My Favorite Monster

Herman is amazing. Herman is my pet, Herman is my confidant, Herman is my constant companion...Herman is my sourdough starter.

My latest fascination is with fermentation. Over the last several weeks I have become obsessed with the idea of pickling, krauting, canning,kambutchaing, keifer...ing? I want to make stuff and I want it sour and I want it stewing in its own juices! This all really began with Herman.

About two months ago I ran across a recipe for a sweet sourdough stater whilst looking for bread recipes and I decided to give it a shot. I remembered my mom constantly trying to keep something she called "Herman" alive and eventually forgetting all about it in our pantry until one day she would throw it out with a look of disgust. Most people I asked about sourdough starters, including Mom told me not to bother, I would certainly forget about it and kill the thing before any tasty treats would be made. My mom however does not  have the obsession with "making shit happen" that I have. As soon as you tell me to forget something, it is pretty much a guarantee it will become my new passion.

If you have ever made a sourdough you know the basic recipe. Yeast, flour, water. Stir. Stir. Stir. Stir. Feed. Lather, Rinse, Repeat, culinary delights ensue.

I had never made a sourdough starter before. I picked the first recipe off the web and went to work. Research is NOT my thing.

The original recipe I had called for milk and sugar every 5th day. On the 15th day of the stir, stir, stir, stir feed, stir....cycle, I was super excited to make some breads  and get me some sour-dough in my face. We used a recipe from Instructables to make a no knead sourdough artisan bread. We made chowder to have it dipped in. The house smelled outstanding. We were ready for that first bite, I slathered it in butter, took in the aroma, put it in my mouth...It tasted like...nothing. Not even bread really. It had the right texture. The right chew. But it had nothing in the sourdough department or the yeasty bready department we were looking for.

Fail.

Never one to give up, I fled to the internets and searched for a reason. Turns out, most sourdough recipes do NOT call for sugar, nor milk. I was aghast. Perhaps READING the recipe, other than the instructions and ingredients may have prevented this...but who is to say really?

I started immediately eliminating the milk and sugar from Herman's feedings and instead adding only water and flour. The flour itself has enough sugar to keep the yeast going without any other help. I went back to my 4 days stir, 1 day feed schedule for 2 more weeks before attempting another experiment in Herman cooking. (so violent)

After 2 weeks, I found a recipe for sourdough pancakes that made my mouth absolutely water. Please see said recipe HERE. Warily, I approached Herman's jar. Upon opening the lid I saw that he had that fine layer of liquid on top the interwebs had said he would. He smelled like a miner from the 1800's and definitely evoked the feeling of fermentation I had been looking for.  We had a talk. We decided that sourdough pancakes were too cool to pass up. It was time he and I got down to business and started working WITH each other, and not against. We came to an accord. In the end, the pancakes were AMAZING. Sour, light, delicious. We top them with brown rice syrup or honey and we don't get that nasty carb hangover we always got from buttermilk cakes.

Over the last month Herman and I have been trying some new things. I have switched him to an entirely whole wheat diet. This seems to agree with his digestion more than the white bread flour I was using. He is always hoochy and bubbly. I also haven't divided him since like the second week I made him. I gave some to a couple of friends and then no one wanted the responsiblity of an edible pet monster so I haven't handed any out. Because I am pathologically incapable of throwing away food (or most things really) I haven't divided him at all since.  If anyone knows whether this is causing my bread to mutate into some sort of yeast beast I would like to know because all I know is he tastes awesome.

To date we have made using Herman:

Sourdough Cinnamon Rolls

No Knead Sourdough Bread (whole wheat and white) both awesome

Sourdough Whole Wheat Bread

Sourdough Tortillas-whole wheat, we are still perfecting this one

and Sourdough English Muffins

Herman an I have grown rather fond of each other. Boss refers to him as another member of our family. Pinkone takes her turn feeding him and talking to him to make sure he is well loved and cared for. In return he fills our bellies with delicious taste treats at least once a week. There are thousands of links for creating your own starter if you only consult the Oracle. I would post mine here...but it doesn't actually exist.

Here is one that is similar from My Sisters Kitchen or you can take the Gnowfglins Sourdough E-course and learn about ALL OF THE THINGS!!!

Tell us about your favorite monster?

*update: prior to this posting Herman passed on. His jar was contaminated by some unknown substance. We have not ruled out sabotage by other bread products wishing to be as awesome, or possibly the dog, looking for attention. Either way, Herman 2.0 has been created today and will hopefully live up to his predecessors delightful flavor. RIP Herman.

[caption id="attachment_975" align="aligncenter" width="540" caption="quite similar to Herman"][/caption]

The Weird Kid

Anyone who has either met our family, or read our blog with any regularity is painfully aware that Pinkone is a kid who marches to her own drummer. Her unique brand of "Pink-ness" is kind of taken for granted as normal by the lot of us who are in the trenches with her every day. Generally, there isn't a problem until she, or we, are forced to interact with the world at large. Suddenly her new found love of Swedish Black Metal is looked at as a cause for concern rather than totally bad ass.

We had parent teacher conferences the other day, always a source of anxiety for me. The teacher had already called us a couple of weeks ago to let us know that apparently, our kid had a disconcerting odor. This was news to me, as she was given a shower that very morning. When she came home, it turned out that she had decided that simply standing under the water and not actually using soap was an adequate means of cleaning ones self. As I have mentioned in previous posts, it is still shocking to me that hygiene is not something all people are inherently born with.

So after a long and detailed discussion on how to properly wash ourselves and the importance of clean socks, we sent the child back to school thinking all of our problems were solved. Parent teacher conferences come up and Boss and I go like the good Queer-rents we are. Pinkone show's us her desk, her illustrated guide to the life cycle of  a spider and the book of wacky learning songs she uses every day. We see the chart illustrating the teeth lost by each member of the class, see the quiet reading corner and learn about Kelso's choices. Kelso usually chooses to not be a jerk, so we like him.

Then comes the part where Pinkone goes to play with the student teacher and we sit down to talk to the teacher one on one. She starts off with all of the stuff we already know. Pinkone is great at math, she is super smart, has a little trouble focusing sometimes, but is generally doing very well academically.

Then we get into the bits we did NOT know. Apparently Pinkone has an issue with sneakiness. After work time the kids are supposed to bring a  crayon to the magic carpet and circle the answers they got wrong. Pinkone brings her pencil and erases the answers and writes the correct ones on the paper instead. They are supposed to put the math blocks in the box after math time, Pinkone quietly stuffs them in her pocket and takes them home with her for no apparent reason. Teacher is concerned about the amount of sneakiness Pinkone is displaying, did we think there was something going on we weren't aware of? Did teacher need to be brought in on some sort of deep family trauma that resulted in the stealing of math blocks?

Awesome.

Pinkone went through something of a Hudson Hawk phase shortly after her bio-dad left as well. There were several instances of finding small toys and things in her pockets after returning from her friends houses. She would return the toys, apologize and be grounded, eventually the phase seemed to subside and we hadn't had an episode in months.

Has our child become a criminal mastermind? Is she a tiny sociopath in training?

I don't think so. The deal here is that Pinkone has embarrassingly developed a habit I myself, and most of my family seems to have. It is an issue with scarcity. Though we have never had an instance in which we have had to truly want for anything, we are all always afraid that there will suddenly not be enough of it when we want it. If we don't get this thing NOW it won't be there when we legitimately can get it. This is the issue that most often results in shop lifting, hanging on to abusive relationships, and disordered eating.

Where does this issue come from? I see it in myself, I see it in my family, and now here it is in my daughter. I take portions bigger than I want because I am afraid the food won't be there if I want more. I hold on tight to my partners whether  I want them there or not because I am terrified they might disappear at a moments notice and I won't be able to get a new one. I either buy whatever it is I need the MOMENT I can afford it with NO research whatsoever or buy nothing at all.

While swiping the math blocks may not have been a huge deal in the grand scheme of things, the anxiety that goes along with the desire TO swipe the math blocks has the potential to be a life long issue if we don't nip it in the bud ASAP.

