Adventures in foodstuffs

I've been adventuring with making a greater variety of cheap, good for you foods. Lately it's been beans, rice and lentils. I made a lentil and veggie tostada recipe that was well received by the adults in this family but the kids turned up their noses. Then I made a veggie stir fry with brown rice that was at least eaten by the children with minimal prodding. Then, I made a black bean burger that everyone loved (well, Jon only got to eat one reheated patty because he was gone the two nights I made it and no other burgers lasted). It was a great improvement over the chickpea burger that was all right in taste but kind of dry in consistency. This burger was just perfect. Nice and moist inside with a crispy cornmeal coating (say that ten times fast). Add tomato, lettuce and onion and a whole wheat organic bun and voila! Dinner perfection!

My burger with homegrown snap peas on the left (cooked from peas I picked and froze last year, Maine hasn't been that good to me yet)

So tonight was my second ever try at making homemade hummus. I tried years ago using canned chickpeas and a recipe that for some strange reason did not include tahini/seasame seeds. The result was a lemony chickpea nastiness that no one in the house liked and it scared me off of making hummus again for quite some time. But since we eat hummus like it's going out of style, I figured the time was ripe for me to give it another shot with my super awesome blend-anything machine and with a new recipe. The result was an excellent hummus recipe that only lacks a bit of seasoning, probably because I used garlic powder and not actual garlic.

Here is my recipe:

- 2 15oz cans of chickpeas, one drained, one undrained (I used fresh cooked chickpeas, so 3 cups of cooked plus 1/2 cup or more of water for consistency)
- 1/4 cup raw sesame seeds (I used toasted and it was fine)
- 1 tbsp olive oil
- 1/4 cup lemon juice
- 1 garlic clove, peeled (here I used garlic powder and it was quite garlicky enough)
- 1 tsp cumin
- salt

You puree everything but the salt until it reaches the consistency you want (add water gradually to make it thinner). Then you add salt to taste. You can easily make this into different flavors by adding things such as pureed roasted red pepper, pureed spinach and artichoke, extra garlic or hot pepper powder to the base hummus. I highly recommend using fresh cooked chickpeas. A 1lb bag of dry chickpeas yields about 6-6 1/2 cups of cooked chickepeas, which is enough for two batches of hummus. This recipe makes about 3-4 cups of hummus depending on what else you add to it, how much you can get out of your food processor/blender, and whether your husband and/or children eat some of it when you're not looking. Cost wise, this recipe is excellent. On a good day, when the big tubs of hummus are going on sale, I can nab two for $5 or $2.50 apiece. On a bad day they cost me $3.49 per tub. This recipe, even with super expensive sesame seeds ($3.99 for a little container), only costs me $1.65 per batch which makes more than I can buy in the tub. Win!

Om nom nom...homemade hummus.

Green and growing.

I joined Pinterest which may or may not be to my detriment (depending on how much time I spend pinning and repinning things...ok, let's face it, this could get ugly...) so you can find me on there. I've been slowly going through my links and pinning things up that I find useful. One thing I found was the website of the Thrifty Mama which has a lot of good suggestions on living a natural life on a smaller budget.

That is definitely one thing we're struggling with right now. I really believe in the benefits of organic food and whole food and local food, but it is so hard to buy it without it costing an arm and a leg! One thing I've found is that good staple meals like beans, lentils and brown rice go a long way for making a lot of cheap but good for you meals. Also, spices are a huge part of it, in my opinion. Just adding spices makes boring brown lentil mash much more interesting. I cooked a lentil and veggie tostada meal recently and the spices really made it a lot better.

The other difficult thing is finding good proteins without overloading on milk, cheese and other dairy products, or eating too much meat. Don't get me wrong, I'm hardly an herbivore but I try to limit my meat consumption to two meat dishes (where the meat is an accompaniment, not the main course) or less for the family a week. But that means that I need to make sure we're upping our protein intake from plant sources, in particular making sure we get enough complete proteins which is difficult with a mostly vegetarian/vegan diet. Well, I suppose it isn't that difficult. Nuts and grains make a complete protein. So do grains and legumes, legumes and veggies, or veggies and nuts. So it isn't impossible or even really all that hard, but it's more difficult than, say, grilling a steak or drinking some milk.

