The Hair's the Thing

So I've been looking at our rooms in a whole new way, thinking about ways to eliminate plastic from our life.  One of the major offenders, of course, is the bathroom.  I need to see if I can find a shower curtain solution that doesn't involve a plastic curtain.  Not sure if that's going to work, and  be pretty at the same time, but I'm going to look around and see what's out there.  Ba'al and I have already agreed to switch to bar soap after our current bottles of gel are empty.  A few times, we've gotten shampoo bars and really liked them but the ones we've purchased in the past have been quite expensive.  

BASIN makes wonderful soap and shampoo bars.  I love Egg Noggin and Hair Nut.  However, when a small bar that lasts approximately a month costs $7, it's hard to justify buying the bar on a regular basis.  There are a few other companies making shampoo bars as well.  Basin seems to make them because they're luxurious.  The other companies mostly seem to be making them for their eco-friendly advantages.  

I'm inclined to start buying my shampoo bars from Burt's Bees because although their bars aren't much cheaper than Basin's, at least I know I can find them locally.  Basin is available on line and at three stores in California, Florida, and Minnesota.  Burt's Bees, well, practically every big box retailer has a shelf of their products somewhere.  Anyway,  BB has two bars I would like to try, Baby Bee Shampoo Bar, and the Rosemary Mint Shampoo Bar.  The Baby Bee bar is listed as out of stock on the website but the Rosemary Mint bar is listed at $6 even.  The Basin bars are 65 grams, the BB bar is 98 grams.  Of these two, I say go for the Burt's Bees product.

Next, J.R. Liggett.  I had some trouble getting into their website and almost decided to not include them in my quick and dirty survey of the available options.  I looked at their Original bar as a representative of the four formulations they carry; it is 99 grams for $6.49.  Ba'al has used their shaving cream in the past and really liked it.  They are a very old company still using the original company recipes so they do have staying power.  I know some of their products are available at Bath and Body Works (where we've gotten the shaving creams for Ba'al) but I don't know how widely their other products are carried.

Last today, Vermont Soap.  I like their choices.  They have boxed bars for $4.29 for 99 grams.  But you can get their Eco Brick, a brick of soap you cut into bars yourself for $36 dollars.  This works out to $3/bar if you slice the brick into 12 bars.  It appears they only have two choices, though, an unscented bar and an aloe and lavender bar.

Of the three bars that weigh the same, I'll probably go with Burt's Bees.  It's not the cheapest but it is the most widely available without having to order on line.  In my mind, ordering on line negates some of the benefit of choosing a bar shampoo in the first place because of all the additional shipping packaging.

However, there are non soap options also.  The Hair Boutique has a very nice page about using dry ingredients found in any kitchen to clean hair without water or liquids.  Cornstarch absorbs grease but can be drying.  Other flours are less drying but can color light colored hair.  Eggs can be used, either by whipping whites to stiff peaks or by creating a masque with egg yolks.  The one that's most intriguing to me is making a scented cornstarch with rose petals or other flower petals.  Since I have a jar of rose petals in the back of a cupboard, I'm thinking about trying this one out.  Just need another box of cornstarch and a pretty jar to put it in.

 

Heat

We've been obsessing about heating options.  For the past several weeks, Ba'al and I both thought that an old fashioned wood stove of the parlor stove variety would be perfect for our home.  We found several that we liked, replicas of classic designs that we both agreed would fit in well with our overall aesthetic.  Then we found a potbelly stove that had been designed for use in train cars.  Ba'al, being a lover of all things related to railroads, fell in love.  I liked it too.

Then, last night, we heard something about pellet stoves somewhere.  Ba'al spent a good portion of the night researching various pellet stove options.  Corn pellets (made from corn cobs) are cheaper than wood pellets (made from sawdust) but harder to find.  The cost of a pellet stove is similar to the retro wood stoves we found.  A ton of wood pellets costs the same as 170 gallons of propane and lasts about the same time.  However, pellets burn with far fewer emissions than any other viable heat source.  I think we have found the heat source for our yurt.

For the basement level, which will be dug into either an existing hill or a manmade one, we are going to put in radiant floor heating.  This leads us to yet another choice.  As mentioned before, we want to use a tankless water heating system.  However, a tankless system probably isn't practical for radiant floor heating.  We have to talk to someone who knows about these things to be sure.  The sites Ba'al looked at today recommend a particular water heater as being especially good for radiant heat systems.  So do we put in a tankless system and a traditional tank?  One big and one small tankless system, with one dedicated to the needs of heating floors?  Suck it up and buy a really big water heater tank?  I'll post the new links later this evening.