Pinkone has also been on a kick lately where she keeps trying to convince Boss and I that we should get married. She has even offered up her own pink plastic butterfly ring if only he would be willing to propose to me. While incredibly sweet, we aren't planning to get married any time soon, or possibly ever, its not really a priority for us. After her 11th request for us to get married. I asked her the other day, "Honey, are you worried that Boss is going to go away if we aren't married?." She admitted that yes, that was her concern. We had a long talk about  the differences between commitment and marriage, and that the two do not always have to equal the other. Her bio-dad and I were married and it didn't stop him from leaving.  Just because Boss and I are not married does not mean we are any less committed to each other than any other couple. She attended the "document signing ceremony" of our dear friends with us and we reminded her of what they told her that day. "Our relationship is no more valid today than it was yesterday. We are just letting the state of Washington know that we plan to file our taxes together next year".  A fantastic lesson the true meaning of marriage if you ask me.

As I am telling her this, I realize that I have thought and felt the very same sense of urgency regarding my relationship, whether I have said it out loud or not. If we aren't married, or working toward getting married, our relationship seems somehow...less than. That is not OK.

What do you DO when you see your kids playing out your own issues in front of your face?  How do you correct a behavior in them that is so ingrained in yourself? I didn't even realize that this was a problem for me until very recently. I have been trying to expend my energy reminding myself that if I don't have something RIGHT NOW it will either be there when I am ready for it, or if it isn't, then it wasn't meant to be. How to communicate this to Pinkone? I didn't realize I was communicating my scarcity issues to her in the first place so how do I communicate my attempts at eradicating them from my own life?

Have any of you been shocked to see your own issues mirrored in your kids? What did you do to correct it?

Tah-Boo-Lee!

I love Levantine cuisine.  Everything from the basic olives, Hummus and Shwarma to the more "adventurous" like Shashlik, Dolma and Kibbeh and if you have never tried Baklava you have never truly lived.  Often some of these foods can be difficult to prepare, I mean who has a Shwarma spit in their kitchen? (one day it will be mine, oh yes it will be mine!) However, one of my favorite dishes from the Levant region of the world is Tabbouleh.  Originally from the mountains of  Syria and Lebanon, tabbouleh has become one of the most popular salads in the Middle East. Traditionally made with bulgur wheat, Tabbouleh is a super easy and delicious salad that can be served as a main dish or a side.  One of the best things about it is that you can make a large amount, store it in the refrigerator in a tightly closed container and its flavors develop more and more as the days pass.  We are trying to reduce the amount of gluten we eat in casa DR and experiment with new grains and seeds so I have adjusted my usual tabbouleh recipe to use quinoa instead of bulgur, this give it a softer texture but I really like the taste and this recipe could be used to make tabbouleh with almost any grain.

Fun Fact!

The largest recorded dish of tabbouleh to date weighed 4,324 kg and was created on 13 November 2009 by the Yaldy Association at Alaayen Elementary School in the Arab town of Shefa-Amr in Israel.

Here is my recipe for a traditional tabbouleh with a few of my own tweaks.

So for this you will need:

1 cup dry quinoa*

3 ripe Roma tomatoes

1/2 long english cucumber

1/2 red bell pepper

1/2 yellow or orange bell pepper

1 bunch Italian Flat leaf parsley.

1 cup kalamata olives

1/2  red onion

2 cloves of fresh garlic

2 whole lemons

1 cup quality olive oil

1 tsp ground cumin

1/2 tsp sea salt

1/2 fresh ground black pepper

*You can make this with either cooked quinoa or raw sprouted quinoa.  To see how to sprout quinoa visit our post on sprouted grains  or if you are going to cook the quinoa, here is a great tutorial on how to do just that! If using cooked quinoa I recommend cooking it at least 3 hours prior to making the salad so that it has plenty of time to fully chill. The best is to let it cool in the fridge overnight.

To begin, put all your cooled quinoa in a large mixing bowl. Chop up all vegetables with the exception of the onion,garlic and cilantro in small cubes, I find the smaller cubes work better than large chunk vegetables to maintain a consistency of texture and to ensure you can get a bit of each ingredient in each bite! Add all chopped veggies to the quinoa.

At this point I attack my parsley.  Usually I will wash it and trim off the bottom third of the steams. Also pick through it and make sure there are no wilted, blackish bits...trust me, you do not want to get one of these in your bite..very foul! After I have made sure it is all good to go I bunch it up tightly together as if I am going to do a chiffonade of the bunch. The tighter you hold it the smaller pieces you can cut it in the first go around, otherwise it tend to explode and go everywhere!

Toss it in with the quinoa and veg. Now, on to the dressing which brings this all together in a mess of tangy freshness.  Combine your olive oil and lemon juice, add in the salt, cumin and pepper. Whisk well so that the lemon juice and olive oil combine.  Cut up onion in a small dice and mince both garlic cloves, add to lemon and oil mixture.  Whisk well to incorporate. At this point my mouth usually starts to water as the heady garlic and onion and the tart lemon scent hits me.  Pour dressing onto salad.

Slice up your olives and combine with your salad, mix well.  Now comes the best part...the taste test.  Take a big spoonful, close your eyes and..NOM!!  This salad just gets better as it sits so usually I will make it at least 1 hour ahead of time and cover it and put it in the refrigerator to chill and let the flavors mingle.  Drop me a comment and let me know how yours turned out and what, if any, adjustments you made.  Enjoy!!

Apple Butter Business

Two weeks ago  I started a campaign on craigslist for canning supplies. Preserving is my cause du-jour at the moment. I am getting super excited about things like canning, fermenting, and dehydrating. Oh the possibilities!

During my quest for free canning supplies, I was contacted by a person that worked for an older gentleman with a plethora of canning business cluttering up his shop since his wife passed on. Boss and I immediately planned a trip out to the nether reaches of the county to pick up our free swag and start the canning fun times.

When we got there, we found the COOLEST gentleman either of us have had the pleasure of meeting since our own grandpa's (who are both extremely awesome mind you). Farmer Jim had not only canning supplies, but an industrial rock tumbler, gads of shiny rocks from all over the US, a stuffed owl and so many amazing handy craft projects I think etsy would blow up if it allowed him to post to their site.

Farmer Jim loaded us up with jars and a canning set up and also sent us home with a HUGE bucket of apples to start off our adventure in canning. Boss now has his old gentleman mentor, and I now have my canning supplies...all in all, a prosperous trip.

[caption id="attachment_943" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="above: a veritable shit ton of apples"][/caption]

When I got home,  I couldn't decide what it was I wanted to DO with these nifty canning supplies and all of these apples. We are big fans of apple muffins in this house, but it seemed a little silly to make 600 of them just to use up my apples. After a quick offering to the Oracle, it was decided that apple butter would be the coolest thing we could make with the ingredients we already had on hand.

The process begins with a veritable shit ton of apples. We used two bags from the grocery store as well as 10 of Farmer Jim's far superior apples. We filled the crock pot with tiny chunks of apples and thought smugly...this shall make thousands upon thousands of gallons of delicious apple butter! MWHAHAHAHAHA! It of course made...2 pints of delicious apple butter. According to the interwebs, if youw ant to make gallons of the stuff, you will need to keep adding apples as it cooks down and you will need far more than like 30 apples. SO the recipe I am posting here is for a small yield batch that you can do in a weekend with your crock pot. The apple butter purists will do it in gigantic pots over fires and such. I am no apple butter purist.

Let us begin.

Ingredients:

A bunch of of apples (30 or so) -cored and chopped. I leave the skins on because they cook down and it doesn't make any difference to me. Plus...the lazy...

[caption id="attachment_944" align="aligncenter" width="225" caption="like-a-so"]

Sprouted What Now??

Have you ever heard of sprouted grain bread? Yeah, me either, until Boss mentioned something about it one night whilst basking in the romantic light of my laptop. Apparently he was quite fond of a certain type of bread called "Squirlley Bread". It is a bread made with sprouted grains, which according to http://www.organicsproutedflour.net is like the best thing ever. The website has a big ol' list of health claims most of which amount to "this is both tasty and good for you!"

Boss began waxing poetic about this bread, making me desperately want to try them. At $3.00 or so a loaf I of course was skeptical (and also cheap). So rather than rush out to the Co-Op searching for this bread, I did what I now often do and said "Shit, I can do that. To Google!"

