because I am so lucky to be blessed with a guy who goes along with my most of my kooky whims fairly easily. Considering that we already used cloth diapers, cloth diaper wipes, and I use cloth menstrual pads, it wasn't such a stretch to add this anyway.

I cut up old t-shirts that had holes and were just hanging in our closets taking up space. Threw them in their new wicker baskets and told everyone the new protocol. Sure, those first few weeks there were wipes that ended up in the toilet, but everyone made the switch easily. We found out something interesting. We liked cloth wipes much better than toilet paper. They are so soft and more durable so you need less to get the job done. You can also moisten them with warm water and they don't disintegrate. So, here we are two years later with no plans to go back to toilet paper. We still keep a roll in each bathroom for guests to use or if we run out of clean wipes between launderings. In those two years I would calculate that we have saved a little over 700 rolls of toilet paper from use and saved at least $300 and countless gallons of water, nasty chemicals and fuel that goes into manufacturing and transporting the toilet paper. We are finally replacing some of our original wipes with new wipes from cut up holey t-shirts and underwear and wash one to two extra small loads in hot water with biodegradable Bio-Kleen detergent, baking soda and vinegar per week. The equation looks pretty clear to me. Family wipes are win-win.

Here are a few important realizations that have come to me during during the past couple of years of family cloth use. The first is that it took a minor mental shift to be able to deal with our own biological waste. I think our society is so used to paying other people to deal with the dirty or gross things that we would rather not think about, that it does take a mental shift. Think about it. We pay people to separate the sludge of excrement and toilet paper and used condoms and other trash at the waste water treatment plant and we simply flush and don't give it a second thought. We pay people to take our trash away so that we don't have to think about it once we set it out at the curb. We pay people to clean and bury our dead so we don't have to deal with the smell or the disgust of handling a dead body. We pay people to raise and slaughter our meat (usually in horrific conditions) so that we don't have to see their (sometimes) degradation and death. All this delegating and not thinking that we do is leading is to not think about what we do and waste and destroy our most precious resources. If we don't see and think about how to handle these situations, we take it all for granted and that makes it easier to waste paper, plastic, meat, etc. Of course, all of these thoughts are not only the result of using family cloth, but the result of a paradigm shift in which family cloth is only one component.

I'm really not trying to convince you all to make the switch, because I imagine that most people aren't ready or inclined to switch from using toilet paper. What I am asking you to do is to not have the knee-jerk reaction that seems to come from hearing about family cloth: That family is bizarre/ultra-thrifty/hippy dippy/unsanitary. None of those are the truth. Family cloth is just as sanitary as using cloth diapers or cloth underwear. How many of you use disposable underwear? Don't you trust your washer and dryer or clothesline to sanitize your underwear that inevitably has bacteria on it (no matter how well you wipe)? The same is true of family cloth. My method of baking soda, detergent, hot water and vinegar sanitize them very well.

Think about what changes could be effected if we all takes steps that are easy for us to change. Maybe family cloth is easy for me and not so easy for you, but perhaps you have changed something else that is easy for you and hard for me, like permanently decreasing driving or giving up a Frappaccino habit. It's incremental, permanent lifestyle changes that are the key, folks.

If you are curious about the practical details of using family cloth, read on.

That's my basket of clean wipes, within easy reach of the toilet. We use clean wipes for each job. Not one wipe that the whole family uses for the day. (It seems like that may be a misconception that some have.) When somebody has finished their business, they toss it into a lidded trash can reserved for soiled cloths. When it is full or we are running low on wipes, the cans from both bathrooms are hauled to the laundry area and rinsed in cold water with baking soda and then washed with hot water and a vinegar rinse and most recently, hung on our basement clothesline to dry though I used to dry them in my electric dryer.

Of course some families have variations in their routine. Some use a different color for the wipes for each family member so they don't have to use wipes that other people have used. Some people toss wipes in with their cloth diaper loads (which I used to do).

No-Knead Bread

I've been wanting to bake this bread for a long time. Possibly a year and a half or more. So, as soon as my dutch oven came in, I was ready to give it a shot. It is, in fact, the second thing I made in it. It is the famous No-Knead Bread recipe published in the New York Times, which I heard about in a round about sort of way, not directly from NYT. I love freshly baked bread. The kind with the crusty outer and soft and spongy inner. We have a local bakery here, but they are a bit on the pricey side (most good quality is) and I find their consistency in quality rather spotty. Sometimes the crust is way too crusty or the bread tastes unsalted and sometimes it's great. So, if I could make artisan bread at a fraction of the cost with constant results and minimal effort, I think that would be just about the perfect solution.

The recipe is ridiculously easy. Seriously, a six year old could do it. I know this because as I was running late the night before last, I set Isabel with the task of mixing the ingredients or we wouldn't have had bread with dinner the next night as I planned. (These photos happen to be from the first batch that I did, not the one Isabel did.)