Mostly I'm a traditionalist. If our ancestors didn't eat it in the 1700s, we probably shouldn't eat it now. GMOs, antibiotic and hormone treated everything, high fructose corn syrup, refined flour and refined sugar. It all inundates our culture to the point where we just don't even see it. It can be hard to break away. By far the most difficult thing is buying organic, which (sad to say) is the lowest on my priority list. My first priority is to buy healthy foods, and if I can find organic so much the better, but if now I'll buy conventional. Luckily we're involved in the Heron Pond CSA this year as well as growing a garden for the fourth year, which will help with our veggie sources. I'm also hoping to make use of the various farmer's markets that are around to buy the staples like maple syrup and honey. Hopefully Jon will have some hunting success and we can get our meat from that. I've also ordered a book on Amazon about foraging in New England which will help supplement our food intake. There is a lot of good foraging that we already take advantage of. My blackberry and blueberry jams last year were entirely foraged stock, the blackberries from the road next to our property and the blueberries from Kennebunk Plains. I plan to get even more blueberries this year because the blueberry jam was quite popular. Our rhubarb patch is prolific as always and I will be looking for more sources of good rhubarb recipes so I can use it as it grows. I might also start selling it along with our extra eggs.

Sad, sad day...

Of the 30 duck eggs we acquired, one was cracked to begin with. So we were down to 29 from the get go.

Of those, only 3 made it to a point with a moving, living embryo.

Of those 3, only 2 started pipping (peeping and tapping at the shells) on Monday. They were still tapping yesterday.

Apparently they took too long to hatch and died, as we have two fully formed otherwise healthy ducklings who are dead in their shells. The saddest part of this is that tomorrow is my son's fifth birthday. We've been hoping to have ducklings in time for his birthday, but now it seems he'll be helping me bury them tomorrow.

I still have a faint glimmer of hope for the third egg (a Cayuga duck egg), but not much. I'm done with ducks. We gave away our pair that weren't laying because there wasn't any point in keeping them. I really wasn't terribly keen on having ducks anyways, but I'm so sad that our poor little peeping ducklings have died. I wish I had known that I could crack their shells for them or I would have done it yesterday to help them along. Sadly, I had no idea how to hatch a duck and now they've died. I'll move on I'm sure, I have chicks to take care of and animals to feed and life to do. But I'm a sucker for baby animals, I tell you what. I cried like a baby when I cracked their shells and saw two perfect little ducklings that weren't moving an inch.

I've determined now to never, ever, EVER do this again. I am not putting myself (or my kids) through this. I just hate incubating eggs myself. So we got four Brahma pullets in the hopes that at least one will go broody (and the rest can lay eggs and produce fertile eggs that don't come from inbred siblings). Then I can let Mama Hen do her thing and stay the heck out of trying to hatch another animal's baby. Ain't gonna happen!

Now with more...er...stuff?

So I've decided to revamp this blog with a new look and a new name.

A little background is that I am not a natural-born Mainer. Having been born in Massachusetts, however, I come with all the sarcasm and coldness of a born and bred New Englander. Our ground is cold and tough and full of rocks and our people can often be very similar. We talk too fast and speak too snidely for most people from warmer climates (and that is of course assuming you get us to do something other than glare at you menacingly like you're trying to sell us a used Pinto). That being said, however, I wouldn't live anywhere but in New England. I take for granted a lot of the advantages I enjoy here, not the least being the accessibility of all the necessities for a simple, natural life.

