Strawberry Fields Forever

Our front yard is very small as far as yards go.  It's just three raised beds, each about 4 feet by 15 feet. In the top bed, we have mostly native, perennial flowers.  In the second bed, strawberries and three hostas.  In the bottom bed, there are herbs, radishes, carrots, and nasturtiums.

Our strawberries have hit their prime.  On Saturday, I picked as many as I saw, and got a little over two pounds.  I was thrilled and amazed!  What a great yield for a garden that started as eight little plants a couple of years ago.

I used one pound to make homemade ice cream for Father's Day.  Along with the vanilla and chocolate I've been making and storing for the occasion, everyone loved it.  But I'm not a big fan of strawberry ice cream in general, and I had other plans for the berries.  I just had to wait for more to come in.

 

I wanted to make something that would sustain us long term, not something that we gulped down and quickly forgot.  And so, I eased back into canning and made some delicious jam.  I figured I'd have to wait quite a while to get enough berries to make the jam.  I thought I'd have to clear out the whole patch.  But Saturday evening, there were loads of dark red berries where they had been pink the day before.  We got another 2.5 pounds in just a few minutes.

 

 Nearly an hour later, we had 12 cups and 2 pints of jam.  This (plus the 8 jars we already have in the pantry), should keep us clear through to next year.  Given the price of sugar and the fact that I put eight cups of sugar in it, all of this jam cost us about $7.  The same amount of jam for the store brand costs $42, which gives us a savings of $35.  Not too shabby!  But still, I hope to be able to bring the cost and the sugar down in the next recipe.  It's way sweeter than the jam to which we're accustomed.

We still have a ton of berries left on the plants, so I have to find more recipes.  There will definitely be strawberry shortcake, plain strawberries, and perhaps even strawberry crepes.  And, of course, we'll freeze some.

Food Frugality: Sales and Buying in Bulk

I've been trying to be very careful with our food budget lately.  We've decided to try to eat more locally than organically (aside from the dirty dozen).  Now that the farmer's markets are starting up, that's a lot easier.  We get our eggs from our farmer's market for two dollars fewer than those in the grocery store.  And this lady lives just up the road!  I know that she sells eggs in the off season, too.  We're going to have to visit her once the farmer's markets end for the year.

There's a farm in a town about half an hour away that has a large farm stand and restaurant.  We dropped by today while wandering around my old stomping grounds.  There are two things I love about this farm:  their peaches and their "seconds" deals.  Their peaches are to die for.  For the seconds deals, they put all of the produce that is bruised, damaged, or about to go off into bags and boxes and sell them for a deep discount.  I love it when huge baskets of peaches go up there.  I can them and enjoy them all year.

But tonight, we were treated to a nice surprise.  There were four bags of produce on the seconds shelf.  They were mixed packages of parsnips and small potatoes.  Each bag was fifty cents.  Rather than just buying one, I figured we could afford the $2 for all of them.  When I got home, I weighed them.  For two dollars, we got:

• 10.5 pounds parsnips = $1.27 = $0.11 per pound
• 5.75 pounds potatoes = $0.73 = $0.13 per pound

That is a FANTASTIC price!  I didn't realize how wonderful a deal that was.

These are the potatoes before doing anything to them.  I'll deal with them tomorrow.

 Parsnips as I started to peel them.  That's a four quart bowl.

 Yes, I peeled and cut them into strips on my living room floor.  I was watching Doctor Who :o)

 I blanched them in batches in boiling water for two minutes each per the instructions I found from the National Center for Home Food Preservation

 Stage two of the blanching:  submerging them in cold water in a freshly scrubbed sink.

 Stage three:  let the parsnips drain by putting them in a colander or steamer basket.

Finally, I vacuumed sealed them in one pound packages.  

So with peels, tops, and bad parts, I lost about 2 pounds of parsnip weight.  But still $1.27 for 8 pounds is definitely not bad :o)

***

I had bought a spiral sliced ham a while ago.  I had never bought a spiral sliced ham before, just the regular old kind.  I threw it in the freezer, and mostly forgot about it.  I'd open the door, feel guilty about not dealing with it, and shut the door without giving it another thought.  Finally, I thawed that and decided to repackage it.