Whilst Googling, I found a recipe for making your own sprouted grain breads, the method for sprouting said grains and the tools with which to grind the resulting sprouts. I had all of the things, shit was gone get sprouted up in this joint.

The recipe for sprouting grains is located HERE  at the mother of all DIY awesomeness, Mother Earth News . The basic principle is to get the grains to sprout little tails, which means they are rehydrated and growing again. You can apparently do this with any unprocessed seeds or grains. Our first endeavor involved red wheat berries. The resulting bread was...damp? but sweet and nutty, also delightful with soup. The next goal was to make a gluten free version of this delightful buisness so we tried our hands at Quinoa sprouting.

Thing the first: Do not use the jar method that is mentioned in the Mother Earth article. Apparently with the smaller grains like quinoa  (and possibly others but for sure this particular grain) it is easier to sprout them, and drain them by laying them flat on a cookie sheet. Please see below for step by step pictorial instructions!

Step One- Pick a grain!

We picked Quinoa becuase its gluten free and  I have a fetish for feeding the starving. A cup of grains will sprout into about a cup and a halfish of sprouts and that will make one small loaf or 8 small rolls.

[caption id="attachment_875" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="nom nom various grains"][/caption]

Second: Soak the grains over night in a jar

(this is where the picture would go if I had taken said picture)

Third:

Drain said grains and move them to a flat surface with which to sprout

[caption id="attachment_876" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="cookie sheets are flat!"][/caption]

Fourth: rinse the grains twice a day shuffling them about so they don't congeal and make yicky mold thingys until they start to make tails. This takes about two days. There is not a photo of the tails because I only have a shitty point and shoot camera with no macro setting right now. So..here is a drawing of what they look like with tails.

[caption id="attachment_878" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="NOTHING else"][/caption]

Fifth:  After they have the tails, you can grind the ever loving shit out of them. We use the meat grinding attachment for my Kitchen Aid and it works perfectly. I am sure there is an alternative method so you don't have to go buy a Kitchen Aid...but you should just go buy a Kitchen Aid because they are seriously the greatest things ever in life. I hug mine when no one is watching...Anyway...put the sprouts in the grinder and smoosh them through creating this odd, hamburgery like substance, you can add some flax, some seeds, some other stuff, whatever sounds good to you. When we did the wheat berries, we added flax but when we did the quinoa we kept it pure.

[caption id="attachment_879" align="aligncenter" width="225" caption="No one knows of our secret love Kitchen Aid..."][/caption]

What Step am I on?

Smoosh the resulting pulpy stuff together to make little balls or a loaf and place on a sheet pan. We also rolled ours in sesame seeds because...why not?

[caption id="attachment_880" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="even his hands are handsome...*sigh*"][/caption]

I have completely lost count at this point:

Put a pan of water on the lower shelf of the oven, and the sheet pan on the upper rack. This keeps your bread from drying out. Bake at 250 degrees for...well the recipe said to do it for 2.5 hours and we found that this worked fairly well with the wheat berry bread, but was a bit too long for the quinoa. So, I am going to say check it after 2 hours and push on the top, if it is crusty but springy, its done. If its still fairly smooshy, give it another 10 minutes. There really isn't an exact time to this. The resulting nibbles look something like this:

wait...I forgot to take a picture of that too... well they look like the ones boss is rolling only cooked.

The judgement:

So, we quite liked the wheat berry bread, particularly when paired with soup. It was nothing like the squirlly bread, we think becuase they not only sprout their grains, but then dry and mill them or mix them with other grains to make flour...basically its more like bread. These loaves taste breadish, but in the case of the wheat berry bread, its very wet on the inside and hard on the outside. We may not have squeezed out enough of the water from the grains before smooshing them. As for the quinoa, we over cooked them but they had this very pleasent nutty flavor that we think would make an excellent cookie. We plan to incoporate some brown rice syrup next time and see what that is like.

Over all, sprouting: successful! Using said sprouts to make bread: Moderately successful and definately boast worthy. I mean, who do you know that is running about sprouting things and making stuff from them? Not enough people that is for sure!

Give it a try, use some other grains and let us know how it goes. What works best for you? Any alternative grinding methods? Next up, sprouted grain tortillas Oh yeah...that is happening!

Food! F*ck Yeah!

Like many of my generation, I have spent most of my life eating what can only be called "processed food type products." Everything I learned to cook was either soaking in cream of stuff or smothered in cheddar cheese.

Oddly enough, I have often not felt like the healthiest person in town. Having one time been something of an athlete,  it was right surprising when I became a grown up and doing my own cooking coupled with far less of the sports things, and then found myself exhausted, breathing hard, and often unnervingly sweaty.

I have made many a half hearted attempted at healthy living, and have made a few full hearted attempts at self sufficient living. Usually I have given up after a few short weeks and a couple of misshapen bread loaves.  The reason these experiments fail varies, but overall I think the uniting factor has to do with my reasons behind doing so.  When I would try to eat healthy it was because I wanted to lose weight, go on a trip and look like what I decided pretty was. When I would try to make my own foods it was because I was broke or needed some kind of escape from a crappy life.

When Boss moved in, we both expressed our desire to start living more healthy lives. We wanted to have more energy, be less reliant on processed foods and have a better understanding of what it was that we were putting in our bodies.These seemed like better reasons than any I had had before.

The decision made, putting it into action became something else entirely. As I mentioned, I was raised on mayonnaise based salads and margarine, my idea of eating healthy was buying things full of health claims and shiny photos brought to you by Nabisco and Winston Salem. I was still desperate to find the food loop hole that would allow me to continue eating cheese as often as humanly possible and feel awesome about my choices while doing so. Unfortunately,  that loop hole does not exist, and believe me, if it did, I would have found it. I fucking LOVE cheese.

We went back and forth and in and out of good habits, nothing really sticking for any significant amount of time. We would buy the better versions of boxed foods, skinless boneless frozen chicken parts, and things smacking of Omegas and what not. We didn't feel any better, our wallets were still pretty damn empty and we couldn't tell you from one day to the next what exactly it was that was going into our foods. This seemed counter productive.

*Tangent*

As poor people, we have been told again and again that we don't deserve to be healthy, that we don't deserve to have delicious, healthy foods to put in our bodies that don't come from brightly colored boxes. Healthy, organic foods are not affordable, not readily available and not marketed to your "average" family making only slightly more than minimum wage. The shelves at Wal-Mart (where all us poor folk shop) are chock full of chemical laden sugar drinks and vegetable flavored fried corn puffs. As there is no money to be had in actual carrots, rarely will a carrot be seen (the carrot lobbyists are few and far between).

As fat people we are told that its our fault we are fat, that we can't possibly be both healthy AND fat. Society tells us the two are mutually exclusive. We are told that the only way to be healthy, is to be thin. That the only way to be thin, is to give our money to a diet organization, or subscribe to some new chemical fad that will change our bodies to work in a different way. Does NO ONE see how FUCKED that is? If we give money to someone to make us thin, does that someone benefit in any way from actually making us thin? If we are all thin and staying that way, where will they get their money? Will Jenny Craig just brush her hands off and say "ahhh, now that was fine days work, on to cure cancer!" WHY would we willingly alter the chemistry of our bodies and reroute our internal organs in order to eat less shitty food, but shitty food all the same, instead of leaving our bodies the perfect energy plants they are and filling them with real, actual food that is also fuel? And why can't that be fun?! and social?! instead of a source of contention and angst?

We as a society have been told that we are helpless slaves to multinational corporations that know what is best for our families and that the food we have always eaten isn't good enough, or healthy enough. That their lobbyists and scientists know better than our bodies and our ancestors do. Do you see Charles Ingalls eating re-hydrogenated food type products? HELL NO! Charles Ingalls would be like, I want chicken, I'm gonna go get me an actual chicken. Caroline, grind me some flour! You know why? Because Charles Ingalls is THE MAN....

*End Tangent*

SO the point I was getting at is, we got sick of it. We started making changes.

Change the first:

Stop buying what has commonly been referred to as "bread" but is really a mishmash of refined chemicals and flours and a metric ton of sugar compressed into a bread like shape. That one was easy. I love making my own bread. Its this very zen thing for me. I knead the dough and become one with it, there is nothing but me, and the dough. I have begun the search for the most epic of all bread recipes. Stay tuned for that adventure.

