Under pressure– cooking

Pressure cookers are usually thought of one of those things that grandma used, dangerous and intimidating as it seemed, to store her preserves and can her winter veggies. Not quite an appliance on it’s own, not just another pot or pan, the pressure cooker is a must have  device for any savvy and frugal cook.

Pressure not only injects fluid into the food and speeds up cooking time considerably, it also softens hard materials like seeds, bones, cobs, and kernels.

Not only will you have the assurance that you can store food for months, you’ll know exactly what went into that food. Things you may not have considered for canning: soup, stew, chowder, bone meal, sauces, gravy, sliced citrus fruit, salted meat, potatoes, carrots and homemade pet food are all good candidates.

And you’ll be able to prepare things like hummus, hominy, bone meal, berry syrup, and berry preserves on the fly (without hours upon hours of cooking and waiting) to store for a later date or to serve up the same day. You can also speed the preparation of foods for storage by giving them a run in a pressure cooker.

A few tips to get you started:

• Always read the manual before using your pressure cooker and follow the instructions for your model.
• Buy the smallest pressure cooker size that will accommodate your needs, filled with water and food they can be quite heavy.
• Do not try to recycle self sealing jar lids
• Keep extra jars, rings and seals on hand
• Look for sales on the produce your family prefers
• Pressure cook bones, cobs, shells, husks, pits and kernals before throwing them in the mulch pile (they will break down much faster)
• Pressure cook bones and corncobs for your pets to chew on (their teeth will thank you)
• Core and pressure cook apples and pears in a spiced or maple syrup for a sweet treat

Bob Books

I have some serious love for Bob Books. If you haven’t found these revolutionary little gems they are a series of books that teach very basic phonics and context with simple line drawings. Each set progressively teaches more complex concepts as they are read. I’ve used Bob Books with my own children, I am constantly recommending them to friends and family with young pre-readers. Quite by accident I learned that older children who’ve missed essential phonics foundations are suddenly “getting it” after reading Bob Books to younger siblings. Not too spendy, these books are worth their weight in gold.

Kitchen: Cast-iron

For those of us that use cast iron cookware it’s unimaginable to switch back to copper bottom frying pans and Teflon coated cookware, aluminum is simply out of the question.

My cast waffle iron consistently produces perfectly formed and cohesive waffles with so little effort that switching to a Teflon waffle iron would be a clear sign of mental illness.

Cast iron offers an even distribution of heat throughout the cooking surface and sides, non-stick properties, durability, and lightening fast clean up when it’s cured correctly and properly cleaned.

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Craft: got plastic?

You can make a plastic from the protein called casein. Casein is found in milk, it is the substance that makes custards, cheese, and in this case: plastic. This recipe works with spoiled milk as well, so it makes a good recycling project.

You’ll need a stove top, a small pan (for heating), 1 cup of milk and some lemon juice or vinegar, and a wire strainer or some cheese cloth. You might also want some small candy or chocolate molds and a few paper towels handy.

Warm the milk 50°-70° (F) and add about a tablespoon of vinegar or lemon juice to the milk. Stir continuously as the milk curdles and remove from heat, strain the liquid from the solid using the wire strainer or cheese cloth (you can discard the liquid) and squeeze remaining moisture out of the solid curds with fingers or by patting with paper towels.

Congratulations!

You now have a plastic that you can sculpt or press into a mold. After sculpting or molding allow to air dry for 3-4 days. Try making buttons, rings, ornaments and small toys from the casein plastic, the more the casein is worked the smoother it becomes, so don’t worry about handling it too much. It can be cut, sanded, painted or lacquered for further finishing once dry.

Increase quantities and drying times as needed for larger batches of casein plastic.

(If you happen to have any formaldehyde laying around you can use it to dry the casein faster but that sort of takes it out of the ‘child safe’ project arena.)

Scaling down in the kitchen

I resent the power company.

I do. It’s not that having electricity is a bad thing– indeed. Having electricity is a wonderful thing, it’s just that the power company represents exactly everything that is wrong with the way large corporations do business. Wasteful, bureaucratic, thoughtless, and just generally not nice at all.

Therefore, I do not wish to give them any more of my money than I have to.

Also, the customer service is very rude. In fact, so far at our power company the only nice people we’ve met are the service technicians. The service technicians are pretty good people overall, at least for our current company.