My husband and I have been married for nigh on eight years (ok, well, more like seven and counting) and have two children to show for it so far. My husband slaves away for his taskmasters doing disability claims (so if you have a broken leg and you talk to some guy named Jon be nice to him, ok?). My children generally run amok and get dirty, which seems to be what they excel at. My eldest will be school age this year and I look forward to sending him off on his own and not listening to the perpetual "HE STOLE MY BINOCULARS!" "WAHHHHHHHH!!" "STOP HITTING YOUR BROTHER!" that seems to occur every. single. day.

Yeah.

I grew up eating a diet that roughly consisted of a bag of sour cream and onion potato chips washed down with Coke and chased with a bowl of ice cream. I consider it a small miracle of genetics or fate or something that I managed to escape both a) obesity and b) type II diabetes (dia-BEE-tus). I may also credit the fact that my mother insisted that we have no access to anything processed, sugary, fatty, or generally appetizing to a child so long as we were staying in her house. My father's house was another story, where my brother and I had free range of a variety of unhealthy, non-Michelle-approved snacks.

That being said, when I married my husband as a budding college freshmen in the land where Macy's is a really crummy grocery store, we mostly focused on the cost and not the quality of our food. If it was cheap, it was worth buying. Fresh fruits and vegetables were good, and appreciated, but certainly not at the top of our list of foods to buy. We never at terribly, but we certainly did not eat particularly well.

Four years, three cats, two degrees and one child later, we left lovely Deseret for our home turf in New England. Yet again, we were more concerned with the price of the food we were buying, especially as we shortly added a home and baby number two to our family.

So fast forward a little more and we have now! Over three years of home ownership later and I've started to get some of this natural living stuff down. I've always loved gardening, I grew up with a mother who had a large and productive garden (a little overproductive in cabbage and parsnips if you ask me...) and I always dreamed of having my own garden. Before we were asked ever so politely to vacate a duplex we were living in with three cats and a newborn so the new owners could live in our spot, I had a nice little garden in Utah that was producing fairly well (let's ignore the carrots that were mostly weeds and the failed corn venture). So, when I finally got my hands on my own piece of land, I decided to try my hand at gardening again.

After year one, I was pretty sure I was ready to throw in the towel and live off of chips and soda again for the rest of my life. Bugs, weeds, weather and fatigue (ok I was pregnant, so sue me) pretty well did me in. Despite all that, I had a decent year and I for some unknown reason decided to try it again the next year.

Year two was much better! I improved my technique and increased my yield. I had the world's largest bumper crop of cucumbers (anyone want pickles? seriously, I think I have a canning addiction...) and summer squash. I was very happy with my garden.

Year three was decent. Some odd weather again caused a few crops to fail, but over all I had a good run of it.

So now here we are at year four.

Somewhere in all that I also managed to acquire: six hens, one rooster, two ducks, and numerous duck eggs that will be hatching in a couple more weeks.

So mix that all together, hit puree, wait a bit and you have: a family of four with seven chickens two ducks and lots of soon-to-be ducklings planning garden number four. Ta da!

Hello!

I promise this hasn't been forgotten! I have quite a bit of updating to do so I'll do that when I get the chance over the next few days. I hope to add pictures and make this a bit more interesting (if anyone out there sees it anyway!).

Toodles!

Oh wait, this is still here?!?

I looked at this and said, I should write in here or I should delete this blog. So write in here I did! The growing season is underway and my garden is ready and already growing some cool weather plants. I've got peas (shell and snap) popping up as well as lettuce planted (which will hopefully make an appearance soon). My rhubarb is growing like mad and will need to be cut soon. My fruit trees are all leafing out so I need to keep an eye on them to make sure no beetles/caterpillars eat the leaves.