Step the second:

Vegetables are expensive and keep spoiling before we eat them, this is both wasteful and annoying. Solution? Don't buy any meat, then you have to eat the vegetables and also have more money to spend on them! We also turned to the family oracle (Google) and found better ways to store our veggies and things to do with the bits we don't eat (stay tuned for this also!) So no veggies are going to waste!

Step the third:

Foods that contain less chemicals seem to be more expensive, this is what we in this house refer to as "bull shit". Solution? figure out how to make it yourself. Again, the family oracle provides us with solutions. Want gluten free bread? Don't want to pay 9bazillion dollars for 12 kinds of flour? Make sprouted grain breads.  Have a hankering for egg salad, don't know what "disodium edta " is and don't particularly want it to be part of your dinner? Make your own mayo. The internet is literally SWARMING with people aching to share their recipes and tips for making the perfect whatever. This has become what I call culinary truth or dare, and what Boss calls "Food Alchemy". I have saved about $100 a month by cutting out meat, and making my own everything but vegetables, yeast, almond milk, and flour. And if that grain mill comes in for my kitchen aid at a reasonable price...

Step the fourth and final:

Quit fucking apologizing for being awesome at life. We feel amazing since we have started instituting these changes in our lives. The energy shift in our home is palpable. Pinkone is happier, cleaner, and is far less of a goth kid in training. Boss and I are playing with her again, teaching her how to do the things we are doing and are able to use every meal as a science experiment or math lesson. There are some days where I start to feel silly, or self conscious for going to the co-op buying bulk quinoa or grinding my own oat flour or...whatever. Like suddenly I am one of those people from California Woody Allen makes fun of. Then I stop and think about it. Fuck You Woody Allen! (not really, I seriously love you Mr. Allen) But, really, that kind of thinking is me apologizing to (someone?) for living the kind of life I want to live. Living this way only looks ridiculous and feels like work when I decide it is ridiculous and feels like work and don't remind myself that not only is being relatively self sufficent super fun, but a great way to keep my brain in shape learning new things. Fuck Yeah Learning!

So basically what I am saying here is that my family is making the choice to engage in food related anarchy and non conformist living. We would like to share that with you, the people of the internet in the hopes that you might find it informative, entertaining, or at the very least, amusing. If you have any awesome ideas for self sufficent living, food related anarchy, or just a general comment or gripe, please feel free to send it to the following address: pinklilybit@gmail.com

Stay tuned for more adventures in MediocreParenting, in which your hero continues to feel less Mediocre by the day!

29 Full Steam Ahead!

This may come as no surprise to anyone who regularly reads my blog, or knows me in anyway, but sometimes I feel like I might be a crazy person. As I age, I care about whether or not this is true less and less, but the thought still crosses my mind from time to time.

Tonight I was reading bits of a blog that Boss linked me to, The Non-Conformist Family. In reading Josh's familial manifesto, I am starting to feel a bit like less of a crazy person, and a bit more like one of the lucky people in the universe that has managed to start figuring out that our world is actually more than just the next thing on the to do list. Boss calls this tapping into the universal love stream. I love that. We aren't out here alone being nuts, we are part of the stream of people out here being nuts together!

Over the past couple of years I have made some really insane choices. I decided that living genuinely was more important to me than living safely. While this was not an easy choice to make, and resulted in the end of my marriage, the end of several friendships, and skeptical eyebrow raises from many a family member, I wouldn't change that decision for anything. In NCF, Josh talks about taking risks, and by coming out, ending a crappy marriage, and taking a flying leap off the love cliff with someone that lived impossibly far away, I think I may have one or two things to say about risk taking.

So yesterday was my birthday, and as is my custom, I looked back on the previous year, looked forward to the next year, and did a little of the "yes this, no that" game with myself. What did my life look like this time last year? quite different for sure. What did I want it to look like this time next year? Similar but better...so as you can see, I'm totally deep.

For my birthday this year, I asked for one thing. Boss and I don't have any money to speak of, so lavishing me with furs and jewels was not totally in the realm of possibility. Rather, I asked him for a weekend of us time, or as we say, "mantics". We spent the weekend baking, cooking, talking, watching movies, and just being together. In doing this, not only did we get some prime 'humpin' in, but we also managed to really connect on a deeper level. It was super awesome to remind myself exactly why I took the insane risk of moving this person out here to live with us from a foreign land, with full knowledge that they would not be able to work and may possibly turn out to totally hate everything about me. It reminded him why he left a comfortable job, socialized healthcare and a boat load of friends for a capitalist dictatorship populated with individualistic hate mongers, I might be paraphrasing there a bit, but you get the jist. The point is, in my 28th year I took some crazy ass risks, many of which did not sit well with those I love. In the end, the most important thing was that I went in fully informed and came out into 29 the best version of me I can be today.

Birthday List of Awesome Things I Plan to Continue into 29

1) Making as many things from scratch as humanley possible

Cooking has become the ultimate game of double dog dare with myself. Being super poor, but also something of a foodie poser, I like to pay close attention to what I stuff in my face hole and that of my little family. I have grown to LOVE making things that normally come from a box or a can or a bag, myself. There are few things more cathartic than kneading bread. I also love finding vegetarian and vegan alternatives to favorite foods. I feel like I plant a giant middle finger in the face of corporate greed every time I master a new recipe.

2) Becoming more socially aware

There was a time when I was a bright eyed, idealistic little college queerling with lots to say about lots of things. I read newspapers (remember those kids?!) and I had witty and insightful comments to make about the things I read in them. That time passed with the discovery that the amount of weed I was smoking at the time directly correlated with the level of wit that my comments actually contained. Also, I had a kid and stopped caring about anything other than the contents of her diaper for like...5 years. So  I made a pledge to myself at 28 that I would start taking care of myself intellectually and in doing so, be more aware of the world around me. I'm getting better, I learned about the Occupy movement only like, a month after it started so thats better than most of my country men. In my 29th year, I plan to learn about things as they happen and start forming opinions again, this time without the aid of recreational drugs whenever possible.

3) Be the most involved parent and partner I can be

I modified this one slightly because going into 28, i had recently been unceremoniously dumped by my last girlfriend so i wasn't really thinking in the partner realm at the time. Luckily however, I was e-ogled by a charming young thing  a mere 3 days later which turned out to be the gentleman I am currently sharing my life with. Last year I decided that I would do everything within my power to be the best parent I can be. That means to me, answering questions, taking time for Pinkone and I to be together just us. Encouraging her special brand of awesome, taking time for myself so that I can be better prepared for mommying when the time comes. Also, to be the best parents we can be, Boss and I need to be the best partners we can be. We have both dealt with tons of life altering crap this year, and chances are there will be more in the near future. Our relationship has to be a priority because we have a little person that is counting on us to be together and with it so there will always be two happy people helping to guide her through life. The best gift we can give our daughter is a happy and healthy set of parents.

4) Be nice to myself

I am terrible at this. I don't like to buy myself things, I say awful self deprecating things about my body and my various issues and I don't take time to just relax and be. Going into 28 I promised myself I would start to work on this. I would make peace with my body, I would find time and energy to center myself and I would take time to just BE for once. It was really hard, because  I am not good at that kind of thing. Going into 29 I am renewing my commitment to myself. I am changing the way my family eats, doing things I enjoy for not reason other than I enjoy them, learning to say no when I simply don't feel like doing something and not apologizing for it, and taking time to meditate and reflect on a daily basis.

5) Be the change I want to see in the world

God, so trite, but whatever. I am a person that has always been into the flakey hippie dippy BS that my dad would roll his eyes at. I would get super into energy healing and tarot cards and aura reading for like, 6 months, start to feel stupid and back off. Well, no more. I know that we in this world are all one, we are all apart of a greater, universal energy and if i sound like an idiot when I say that, its only because the person hearing me isn't ready to hear me. So what this means for me this year is that I am going to live my life knowing that the energy I project into the world affects everyone and everything around me. I am going to tap into the love stream as Boss says, and I am going to throw love out my every pore to everyone around me. I am going to say wonderful things to the wonderful people around me and I am going to find a way to give back to the world in a very real way.

So those are my personal goals for 29, I also plan to learn to sew and master sourdough at last, just in case you were looking for something less abstract. What are your goals for this year?