This is the original price of this arganically and humanely raised ham.  I got it half price since it was after the holiday (which holiday?  Christmas?  Easter?  I can't remember.  It was in the freezer THAT long.)

Since it was spiral sliced, all I really had to do is carve straight down the bone and I got ready made lunchmeat.  I repackaged it in 8 bags of 8 (ish) ounce packages, plus two packages of ham chunks where the ham had not been spiraled PLUS a ham bone and all of the fat scraps I trimmed off.  Regular old ham in the grocery store runs about $6 a pound.  I have a bunch of delicious, humanely raised ham for merely $2.50 a pound.  Talk about frugal and responsible!  I have two more hams in our freezer that aren't spiral sliced, but I'm excited to cut them up when we run out of this lot.

***

My next project is to part out *B*'s Christmas bonus.  Every year, he gets a turkey AFTER Christmas.  It's very kind of his company, but we obviously can't use it for our holidays in the year that we get it.  So we've been freezing it until the next Thanksgiving for a few years.  But now my brother also gets a turkey as a bonus, and we are up to our ears in birds.  Since things are a little tight, I'm going to follow these suggestions to get our best usage out of it now.

We'll see how it goes.  So long as I can get it all done while Miss F is down for a nap, it should be a snap.

A Long Trip Home

Saturday afternoon and evening were an experience I will not soon forget.  I was told by multiple people that security at the Tulsa airport takes 15 minutes to get through.  Miss F and I still arrived 2 hours early.  As soon as we got through security, we found out that our plane was delayed by half an hour.  I started to panic just a little bit because I knew that we had a 45 minute layover.

Miss F loved the airport, though.  She crawled and cruised all over the place.  A little girl about 8 years old and her younger brother took a liking to her.  Their mother worked for the airline, so they spent a lot of times in the airport.  I kept pulling Miss F back to the middle of the room, and she crawled right back to them.

 

We got on the plane, and they said we'd get in almost on time.  Yay!  This flight isn't full (unlike our trip out), so we got our own row.  Double yay!  Miss F sat in the seat, munching on sauteed apples and oatmeal pancakes.  She particularly enjoyed the safety instruction card.  I guess it was something about the colorful pictures and lack of words that attracted her.

Twenty minutes before the end of our first 90 minute flight, Miss F was restless.  It was about 6 pm, and she hadn't napped all day, aside from some car seat catnaps.  And then, she unleashed her inner fury.  This baby screamed like I've never heard her before.  I tried to nurse her, she pushed me away.  I tried to feed her, she threw the food.  I tried to cuddle her with a blanket, and she tore it away.  I tried shushing and rocking.  I even tried covering her mouth.  Nothing was working.  I could see two men in front of me complaining.  One covered his ears.

At about the 10 minute mark, I started crying out of frustration.  Finally, I flipped her over in my lap, face down, so that at least she was crying toward the floor.  The little girl from earlier came up and offered her a Barbie doll.  For a brief moment, she stopped crying.  I was patting her back when she passed straight out.  She went limp as a ragdoll, and she began softly snoring.

Everything is great now, right?  No.  I forgot about our plane's delay.  We landed half an hour before my flight took off.  It was already boarding when we got to the gate.   We waited for our carry-on luggage that was gate checked.  As I'm waiting, I mention to the mother of the little girl that she did an amazing thing for me.  I tell her I'm freaking out though, because my plane is two terminals away and already boarding.  If we didn't make that flight, we wouldn't get home until midnight.  Rather than offering a half-hearted response, she grabbed my bag and told me they'd get me there.