Anyway this has lead to a reassessment of what we really need plugged in and turned on. Do we really need a ginormous refrigerator with so many cubic feet of storage? Not really. It’s old and the fan turns on way too much, also I tend to walk to the store every other day or so for fresh goods since the crisper drawer collects too much moisture and would be more accurately labeled the “moulder” and the meats drawer gets way too cold and freezes meats solid. Also the freezer portion is really inconvenient, I have a small kitchen that is long and narrow– so opening the freezer when the stove burners are on just doesn’t happen.

Now the large fridge is awaiting disposal on the back porch and we’re awaiting delivery of a compact fridge. Benefits: save money, more space and stickin’ it to the man.

The water heater is next. It is another old appliance that just sucks juice, new electric water heaters are better insulated, so there’s less loss of standby heat. Also, we don’t need a large water heater, so the plan is to scale it down to a 28 gallon water heater and if it proves to be too little we’ll place an on demand water heater at one of the far points (such as the tub or washing machine.) Benefits: save money, more space and stickin’ it to the man.

Eventually we’ll do a built in convection oven and stove, but for now those are our big changes. It’s hardly going off the grid, still– deep down in the cockles of my heart there’s a little warm glow just from knowing that I’m going to give the electric company less money (and that I’m stickin’ it to the man.)

I’ll keep you updated as things progress and on how much electricity/money we save by scaling down.

Cheap Home Improvements

Here’s a quick list things that you can do around the house to make it look a little nicer, and new, especially if you’ve lived there a while and things are starting to look run down. Some items on this list are rental friendly, some aren’t– when in doubt ask the landlord.

• Paint a wall, a single wall
• Replace caulking around tub
• Wash the front door and trim, inside and out
• Clean light fixtures
• Clean appliances

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Happy Easter!

I will be spending the day with my family to celebrate. So tonight, I will leave you the warning not to leave unrefrigerated eggs out if you intend on eating them and my favorite egg salad recipe.

You’ll need:

• 6 hard boiled eggs*
• 2 tsp 7-Up (or generic version) soft drink
• 1/8 tsp dry ground mustard
• 1/8 cup diced mild pickled peppers
• 1/4 cup mayonnaise*
• paprika to garnish

It takes about 10 minutes to prep this salad and about 40 minutes to chill in the refrigerator.

Peel egg whites and set aside. Blend yolks, 7-Up, dry mustard, and mayonnaise thoroughly by hand. Crush egg whites, blend with peppers. Pour yolk mixure over the eggwhites and diced peppers and mix until evenly covered. Chill for 40 minutes. Prior to serving garnish with paprika. Serve as a dip or on fresh toast with tomatoes and lettuce.

*Vegans can replace the egg whites with firm tofu, the yolks with soft tofu, and mayonnaise with vegan sandwich dressing.

Please note that increasing the recipe will increase the time needed to chill in the refrigerator; adjust your recipe accordingly.

DIY blogs and websites using blogs

Drool on our site Quantumspindles.com, we (by “we”– which I imply Matt and I, but I really mean “I”) rebuilt it using wordpress (the same platform that this blog uses) an open source platform with lots of support and many cool thingies (called plugins) that make blogs perform great tricks (like making a super-sweet shopping cart, changing the appearance of the site, generating cool font graphics for titles, anti-comment-spam measures, creating picture galleries and automatically managing ads.)

The more I use wordpress, the more I like it. The support forums are excellent and there are lots of free tutorials, plugins, themes, and advice about using wordpress. Use the free hosting for non-commercial sites or install on any TLD that has mysql and apache (if you have hosting that provides cpanel with fantastico odds are that you can install WP.)

I have to admit that I was using the blogger.com/blogspot.com combination quite happily for quite a while. And while I like the interface and the ease of use (free is an awesome price), I too had problems with losing posts for various reasons, visitors experiencing slow loads, and sundry other small issues.

Warning, philosophical waxing ahead

As much as I try to keep my personal politics and philosophy away from my DIY ethics, I find that the two are intrinsically bound together. It warms the cockles of my heart every time I walk past the strawberry starts that we put in the ground two days ago. I feel the brisk purr of excitement when I can salvage an old motor. I am giddy with anticipation when I find a box of old keys or a forgotten package of polymer clay or a stash of vintage fabrics in the back of a closet.

There’s something thoroughly okay with the world when I can stick it to the man with a pair of hand knit socks and a dozen homemade doughnuts.

Back to the point: I’d rather not waste time protesting consumerism and commercialism and slave wages. My time and resources are better spent supporting graciousness and independence, and I don’t think I want to curb that impulse. So I’m going to go with it.