I just wrote down on paper my plan to completely revamp my front lawn and turn it into a low maintenance perennial garden. It freaked out my husband a little who had visions of me spending the car money on plants and completely decimating his lawn, but after I explained it a bit he understood better my plan. I want to replace the grass entirely on one side of our driveway and some of the grass on the other side. I'm putting in a lot of ground cover to eliminate the need for weeding or mulch. I want to put in drought tolerant perennials, trees and shrubs. I'd like to have a good deal of edible plants. My biggest complaint with lawns is that they're a huge waste of space, time, and money. I spend $9 (thank you Libya...) to fill up the tank of my riding mower, and I have to use almost a whole tank each time I mow thanks to my 3 acres of hayfield, most of which I actually don't mow. Perhaps because I've been mowing it too short (I mow at about 2 inches but apparently that's too short), or perhaps because of our incredibly sandy soil (when they put in our new leach field they didn't have to bring in sand), our grass has large expanses of Sahara like dirt that blows up in my face in great clouds when I "mow" it. So I'm spending $9 to mow a half dead lawn and I really don't want to spend more money to reseed the whole darn thing. My plan was to take everything from the back of my garage forward and turn it into usable garden. I've been researching drought tolerant, edible plants, to prevent the creation of a largely useless perennial garden. A lot of native plants (surprise surprise) are drought tolerant, including a lot of medicinal herbs such as St. John's wort and yarrow. I plan to add a few trees, some edible, some flowering. I want a lot of flowers too for cuttings and to attract bees and butterflies. I plan to do this gradually, adding in some of the features that take longer to establish (trees, ground cover, shrubs) first, then adding in flowers and mulching over time. I would love to leave space for some annuals too, particularly vegetables if I have spots where I need to water anyways.

I'm excited to do a garden, I really want something that isn't just useless lawn. Lawn just takes up my time and it doesn't produce anything useful like flowers or fruit, or attract bees or butterflies. And with my lawn, it isn't even that nice to look at!

Voluntary Simplicity

I haven't posted on here in a while, but I've been thinking of ways to change it around a bit to make it more accessible to people and make it a little easier for me to think of things to write about. I'm going to eliminate the Tip of the Day aspect and just give tips when I have them.

I've had a lot of time to reflect recently on how the lives of my family and many of our friends differ from the mainstream concept of a fulfilling life. I think it really dawned on me one day when my eldest son and I were out in the field raking up hay to store in our barn to use as bedding for our chickens come winter time. We live on 3 acres of former hay field, so it isn't difficult to get enough hay to store, but it does require a lot of work. Most of what goes on at our house requires a lot of work, and I was explaining to my 3 year old son that summertime was when we worked so that come harvest and winter we could relax and spend our time on more relaxed projects inside. At that point it really struck me that our family lives a very old fashioned life in many respects. My days are generally spent outdoors, planting, weeding, harvesting, tending to the animals, and working the land. Although I do spend time in the evenings with what technology I find useful (Facebook to keep up with family and friends, my two blogs and the occasional movie), I don't spend much time bothering with the latest technology. I have lived in cities and seen the fast paced world of technology, and I've decided that it isn't for me. I don't want to have the newest this or the latest that all the time. I don't need every time saving gadget that comes out. I find peace and relaxation in spending my days working my land and caring for my family and animals. I would rather curl up with a good book on a cold day than attach myself to the internet. I find myself more fulfilled by playing with my children than by watching a movie with them. This isn't to say that the internet is not useful, or that it isn't nice to watch a movie once in a while as a family, but that these aren't the most important aspects of my life. I value a life of simplicity, filled with the use of technology limited to what is truly useful to me.

I don't live a life of voluntary simplicity to the extent that some people do, but I try to practice a simple life in many ways. I find that when my life is free of technological clutter and simplified as much as is practical, I live a life of less stress and I enjoy the quality of my relationships with people more. There is a wealth of information to be gained on the internet, and yet there is so much more to be gained by spending an hour instead talking with my husband or fighting dragons with my son. I value a sunset and a calm evening more than a TV show.

As a society we live very fast paced lives, and often the result of these lives is increased stress, which leads to increased health risks. I encourage anyone interesting in simple living or homesteading to check out the links provided. I think that anyone can find some reward in scaling back, even by a small degree, our typical lives of fast paced technology driven consumerism.