Nouveau Poor

I have been formulating this blog post in my brain goo for awhile now. The other day, Boss and I were standing in line at the food bank (yep, the food bank) and I was watching the people come and go with their boxes of food. One woman shoved her way to the front of the line, dressed to the nines, entitled as hell, loudly proclaiming without saying a word that THIS (the food bank) was only temporary. SHE was not one of US (the poor). As I silently slam her head against a rock with the power of my thoughts, I start to think. In college, I was like, cute, bohemian poor, college poor. Living on ramen because my education forces me to work shitty jobs poor. Then, i was new parent poor, all my money goes to diapers poor. Then, I was single mom poor for a little bit, noble poor. Now, standing in line at the food bank, I'm like, dude, i am almost 30, and I am just poor. I wasn't raised poor, so I prefer the term "nouveau poor" I was actually raised quite well off, which is probably why I am poor now, I never really learned how to be frugal or budget. I'm like, dumb white girl poor, which is a totally different world of poor from people who actually suffer.

Believe me, I hear all of the white whine in this blog post.

Because we live in a relatively affluent city with a high population of organic markets and Trader Joe's, our Food Bank is surprisingly well stocked. Sure, you get your potted beef tounge from time to time, but you also get a large selection of farm fresh produce, eggs, soy milk and a surprisingly wide selection of vegetarian options. So we are quite lucky in that regard. The rest of the time, when we can actually afford to buy food, we try to do so, so that the stuffs at the food bank can be there for those who just plain can't that week. Here is where we run into issues. How many of you have tried the following:

Being healthy

Eating a predominately vegetarian diet

Eating more organic and additive free foods

Being fucking poor

These things are not congruent. You want to know why (Western Society) poor people are generally fat? Its because food that is healthy, is expensive as hell.

Boss and i were sitting down tonight to discuss the state of our pantry. Its not awful, but it could be better. There is a wide assortment of boxed side dishes, several cans of cream of stuff, and some white rice. The fridge isn't much better, housing a cavalcade of 80% fat meat product, chicken pieces, and more cabbage than my intestinal tract would care to admit. Also, many beets. We like beets.

Our poor diet has often troubled us, as well as or sedentary lifestyle (but that's another blog post all together) and so we sat down to make a plan, a list, a budget out next weeks pay check for food stuffs.  In doing so, I did what I always do, and turned to the Internet, our family oracle. When entering in the sacrificial search term to google of "how to eat healthy on a budget" I learned something startling.

Anyone who write for these websites has never been poor, has at least one parent working from home, and has apparently never entered a Wal Mart.

Not every suggestion is bad. Eating at home rather than out, is one obvious, but still valid idea, other than that, I'm just as lost as ever. All suggestions are coming from the same article, because 1) i am lazy 2) i was super pissed after reading it and began immediately blogging and 3) this article is pretty representative of every other article about eating healthy whilst broke. All suggestions can be found here

Suggestion the first:

1) "Skip the processing. Steer away from foods with lots of additives, chemicals and packaging; they're often not as good for you, and they can drive up the cost of your groceries. Instead, opt for foods that are as close to their natural state as possible. That may mean you have to spend a little more time preparing your meals, but I've included helpful tips below on how to make that more convenient."

Okay, totally. That is EXACTLY what we want to do...but wait. Have you ever looked at the boxes of brightly colored crap that adorne the Wal-Mart shelves? Have you noticed that two boxes of store brand MacNCheeze food product costs you about 75 cents a box, and you use about a half cup of milk  and a half cup of butter to make sauce (about .50 cents give or take), add a can of tuna (89 cents) and half a cup of peas (25 cents) and you have dinner for a family of three, relatively balanced, for under 5 bucks.

As opposed to say, making your own mac-n-cheese for dinner. Noodles, if you don't use the whole bag, will cost you about a dollar, half a cup of cheese ($1-1.50 i like  a lot of cheese) Cream or in some cases Velveta to make it "saucy" is going run you another 3-5 dollars, and if you don't use all the cream, you have cream sitting there being all "use me" and you're like...for what? Mustard powder, becuase that's regualrly around the house, again with the special ingredients ($2 and you are only going to use like, 10 cents of it so again, its like what else can i make with cream and mustard powder? so already, this one dish has surpassed our processed nightmare of a dinner by several dollars, and doesn't even have a protein or a vegetable involved yet.  You see where I'm going with this. Shitty processed foods are super cheap because they cost like half a penny to make, contain very little actual food, and can be replicated in a lab rather than on large tracts of land with sustainable farming practices and chickens that are regularly hugged.  Beans from cans are cheaper than beans from bags, are cheaper than beans from plants. The less actual food, in your food, the more of it you can cram in your mouth hole for the least amount of money. Thanks capitalism!

Suggestion the Second:

Demote meat. Beef, chicken, pork and fish often take a starring role in American meals, whereas in less-wealthy countries they're often supporting players or make only cameo appearances: Think bowls of rice or grain topped with lots of veggies and a few bits of meat or seafood. Or you can skip meat entirely for much cheaper protein sources, such as eggs or beans (a half cup of beans has as much protein as 3 ounces of steak).

She isn't wrong here, but please also note that in other countries they also eat bugs, which i could totally get behind if only i could catch the little fuckers. Again, we come across the problem where the bulk of foods she suggests purchasing, are not, in anyway, cheap. If I had my own garden full of farm fresh veggies I would eat the hell out of them every day and night. But I don't. I have the local grocery mart. In the summer, we were able to load the fridge up no problem with local, inexpensive organic produce from our local farmstand. Seriously, we could get a weeks work of fruit and veggies for like 30 bucks at this place it was amazing. It isn't so easy in the winter months though. Beans and legumes are time consuming to soak and prep and not as cheap as you might think to buy canned, one can is about 1.35 and it takes at least 2 or 3 for every meal, so, again it adds up when you only have say, 50 bucks for the next week. That said, I am fortunate enough to have a partner at home that can spend his days soaking my beans so at least there, I am ahead of many families.She also suggests nuts as a viable source of protien. Go to the store. Price nuts. Come back and tell me about it. Seriously, go. I'll wait. EXPENSIVE!!! Almonds are INSANELY overpriced, pine nuts are like, 7 bucks for a 1/2 cup! Nuts? screw you nut conglomerates!

Those are the only two I'm going to post for now. Feel free to read the rest of the article and tell me I'm nothing but a privileged white girl who is incredibly lazy, believe me, I've already thought it. The bottom line is, being poor in America is a very real thing for more people than ever. Even if we aren't like, "real poor" or "3rd world poor" we are still getting further and further away from what was once considered to be the middle class. It is harder and harder to find, good, healthy, inexpensive food that will actually nourish your body and not completely deplete your bank account.  The world needs to catch up and instead of throwing more money into cramming synthetic fish oil into everything we eat, how about subsidizing something OTHER than corn? How about working with farmers to grow organically on a larger scale? how about making it the standard to not inject our beef with hormones and antibiotics and whatever else it is they are cramming into our food that is causing 8 year olds to start menstruating? and i'm on a tangent.

The point is, Its not easy. All I want is to keep from getting to my "kill yourself weight" be able to say I am feeding my family the best food I can get, and do it for under $200 every two weeks. Is it really so much to ask?

Also, I tried "how to eat well when you are fucking broke" and that didn't turn up any better search results.

Thoughts? Suggestions? Quirky anecdotes?

this article is actually useful:

http://www.mainstreet.com/slideshow/smart-spending/where-find-cheap-fresh-produce

Most people's pantry. Also mine, minus the premium Red Mill flours, we use store brand in this house!

Apocalypse Training 101

Many of you may remember an internet fueled hysteria earlier this year regarding the inevitability of the fabled biblical rapture singling out all of Gods winners from the rest of us poor saps in an epic game of cosmic dodge ball. You may also remember that come the date of the supposed reckoning, a whopping "not a damn thing" actually happened, much to the delight of atheists and heathens everywhere.

We scraped by that particular threat of global annihilation, but another is on the horizon if you go in for the whole "Mayan Calendar 2012 Dooms Day" theory. In all likelihood, that day will pass just as quietly and with as many twitter trends as the last one. I may sound like someone who is skeptical of these purported prophecies, laughing it and joking at the rapture party with the rest of the heathens, but there is one global threat that wakes me up cold in the middle of the night...one potential societal down fall that gets me prepped to horde food water and guns and plot my over throw of the local Wal-Mart...