You take three cups of flour, 1/4 tsp. yeast, 1 1/4 tsp salt and blend.

Then you stir in 1 5/8 c. of water. Stir until it is all moistened but still rough looking. This just takes a minute. Then you cover with plastic wrap or waxed paper and let sit for 12-20 hours.

After it has been sitting for nearly a day, it will be bubbly and yeasty smelling. Take it and fold it over itself twice.

Then let it rest for 15 minutes. After 15 minutes, shape into a ball, flour a cotton towel very well (or you can sprinkle bran or cornmeal in place of flour) and snuggle the dough ball into the well-floured cotton towel. It needs to sit and rise for about another two hours. Towards the end of the rising period, preheat your oven to 450 degrees and stick your covered dutch oven into the oven as well, so that it can get scorching hot. When your oven and pot are hot, take the dough off the towel (at this point you will probably want to make sure your dough hasn't stuck to the towel before you open your very hot oven and pot, otherwise you might be shaking a towel and the enclosed flour all over your kitchen to try to loosen it while your oven door is hanging open and the ambient heat is starting to burn your arms). When you have the dough ball free from the towel, open your oven and remove the lid to your pot (quickly to preserve heat) and dump the dough into the dutch oven seam side up. If you like, you can jiggle the dutch oven a bit to disperse the dough, but this step is really unnecessary and up to you; it will be a matter of aesthetics, not taste or function. Bake with the lid on for 30 minutes. Remove the lid and bake another 15 minutes or so. When it is fully baked and you can knock on the crust and it sounds hollow, remove from the pot to a wire rack. At this point I like to wrap in a clean towel, because it softens the crust just slightly to my idea of perfection.

When it's no longer burning hot, slice and serve slathered with butter (or whatever else you'd like to smear or stack on it).

It is a recipe that I will try to make regularly. I say try, because we all start off with good intentions and then it all falls apart in the everyday rush to do whatever else needs to be done. I am very happy with the results. It is what it promises. A no-knead bread recipe that has a crusty crust and soft interior. I use an unbleached flour that still has the germ (or maybe bran) that I get from Azure Standard. It is touted to be a fine compromise between whole wheat and white flour. As such, it has a lighter texture than wheat, but a darker finished product than white. Lawrence and I are pleased with it, but the girls have said they like the white loaf from our local bakery more because of this. They did like this one, just liked the white better. Second, I have to play around with the salt a bit more. I used 1 1/4 tsp as the recipe calls for the first time, but it wasn't salted enough for me. I used grey sea salt, so this might affect the saltiness. I tried 1 1/2 tsp the second time and it was a bit better. I will add probably 1/4 tsp the next time. I don't like things overly salted, but I do like them properly salted and this wasn't properly salted for my or the rest of the family's palate.

My Word Cloud

This is a word cloud based on words in my blog. You can make your own at Wordle. I couldn't get it to work for me, maybe my Java is funky. My friend Lisa at Colors Outside the Lines was kind enough to do it for me and email it, even though she just got back from vacationing in Vegas.

Dutch Oven Lovin'

I have been longing, longing for an enamel dutch oven. I was hoping for a Le Creuset for Christmas, but logically thinking that it wasn't likely since they cost a fortune. I saved enough Amazon gift certificates to get a 6 quart Lodge dutch oven. It's price is $52.35, but with my gift certificate I paid only $1.99 out of pocket, because I'm thrifty like that. I chose this lovely blue colored one. I've been wanting to make the famous New York Time's no knead bread for more than a year, but it wasn't only that. Dutch ovens are so useful for so many things, braising meats, stews and soups.

When I read the reviews on Amazon, the only complaint that I saw was that the plastic handle melts over 400 degrees. The no knead bread has to bake at 450 degrees, so that could be problematic. However, somebody mentioned that they just went to the hardware store and bought a metal knob and switched it out. Since this was the only complaint and some of the reviewers owned both Lodge and Le Creuset, so could make accurate comparisons, I figured the couple of bucks spent replacing the knob would be well worth the $100+ price savings.

The interior is the same exact color as coconut milk. I know this because the first night I got it, I cooked a spicy bean stew that starts with infusing the coconut milk with ginger and spices. The blue and the cream color make foods look much prettier than stainless steel.

My new $3.97 metal knob. I think it's more attractive than the black plastic one anyway.

Sorry for the Long Break

I didn't post for a few days and then yesterday morning, no internet access. It was down for 36 hours due to a dead modem. I'm back up and running now and I will have some new posts soon.

Yesterday Isabel and I went to see her birthday gift. Phantom of the Opera. It was fantastic. We both had a great time, but it was wonderful to see the awe and enjoyment on her little smiling face.

Excitement in the parking garage preshow.

Impatient in her seat, waiting in the interminable half hour before the show started.

The fountains across the street from the theater.