We're Going Tankless

Per Hidden Potential on HGTV, we have decided to go with a tankless water heater system.  The systems do cost significantly more in upfront costs than traditional heater tanks but pay for themselves within a year or two.  A tankless system heats water on demand and the good ones can run many water using appliances at once - four showers and a sink in summer or two showers and a sink in winter.  Considering that our home will have one shower, one shower/bath, three sinks, a dishwasher (maybe) and a washing machine, I think a system of this sort will be more than adequate.  States that have energy incentives (like our fair state of Colorado) also will give tax rebates for the installation and use of tankless systems.  In fact, one of the websites Ba'al was on tonight calculated that the wasted dollars in heated/unused water in traditional tanks in the state of Colorado cost users over a million dollars in the last two years.  The two companies we are most impressed with are featured over in the links list.

Oops

This is rapidly turning into a recipe blog, which is one of the things I did not want it to be.

Last night, we were watching Designed to Sell on HGTV.  The couple whose house was up for sale is very "green" and one of the products the designers brought in was compressed paper countertop.  I keep forgetting to show Ba'al the Enviroglass website in our What we're Looking at list.  But the compressed paper made me show him.  We also looked up compressed paper.

Enviroglass makes countertops from glass bottles and resin.  There's another company on the east cost that does the same thing but their selection is somewhat limited and the choices available aren't as interesting as what Enviroglass offers.  The other benefit to Enviroglass is that they basically custom make every countertop slab.  They also make the same product as a terrazzo-style flooring.

There are also several companies making compressed paper countertops.  I'm mildly interested in these but not so much that I want to go with this over resin and glass.  The countertops are made with layers of paper and renewable wood bound with resin.  Interesting but I have a hard time believing these will really stand the test of time.  All the companies we looked at are in the list of links over there.  

I guess I'm leaning towards the glass and resin option in part because we've lived in apartments for so long that I was lots of color when we build our house.  Bits of colored glass looks perfect.

We also caught an episode of What's with That House that included a self-sustaining house in Arizona.  The homeowners had some interesting ideas but the bathroom went just a little too far by having a composting squat toilet.  As told to Ba'al last night, that's just a little more self-sustaining than I care to go.  I'm a wanna be hippie but I want some comfort in the bathroom!

Converted

I am now officially converted to the sourdough way of life.  As described last week, I've been nursing a jar of sourdough starter over the weekend.  Today I used it.  Twice.  I made biscuits and gravy this morning and just finished a batch of pita pocket breads this evening.  Both turned out spectacularly well.  Yeled is grouchy tired and Ba'al getting ready for work so I don't really have time to post the recipes and descriptions right now but I will in a couple hours.

Oh, and I started another batch of injera today.  We're going to have a lentil stew for Shabbos dinner.

10:39

We had biscuits and gravy for breakfast this morning.  For the biscuits, I used 1 cup of starter, 1/3 cup oil, 3/4 teaspoon baking soda, and 1 cup of flour.  Mixed the whole thing up until there was no dry flour, and put it by spoonfuls on an ungreased sheet.  I've seen rolled biscuit doughs using sourdough starter also but I prefer drop biscuits, especially in the morning.  I'm a fairly lazy person at heart and the last thing I want to do at seven in the morning is roll out dough.  These biscuits tasted good even this afternoon when they were cold.

The pita breads are impressively good.  I was mildly amazed, considering I've eaten commercial pita bread most of my life, at the flavor of these pitas.  There's a depth of flavor completely missing from store-bought pita.

Use 1/2 cup starter, 1/4 cup warm water, 1/2 Tablespoon sugar, 3/4 teaspoon salt, and 1 cup of flour.  Mix together and knead well.  Put in a greased bowl, cover, and let sit in a warm place until the dough has doubled in size.  This will probably take around 2 hours.

Add 1/2 cup flour and knead until smooth.  Divide into three equal parts.  Form each into a ball and then roll into a 1/2 inch thick round.  Cover and allow to rise.

Preheat oven to 475 degrees.  Bake pita rounds on a nonstick sheet for about 10 minutes, until the rounds are puffed up and just turning brown.