Zombies.

Boss and I have never really made a secret of the fact that we are prepping ourselves for the inevitable zombie apocalypse. Boss works on their hand eye coordination and killing speed by playing copious amounts of first person shooting games (though admittedly their training is falling behind due to a negligent lack of gaming system at the moment)  and PinkOne is often found working on her various zombie destruction devices along with honing her ninja skills.

When you watch as many horror movies as we do, and believe pretty firmly that biological terrorism is going to be one of the many downfalls of society as we now know it, its not hard to see the undead walking among us, hungering for brains as a very real possibility.

Are we ready? Not even a little bit, but we've started the process, and the process begins with freezer bags.

Zombie apocalypse or no, we are poor, and have started this new habit of hording food for the indeterminate future in which we may not have any. It all started with spaghetti sauce. I had this brilliant plan to buy a flat of tomatoes and solve the household sauce crisis in fell swoop. 60,000 tomatoes and like a bazillion hours later, we had a whopping 8 bags of sauce. Good sauce, but not exactly apocalypse hysteria resolution amounts of it. So I moved on to soup, tomatoes proving to be both time intensive and expensive, not to mention the possible lack of pasta come the day of reckoning. Soup however, needs no vehicle, it is a self contained food stuff.

We made Pea Soup, Chicken Noodle Soup and Red Pepper/Garbanzo Soup, all quite good, though the second batch of chicken noodle has now been re purposed as "cream of stuff" due to a soggy noodle disaster. After the soup, we have sort of gone...some might say overboard. Our freezer is now stuffed with bags of frozen concoctions. From noodles and beef to blanched and frozen fresh veggies, we are going to be sitting pretty when we finally run out of money/food/ability to go to the grocery store and I actually allow someone to eat my precious stores.

I have become the Gollum of the freezer. No one is allowed to touch my treasures. What if we need them? What if the day that the car explodes and we have none dollars and every last scrap of food in the house has been devoured and the zombies are groaning toward us at an alarming rate, and we say to ourselves "all that will fix this is some of Mom's Red Pepper and Garbanzo soup" only to open the freezer and find that we had frivolously eaten it one day because we were too lazy to cook something fresh. How will we all feel THEN I ask you?

I've already gone through my jam from last summer, and I haven't a clue what we will do with out that when the world comes to an end. Its dry toast for everyone since you didn't heed my warnings about squandering jam.

This latest bought of crazy is often met with eye rolling from Boss and PinkOne, not that I blame them, we all know in the end, the power grids are going to fail anyway and there won't be a way to heat my precious soup, but, its always good to be prepared.

The Vicious Cycle of Crafting

Boss took it upon themself to clean the kitchen the other day. Not just clean, but CLEAN. While this is fantastic on so many levels, it has let Boss in on a deep, dark secret that I have attempted to hide from all but my closest of kin. I am, something of a hoarder.  *shame*

Not the like, 2 dozen cats and 20 years worth of newspapers appearing on A&E kind of hoarder, but the "I'm totally going to use that at some point..." kind of hoarder.

It all started with my mother. The Martha Stewart of recyclable's. I like to fancy myself something of a crafty individual, able to create useful objects from various and sundry bits of crap found around the house and the local dollar store. I have NOTHING on my mother however.  Every event was a potential treasure trove of crafting paraphernalia, every recycling bin fair game. Soda cans? a little spray paint and some googly eyes and they become ghosts for a festive Halloween wreath. Plastic forks you can't seem to unload? No problem, add some lace and spray starch and you have a delightful wall hanging just in time for spring! Plastic bottles, hospital grade plastic tubing, bits of this and yards of that, everything had crafting potential. It all lived (somewhat) neatly, in our garage in the receptacle termed affectionately, "the junk box". No Camp Fire meeting was complete without Mom pulling out a bag of what one would assume is garbage, dousing it in glitter and tempera and returning with art.

I always admired my mothers ability to both save, and create and I have attempted to model this behavior in my adult years. The saving, that I have down, the creating however, not so much. When Boss began the process of cleaning out the kitchen, this became...rather apparent. The most abundant source of craft-ables (this is my new term for shit I intend to craft with) are plastic grocery bags.  I have saved plastic grocery bags since i began to grocery shop. My mother would save them in artfully created fabric sleeves with drawstring, conveniently placed about the kitchen for use as garbage bags, lunch bags, impromptu over night packs etc. I however, do not have the patience to create artfully designed fabric sleeves with drawstring, and instead cram them in whatever bit of space I can find in my kitchen and bathroom.

When questioned about my hoarding of said bags, my response is always;

 "I'm saving them" 

"For what?" Boss asks quizzically.

"I don't know, something...." and I wander off hoping the question will die and the bags will go unmoved. No such luck.

"I googled some ideas for their use"  Boss says helpfully.  Apparently such a thing as "Plarn" or Plastic Yarn can be made from my stock pile of grocery bags. This "Plarn" then can be crocheted into useful objects like reusable shopping bags! genius, I can do all of those things and save the environment to boot! I have a mission, the bags have a use, Boss can no longer justify throwing them away...conversation over...No such luck.

"Will you actually do this?" Boss asks, eyebrows raised.

"Totally!"  an edge of doubt in my voice betrays my optimistic reply and enthusiastic nodding

"Honey, will you ACTUALLY do this? or will they continue to collect here, awaiting your use, until one day I open the cupboards, they fall on my head,  and before I kill you, say once again, 'honey, WHY are you saving these?'

"Well..."

"I'm throwing them out."

"Wait! I might do it!"

"I'm throwing them out!"

And this is how it goes. With my bag of dryer lint that I promise to one day turn into fire starters, my 16 boxes of super cheap paraffin just right for making candles with the 6,000 broken crayons I have stashed in PinkOnes craft drawers (never have to buy Christmas presents again!) My vat of almond oil and bags of dried herbs and flowers I've procured for making my own scented oils, the 2 dozen egg cartons I inexplicably stash about like a junky hiding from the narc squad and the inexplicably large amount of flower-less plastic stems left over from my frenzied need to create 40's era hair clips from dollar store silk flowers.

Dude was not successful in liberating me from my treasures, Vulcan had a little more success, getting me to move them over to my friend Monica's who (luckily) has an equally cumbersome trash fetish with infinitely more space in which to hide them. Boss however, does not accept my plaintive cries of "no really! you should SEE the hair bows I can make out of that!"  and tosses them anyway, like...well like trash.

While I will never take up my mother's reign as Queen of Recyclable Crafting, I do now have actual counter and storage space in my kitchen. I find it challenging to release my habits. Particularly these sneaky, potentially useful ones. I still dream of a day when my mother will say to me "well isn't that lovely! Where DID you buy it?" (we are of course wearing Victorian garb and speaking with affected British type accents while sipping tea for no apparent reason) and I can reply, "Why mother! don't you know? I MADE it!"  (she will then gasp in awe and commend not only my crafting prowess, but my thrifty nature as well, there may be applause involved, I haven't decided) 

But, as Boss says, "If I let you keep these (insert garbage-esque item Boss is unable to see the crafting potential in), the vicious crafting cycle will continue. You will stash it away, look up something to do with it, stash it away with a plan in mind, forget the plan, and then 6 months later come across them again and say...'gee i should look up something to do with that..." Boss is, as usual...correct

Oooh...2 liter soda bottles....

Dirty Little Minions

Today I'm doing my first Photo Friday in honor of re-vamping my blog.  These photos were taken this afternoon when we took the kids picking at a local U-pick Berry Farm. We managed to haul home $75 bucks worth of strawberries, blue berries and raspberries. We have enough berries to make around 6,000 jars of preserves. Delightful!

[caption id="attachment_608" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="The Pink One passing through the berry fields"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_609" align="aligncenter" width="225" caption="Lukey picking berries"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_610" align="aligncenter" width="225" caption="going in for a closer look"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_611" align="aligncenter" width="225" caption="The husband shows off his pretty eyes"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_612" align="aligncenter" width="225" caption="Riley shows off her haul"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_614" align="aligncenter" width="225" caption="The pinkone and her auntie"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_615" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="No, I was absolutely NOT eating berries"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_616" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Tiny Berry Monsters"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_617" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="The Family"][/caption]

 Thats it for this week! Check back soon for adventures in jam making. You know you're riveted.