She got us to the airport train, calm and keeping her kids in tow the whole time.  As we were riding the escalator, I asked if she'd be late for her connecting flight.  Nope, she lived in that city, and her sister was picking them up.  She could wait.  We got to the terminal and, wouldn't you know, my gate was the last gate in the terminal.  And we had 12 minutes until that plane left.  The kids and I ran (sleepy baby angrily flopping in my arms) to the gate while the mom lugged my bag behind us.  I got to the gate, breathless and shaking.  The little girl handed me the sling and baby blanket I dropped when I broke out into a sprint.  And her mom came up behind two minutes later, bag in hand.  We made it!

On this flight, I took a whole three seat row,

Preparing for Baby's First Flight

Miss F and I are flying out to Oklahoma to visit a dear friend and her newborn for five days.  I'm very excited, but with a little over twelve hours until we leave, I'm panicking a little bit.  Miss F is sitting in my lap the whole trip, which isn't too bad since it's a one hour flight, a one hour layover, and a two hour flight.  But since she doesn't have her own seat, she's not entitled to her own luggage.  Our airline charges a fee to check baggage that we're unable to afford, so we're packing it all into two bags.  Did I mention that I'm still going to cloth diaper her on the trip?

 

This is our main luggage.  On the left is every diaper that we own (aside from those in the diaper bag).  That takes up half of the suitcase.  On the right are our clothes (8 outfits for her, 5 for me), toiletries, and a couple of small gifts for the baby.  I'm not overly worried about clothing because my friend is about my size if I run out, and we have access to a washer and dryer.

 

In our diaper bag, we have four diapers, a wet bag, Lucy the giraffe (a Sophie teether), a book for the baby, a teething pacifier, a banana, three kiwis, three oatmeal pancakes, some water bottles, a sling, and a couple of assorted items.

We checked in online, the passes are 

Brewing Up Deliciousness

*B* and I are brewing machines!  While he's got beer and wine covered, I've been brewing up some non-alcoholic refreshments for us.  I got my water kefir grains in the end of April, and I've been brewing up a storm.  The first four batches were like the water kefir I used to brew:  too sweet, a little strange, and not something I was terribly interested in drinking.  But I've been keeping a journal of everything I've done.  The only thing that wasn't to-the-letter was the bit about not having chlorine in the water.  I put the water through a filter, but the filter was SUPER old.

 Water kefir grains doing their thing

 

Water kefir grains in a brewing bag.  It's my new experiment to minimize time for bottling.

I changed my water filter and the water kefir changed completely.  When I opened the bottles, it sounded like champagne.  Our glasses fizzed up like Sprite does.  It was brilliant.

Since the lemon soda was going well, I decided to try my hand at ginger beer.  I used Rhonda's recipe found at Down to Earth. 

 

I made it with maple syrup instead of sugar for the daily process, but I used sugar at the end. We popped one open, and it immediately fizzed.  It was exactly like the ginger beer you get in the store.  A chunk of ginger, maple syrup, sugar, and water made 5 liters of soda.  A very rough estimation puts the whole recipe at $4.  The equivalent amount of soda in Reed's Ginger Beer would be over $35!

Back to Basics Budget

I tutor students in the evenings in order to help pay our bills.  *B* doesn't make enough for me to stay home without it, but we have a small overage when I tutor.  Rather than being prudent, we were using the extra cash for fun things or miscellaneous expenses:  a dinner out here, a coffee there, a store-bought gift for a friend's baby shower, that kind of thing.  Eighty-five percent of the time, the purchase is food related.  In the summers, my tutoring drops off significantly (though not completely).  As of this week, my tutoring drops from 4 days a week to 2, and I just hit a scary realization:

We can't technically make our bills this month.  

I've been ignoring our budget for far too long, and somehow (though not really somehow, I'm the one who did it), we've wracked up a moderate credit card bill.

We tried swearing off these miscellaneous purchases completely.  We've tried setting goals like "if we don't go out to eat this month, we can get this very modestly priced item that we've wanted."  (The item in question is a mason jar sealing attachment for my FoodSaver that costs less than $10.)  We've tried giving ourselves a very small budget of $20 a month to allow for a few splurges.  But it always ends up that our willpower fails us.