Once they are cool enough to handle, cut in half and open with a knife.  This allows the steam to escape so the breads don't become soggy.

Teff

Teff is amazing.  I have to clean and finish dinner so I can't elaborate right now.  But I will be back later to explain.

9:54 pm

So teff.  I made a classic Ethiopian dinner tonight, doro wat and injera.  Doro wat is a chicken stew simmered long and low with onions, garlic, and tomato puree.  I used chicken leg quarters that have been hanging out in the bottom of the freezer for a couple months.  I buy them cheap every once in awhile but have trouble coming up with uses for them because Ba'al doesn't like bones in his chicken.  By the time the stew was done, the meat was literally falling off the bones.  The last time I made this recipe, using beef, I had trouble getting the stew to thicken up.  I'd been planning to thicken it with cornstarch.  But last night, one of the pages I read about teff said it is also used as a thickener.  So a half hour from the end of cooking, in went 1/4 cup of whole teff.  It thickened the stew beautifully.  I am so impressed.

Injera is a sourdough flatbread.  The recipe is 1 1/2 cups teff flour mixed with 2 cups of water.  You mix this up, put in a bowl, cover with a towel and let it sit on a countertop for up to three days.  By this afternoon, this stuff was seriously scaring me.  I've never made sourdough anything and the sour smell coming from the bowl was a little frightening.  When the batter is thin, bubbly, and sour smelling, you cook it by the 1/4 cup in a hot pan, the same as pancakes.  Cook until the edges curl up and burst bubbles cover the entire surface.  That's it.  They come out dark brown and sour tasting.  With a thick spicy stew like doro wat, it's delicious.

I learned last night that there are only a few places in this country where teff is being grown.  I can't understand why.  It's highly prolific, thrives in low water conditions, and grows faster the hotter the weather.  An experimental station in the Kalamath Valley Oregon run by the University of Oregon gets  three cuttings of teff grass over the summer.  Teff is classified as a grass.  It produces five tons of grass per acre and can be fed as hay and grain to animals in addition to the seeds being used for human consumption.  I don't care what I have to do.  When we get our land, I'm finding a source of seeds and growing this stuff!

Quinoa

We bought a box of quinoa pasta the other day.  It's actually really good.  I found out from reading the box that quinoa is the only "grain" (it's not actually a grain, more closely related to grasses) that has complete protein chains.  In other words, unlike, say beans and rice, they don't have to be combined with other grains to get complete protein chains.  According to the stuff I've been reading tonight, it would probably grow well around here.  It's also closely related to amaranth, which would also grow well in this area.  Both plants need warm days and cool nights, which we have.  The other interesting thing is that the leaves of both amaranth and quinoa are edible and highly nutritious.

I added the Seeds of Change website to our links list and ordered their catalogue.  They have organic amaranth and quinoa seeds available.

Hummus

The hummus also turned out beautifully.  I started with chickpeas and oil in the blender.  I don't know about other blenders but mine did not do well at all.  So put everything into the mixer bowl with the wire whisk attachment.  It took a little longer but worked nicely.  Yeled's is plain, the adult stuff has salt, garlic, and coriander in it.  I stuffed the finished product into a tomato for a late night snack and woke up not hungry for the first time in a couple weeks.

For the chickpeas, I soaked 2 cups of dry peas for 12 hours.  Then I poured the peas and water into a pot, added more water, and simmered them until they were tender.  I let them cool for several hours in the fridge.  Then pureed the peas with oil, salt, dry garlic, and coriander until I had a smooth paste.  This recipe will not be as smooth and evenly pureed as commercial hummus but that doesn't bother me.  I like the more interesting texture.

Forgot to Mention

This on Thursday:  Yeled is now six months, two days old.  His half birthday was on Thursday and came and went in grand style.  First, there was our computer keyboard deciding not to work.  We bought a new one.  Then, we spent three hours seeking semi-emergency care for Yeled Thursday night when I started thinking about his diapers and realized he hadn't had a good pee in 24 hours.