What I did on my Summer Vacation (or this weekend as the case may be)

Some how I got it in my mind that it would be a good idea to make an entirely home made meal for all of our friends this weekend. I've made many a meal for the friend family in the past, usually utilizing the "cream of something" mixed with "stuff" casserole method and some sort of store bought sugar ladden dessert to finish it up. All cream of something/stuff casseroles are met with cheers and accolades, something I never get tired of, but has felt somewhat less than satisfying as of late.

Becasue I have been spending so much time perfecting my new DIY (do it yourself for those who aren't up with the hip lingo) lifestyle, and haven't had much of a chance to show it off, I wanted to do something particularly special for this friend family dinner. Lasagna is my favorite food, ever. I'm basically Garfield, including the whole food shoveling, "I hate Mondays" kind of attitude so it was pretty obvious what I was going to make. Lasagna is also easy to make en-masse and as we have upwards of 13 people over for these dinners, it seemed the best option.

When planning the meal, I wanted to really stretch my DIY awesomeness and decided to make not only the sauce from scratch, but the cheese, noodles, the salad dressing, the pie, the french bread, the garlic butter and the whipped cream. I googled the shit out of my work computer, made list after list, consulted my other DIY obsessed friend Laura, and came to the conclusion that it was not a truly insurmountable task to do this myself.  So, we went shopping.

Money wise, this was not too draining a process. The entire meal, for 13 people ended up costing around 85 bucks, mostly becuase I screwed up the cheese twice and wanted to keep trying it until I got it right. I also bough all kinds of fresh and organic produce and raw milk (5 bucks for a half gallon) at my local co-op so that kind of put a dent in my budget since i had to buy 2 gallons (4-5dollar bottles) to keep trying the damn cheese. If you are a seasoned DIY-er and have a vegetable garden/herb garden, or your own milk producing animal (goats and cows are the reccomended) the you can dramatically cut the cost of this meal because you will already have the high ticket items.

I started the process Friday night with my friend Cari expecting that the cheese would be my biggest challenge and she has a way fancier kitchen than I do having just bought her own grown up house instead of my decidedly less grown up rental with the rinky dink kitchen. We followed the directions and the first ball of mozzarella came out perfect, albiet a little lacking in the salt department. I reccomend adding at least 2 tsps to the recipie to make sure you get a good flavor. Also, the 1o dollars worth of milk only yielded enough cheese for half a layer of lasagna.

We decided that because we hadn't made enough cheese for the whole endeavor, and it had only taken about 30 mintues to do, we would run to the store and try again. We bought two more gallons of regular whole milk this time and tried again. After several burns and finding ourselves, and her new kitchen covered in whey, we ended up with a pile of crumbly cottage cheese and two pissed of milk maids.  We learned two things from this failed batch of cheese.

1) Pasturized milk is NOT going to work no matter how much cheaper it is than raw milk. When the milk is pasturized it kills all that good bactaria and breaks down the milk to a point where it won't bind correctly. Obviously, i don't know the chemsitry of it all, but i'm sure there is something all science-y that can be said about why this didn't work.

2) making double batches is a bad idea. I am the queen of double, and even triple batching just about anything. Because I'm always cooking for around 10-15 people, I have to adjust recipies constantly. Not usually an issue. This time however, it was. I went to the co-op again and shelled out another 20 bucks for raw milk, thinking that my issue the first time was solely milk based as the Google Gods indicated. I went through the process again Saturday morning and it started out just as it had during the creation of the successful batch of cheese, but then we ended up back in crumbly cottage cheese land again. More swearing. I haven't confirmed it, but I'm 99% confident that this was due to doubling up on the rennet and the citric acid. When you double, you double right? wrong. Apparently, with cheese making its best to do it 1 bit at a time.

All was not lost and I turned my 30 dollars worth of crumbles into a ricotta like substance by mixing it with egg and used it anyway. It melted and it tasted great, but it certainly wasn't as pretty as the correctly made ball of mozzarella from Friday.

After the debacle of cheese making, I was feeling a bit discouraged and decided to get the bread and pie going. Making french bread is super easy, especially if you've mastered the making of other types of bread. It has a longer rising time than the wheat bread I normally do but turned out so beautiful and made my house smell fantastic. I gave the kids a jar of Heavy Whipping cream and garlic with a marble in it and set them to the tast of making garlic butter. They shook it for about 5 minutes and got bored, so Sarah and I took turns shaking alternately and in the end we had a beautiful, smooth home made garlic butter that was delightful on the fresh bread.

The pie was a simple Key Lime pie recipie (not green btw, also, key limes are acctually a type of lime, i always thought it was Kiwi Lime, shows what i know) with a grahm cracker crust. Jonny, our resident idea guy thought it might be good to incorporate a little coconut extract into the whipped cream and OMG was that brilliant. Even those who didn't like coconut agreed that it worked so well with the tart key lime pie that they couldn't stop picking at the bowl. I used the left over whipped cream in a chocolate silk pie the next day, also quite delightful.

The pie and bread re-invigorated my spirit and I got the sauce going as well as the noodles. The sauce wasn't too hard, but I was surprised at how little my 20 tomatos yielded. I had exactly enough for my lasagna and I had bought baggies expecting to be rolling in the sauce for the next week at least. If you want sauce to spare, i reccomend going to a U pick or a local farm and buying up a flat of them and just spending a day boiling and peeling tomatos. Bright side, it smelled amazing and tasted even better.

While the sauce simmered I got started on the noodles. I had always heard that pasta making was no big thing and figured my lack of appropriate tools would not be an issue. I was wrong, as I tend to be. You have to have a pasta press, or at the very least, a rolling pin to do this properly. I had neither. I had a wine bottle. I made my little flour pyramid and my eggs fell out, making a huge mess, and even though i followed the directions, my pasta came out really dry and crumbly. I messed with it, adding more egg and even a little bit of water near the end and finally had something i could work with. The wine bottle rolling pin and I fought it out for about 2 hours and I was left with enough pasta to make three layers of lasagna. I realized that they were a little thicker than they should have been but decided enough was enough and I would just have to make due.  I am not undertaking that again until I have the neccessary tools for the job.

After assembling my lasagna, mixing my dressing and smoking a well deserved ciggarette the guests showed up, generally marveled over my DIY prowess and enjoyed the fruits of my 10 hours+ in the kitchen. It was agreed that the meal was a resounding success, though the noodles were a little too thick (never again wine bottle, never again)

So, do I reccomend this under taking? yes. If for no other reason than you can look at this phenomenal meal and say out loud, "Look what I did!" What I do NOT reccomend is serving it to your terminally negative 5 year old who will immediately request maccaroni and cheese instead. Apparently the pasta being brown (whole wheat) made her concerned that it was made of doody. Whatever.

I'll post recipies with pictures later this week.

Sock Cheese

Okay, so I didn't make in a sock per-se...but it totally would work in a sock and I might try that next week. As part of our families crusade to embrace the simpler things I went about trying several new things this weekend. On Sunday I spend my entire day baking, mashing, mixing and whipping and coming out with 3 loaves of wheat bread, 1 loaf of jalapeno cheddar bread, banana nut muffins, blueberry muffins, apple pumpkin muffins, two kinds of bagels and a middle eastern yogurt cheese (that will be done today actually). Sarah has also put together a vat of laundry detergent and some truly to die for granola. Surveying our kingdom about midway through, I was quite proud of our accomplishments. 

[caption id="attachment_598" align="alignleft" width="150" caption="Jalapeno Cheddar Bread-makes a fine Grilled Cheese"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_599" align="alignright" width="150" caption="Blueberry Muffins-1 of 3 kinds"][/caption]

But by the end of my Sunday I was freaking exhausted and asking myself what exactly the point of all this was, especially after each child took a bite of a different muffin and promptly spit them out. Damn kids, can't appreciate the effort it takes to not only make muffins, but make them healthy. 

So if I'm exhausted, and the kids aren't impressed, you might be asking yourself, "what exactly is the point?" 