I really have no idea what I'm going to do.  We need to find the power to loose the hold our temptations have on us.  We need to plan ahead - rather than stopping for dinner at 6 pm because we ran errands at 3:30 pm, we should have had food with us, eaten beforehand, or *gasp* waited the twenty minutes to drive home and thirty minutes to get some good food on the table.  (That was tonight.)

Going out to eat needs to be something we just DON'T THINK ABOUT anymore. 

The other part of my problem:

Pride

Rather than admitting that I can't afford something, I'll find a way to "make it work".  We buy it anyway, then I realize later that there is no way to make it work if it means shorting your mortgage. My mom was (is) the same way.  She would buy things (mostly food) in the exact same way, and then she and my dad would have a huge argument when he found out what she was doing.  While *B* and I don't have arguments about it, I feel massively guilty.

Rather than making a gift, printing up some baby related IOU cards, or admitting to a friend that I couldn't afford a baby shower gift for her, *B* and I bought a $50 gift from her registry.  My thinking was that I know she spent at least that much - probably more - on the gift she gave us.  But she and her husband make at least twice what we do a year, and we all know it.  Since she's such a good friend, wouldn't I think she'd understand that we're on a tight budget?

It seems what we need are a little humility, some honesty (with ourselves and others), and creativity.  Starting tomorrow (June 1st), things are going to be different because they HAVE to be different.

Magic Dough

Over the last couple of months, I've been making all of the baked goods that we eat.  I've been making bread for a long time.  Then, I started making tortillas using this recipe from The Prairie Homestead.  They're delicious, and I make a double batch that lasts us up to a month.

For Memorial Day, I was craving burgers.  I had attempted hamburger buns once, and they were alright, but very dense.  Joolz posted some bun recipes for me that I was excited to try.  After reading them, I realized that the bun recipes were very similar to my bread recipe.  Huh, that makes sense!  So I made some buns.

Then I was looking for a recipe for pizza crust.  I found one from 100 Days of Real Food and wouldn't you know - it's roughly the same recipe!  And in the comments, they talk about making pretzels with the dough.

On Monday, I made a quadruple batch of this dough to make two pizza crusts, some pretzels, and some buns.  It was amazingly easy to do.  While I haven't tried it, I'm sure that with a little tweaking, it could also make some awesome bagels.  I'm planning on trying to do just that with this tutorial since that uses just a little more flour and water than I do.

So here it is:  the magic dough recipe!

Ingredients
1 cup warm-hot water (110 degrees)
2 T honey or maple syrup
2 t yeast
2 T oil
1 tsp salt
3 cups whole wheat flour

Directions

1. Mix water, sweetener, and yeast in the bowl of your stand mixer.  Let it sit for about 10 minutes to make sure that the yeast is still alive.  It should be foamy.
2. Mix in the salt and oil.  
3. Add in the flour and knead in the mixer with a dough hook for a couple of minutes.
4. Spray a bowl lightly with oil, put dough in, and let it rise for one hour.

Pizza

• Roll out dough and place it onto a greased cookie sheet.
• Prick holes in the dough to prevent bubbles from forming.
• Bake at 450 degrees just until set.  Don't overcook it.
• Freeze or top with sauce, cheese, and toppings and re-bake until melted.

Pretzels

• Roll dough out into a rectangle.
• Cut into 12 (or more) strips.
• Form into a pretzel.
• Toss into boiling water with baking soda for about 30 seconds each.
• Place on cookie sheet, sprinkle with salt, and bake at 450 degrees for about 10-12 minutes.

Bread

• Spray a bread pan with oil.
• Punch the dough down and shape into a loaf.
• Let it rise until 1 inch above the top of the pan (about 1/2 hr).
• Bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes.

Buns

• Punch down the dough and let it rise for another hour.
• Divide into twelve balls and form them into flat circles the size of your palm.
• Place on greased cookie sheets.
• Let rise until hamburger bun sized.
• Bake at 425 degrees for 10-15 minutes.