Firstly, I totally get off on the compliments and wide eyes when I serve something and tell people I made it myself. As self-professed attention whore, any excuse to be met with accolades is taken and exploited. 

Coming in at a close second is the sense of accomplishment and good works that comes with making our own food. It feels like we've really done something with our day when there is a weeks worth of bread and cheese and other various treats spread out in front of us. 

Finally, my control freak nature is totally accommodated by this obsession as well. I know exactly what goes in my family's food and i can tweak recipes, add whole wheat flour where once there was none, sweeten with honey from the farmers market instead of odd high fructose related chemicals, and more of my money can go to local vendors instead of the Evil Wal-Mart. 

So, that's a little bit about why were trying this, and I look forward to sharing my adventures in what we are now affectionately referring to "Amish Buddhism" See below for my now famous recipes for whole wheat bread, bagels, and "sock cheese"

Oh, and if anyone has any good DIY sites, or recipes for me, i'd love a link in the comments!

Honey Whole Wheat Bread    

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="150" caption="Big and bubbly whole wheat dough"][/caption]

 Ingredients 

• 3 cups warm water (110 degrees F/45 degrees C)


• 2 (.25 ounce) packages active dry yeast


• 1/3 cup honey


• 5 cups bread flour


• 3 tablespoons butter, melted


• 1/3 cup honey


• 1 tablespoon salt


• 3 1/2 cups whole wheat flour


• 2 tablespoons butter, melted

[caption id="attachment_597" align="alignleft" width="150" caption="Completed (non-fallen) Honey Wheat Bread"][/caption]

Directions

1. In a large bowl, mix warm water, yeast, and 1/3 cup honey. Add 5 cups white bread flour, and stir to combine. Let set for 30 minutes, or until big and bubbly.


2. Mix in 3 tablespoons melted butter, 1/3 cup honey, and salt. Stir in 2 cups whole wheat flour. Flour a flat surface and knead with whole wheat flour until not real sticky - just pulling away from the counter, but still sticky to touch. This may take an additional 2 to 4 cups of whole wheat flour. Place in a greased bowl, turning once to coat the surface of the dough. Cover with a dishtowel. Let rise in a warm place until doubled.


3. Punch down, and divide into 3 loaves. Place in greased 9 x 5 inch loaf pans, and allow to rise until dough has topped the pans by one inch. *Note from Mediocre Mama: Don't let the kids run around or play near the rising bread because it will fall, and nothing solicits a swear from me faster than falling bread.


4. Bake at 350 degrees F (175 degrees C) for 25 to 30 minutes; do not overbake. Lightly brush the tops of loaves with 2 tablespoons melted butter or margarine when done to prevent crust from getting hard. Cool completely

 Nutritional Information

Amount Per Serving  Calories: 143 | Total Fat: 2.2g | Cholesterol: 4mg 

 Ugly But Delicious Bagels 

[caption id="attachment_595" align="alignleft" width="150" caption="Delightfuly ugly bagels"][/caption]

• DOUGH


• 1 1/2 cups lukewarm water


• 1 packet (1/4 ounce) active dry yeast


• (not quick-rising)


• 4 tablespoons sugar


• 2 1/2 teaspoons salt

• 3 1/2 to 3 3/4 cups flour


• GLAZE AND GARNISH


• 1 egg white


• 1 1/2 teaspoons water


• Sesame seeds or poppy seeds (optional)

Instructions  

1. Pour 1/4 cup of the water into a small bowl and sprinkle the yeast over it. Stir with a fork, then let the mixture sit for 5 minutes so that the yeast can thoroughly dissolve.


2. Combine the remaining 1 1/4 cups of water and the dissolved yeast in a large mixing bowl. Stir in 3 tablespoons of the sugar, then stir in the salt. Add 2 cups of the flour and stir by hand for 100 strokes to blend well.


3. Stir in enough of the remaining flour, about 1/4 cup at a time, to make a dough that's firm enough to knead. Note from the Mediocre Mama: I alternate whole wheat and bread flour here to work in a little more healthy-ness.


4. Turn the dough out onto a floured surface and knead it with floured hands for about 10 minutes, using as much of the remaining flour as necessary to keep the dough from sticking. When fully kneaded, the dough will be firm but supple and should hold the imprint of your hand.


5. Transfer the dough to an oiled glass or ceramic bowl, turning it a few times to coat the entire surface. Cover the bowl tightly with plastic wrap and place it in a warm, draft-free spot until the dough has doubled in bulk, about 1 hour.


6. When the dough is ready, punch it down. Turn it out onto a floured surface and knead it for 1 minute. Divide the dough in half, then divide each half into 4 equal pieces.


7. Shape the 8 pieces into balls, placing them on a floured work counter and dusting the tops with flour. Let them rest for 2 to 3 minutes, then flatten them slightly with your fingers.


8. Fill a large soup pot about two thirds with water. Add the remaining 1 tablespoon of sugar and begin heating the water to bring it to a boil.


9. Working with 1 ball of dough at a time, press your floured thumb down through the center to make a hole. Stretch the dough slightly so the hole is about 1 inch in diameter. It will look like a doughnut. Set the bagels aside on a floured surface, covering them loosely with plastic wrap or waxed paper.


10. Let the bagels rest for 10 minutes while the water comes to a full boil. Meanwhile, grease a large baking sheet and set it aside. Heat the oven to 400°.


11. Working with the first bagels you shaped, gently drop 2 into the boiling water (a parent's job). They should float, but don't worry if they sink initially - they'll quickly rise to the surface. Boil the bagels for 30 seconds on one side, then carefully turn them with a long-handled, slotted spoon and boil them for another 30 seconds on the other side.


12. Using your slotted spoon, transfer the bagels to a clean tea towel to drain. Wait a few seconds, then transfer them to the baking sheet, leaving space between them. Repeat with the remaining bagels.


13. Make the glaze by whisking the egg white and water in a small bowl until frothy. Using a pastry brush, coat the surface of the bagels with the glaze. Sprinkle on sesame seeds or poppy seeds, if desired. Note from the Mediocre Mama: We've been using all different kinds of toppings. Our fav's thus far are: Dehydrated Garlic (works better than fresh) Cinnamon and Sugar, Oatmeal (with this i like to mix some honey in with the egg wash to make it sticky and sweet)


14. Bake the bagels on the center oven rack until they are deep golden brown, about 22 to 25 minutes. Then transfer the bagels to a wire rack to cool. Makes 8 bagels

Sock Cheese (also known as Labneh which is a Lebanese soft fresh cheese that is made from yogurt) 

Pour milk into double boiler and heat milk stirring occasionally until it starts to bubble and rise. 

~Take out the pot of milk and replace the boiling water with cold then replace milk so it can cool down to about 110 degrees Fahrenheit/45 degrees Celsius. 

~Add yogurt and stir thoroughly. 

~Cover with lid and let sit overnight in a warm draft less place. (I put mine into a lukewarm oven I pre-heat the oven to around150-160 degree Fahrenheit/60 degrees Celsius then shut it off overnight.) 

You now have a pot of yogurt. 

~Place dishcloth or cheesecloth in colander, (Or a brand new clean white sock) pour in yogurt, gather up corners, and kind of squish down the yogurt into a ball in your cloth (as of now this is a technical term), tie butcher twine or elastic around neck of 'bag', hang over a bowl for the whey to drip out for 3+ hours preferably overnight. 

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If you do not want to start from scratch you can also buy ready-made plain yogurt. Pay attention to only buy the kind that is all natural without added gelatin. 

~Place dish or cheesecloth in colander, pour 2 quarts of yogurt into a dishcloth, gather up corners, kind of squish down the yogurt into a ball in your cloth (as of now this a technical term), tie butcher twine or elastic around neck of 'bag', hang over a bowl for the whey to drip out for 3+ hours preferably overnight. This makes a nice tangy spread super on pita bread or bagels. It has a slightly tangier taste than the phily for instance but can be used in the same recipes the same way. It has to be eaten within a week of preparation. 

[caption id="attachment_592" align="alignleft" width="225" caption="The Yogurt in the "sock" turning itself into Cheese"][/caption]

  

[caption id="attachment_593" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Completed Cheese DELIGHTFUL!"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_594" align="aligncenter" width="185" caption="Enjoyed by Children and pugs alike"][/caption]