The urgent care facility our practice runs took a look at him, catheterized him in hopes of pulling something out of his bladder (totally unsuccessful) and then told us to take him to an ER.  Children's Hospital ER doctor was NOT impressed that he'd already been cath'd.  Apparently, that's something only reserved for high fever with suspicion of UTI cases in children Yeled's age.  The doc took one good look at him and told us, before even doing an exam, that he looked really good and had probably just been a little unhappy in the tummy.  She had us do a log of diapers and nursing times for 24 hours, which I finished at 1 am this morning.  He nursed ten times for an average of ten minutes each time (he's always been an efficient nurser) and produced a more than acceptable number of wet diapers.  All that confirms that he just wasn't feeling well during the day Thursday and nursed just enough to keep himself hydrated.  Yeled is taking a nap with Abba as we speak.

I'm cooking beans.  Navy beans simmering with salt and garlic for our soup tonight.  Chickpeas simmering plain for hummus.  I've got a bunch of little red bell peppers.  I'm thinking about roasting those in the oven and throwing those into one batch of hummus for the adults in the house.  The plain stuff will be for Yeled to play with.  He already loves avocado and is completely not interested in oatmeal or rice cereal.  I'm hoping that by introducing as many non-standard tastes as possible, he will be an easy to please young eater.

We got a thunderstorm with hail last night.  Fortunately, the pots of veggies I'm trying to grow are hung far enough under the overhang that they escaped without much damage.  Now to water them and take care of my kitchen.

Adventures in Sourdough

I have started starters.  The other day, I never did get my sourdough starter going.  But it's going now.  

Next to it on the countertop, I have teff and water soaking.  I've been making a lot of African recipes lately and those require culturally similar bread to eat the dishes with or on.  My bread of choice is injera, a sourdough flat bread made from teff flour.  I've been wanting to try this recipe since Passover.  The plan is to get this dough all bubbly over the next couple days and to make our favorite meat and onion stew on Sunday afternoon.  I'm already looking forward to it.

Then there's the bread bowl.  I've got challah rising overnight.  It's the strangest bread dough I've ever worked and I'm a little scared of it right now.  The creator of this particular recipe wanted a stiff dough (stiff dough braids easier) and eliminated nearly all of the liquid from the recipe.  When I started to knead it, the dough was crumbled, like a cobbler topping.  Very odd.  But it did  become more elastic with kneading so fingers crossed that this will work.

In addition to the stuff on the counter, there are two bowls in the oven.  One is dry chickpeas.  I want to make hummus.  The dry peas have to soak at least 12 hours, than need to be boiled until they are tender.  It would be easier to use canned peas but this is so much more fun.  Plus, I can control the salt content more easily.  The reason for making hummus is that I have a sourdough pita bread recipe.  Pita and hummus sounds most excellent right now.

Finally, a bowl of dry navy beans.  Ba'al mentioned the other day that he wanted a white soup.  Well, I've got chicken sausage in the fridge and the beans soaking.  Tomorrow, I'll make a bean and veggie soup with bits of sausage in it.  Hopefully, there will be challah to go along with it!

I've added new links in the What We're Looking At list.  We have decided that a green house without green energy is rather pointless.  Ba'al also discovered tonight that Colorado has incentives and rebates for people using green energy so the equipment shouldn't be as cost prohibitive as it otherwise would be.   We've been looking at several companies tonight that make very quiet vertical (don't have to be oriented towards the prevailing winds) wind turbines.  They're very expensive but the state will probably help us with the cost and the local power plants will buy any excess energy we generate.  We also want to put up a couple of solar arrays.

Last, a radio program we listened to while running errands included a statement about our dependance on oil going so far as the clothes we wear.  I'd completely tuned out the fact that manmade fibers are mostly made from a petroleum base.  So we decided that we're going to make more of a point of buying clothes made from natural fibers.  I'm not prepared to stomach the cost of organic cotton but we will buy regular cotton, along with wool and linen.  The only exceptions to our new natural fiber rule are A) thrift store finds and B) the manmade fiber is less than half the total content of the garment.  

Prototype

I did a prototype cloth diaper insert last night with a pillow sham belonging to a quilt I got rid of last summer and an old hand towel folded in half inside.  The gDiaper inserts are huge and I think a cloth insert can be a little shorter front to back because with all that cloth, the diaper looked pretty bulky on Yeled this morning.  But it worked well.  Even Ba'al agreed that cloth inserts were a good idea.  He still thinks that overnight vinegar soaks are a little strange but he does understand why they're a good idea.

We're taking recycling to the drop off point today.  Colorado confuses me.  In Wisconsin, where we lived before and where I grew up, recycling is mandatory and has been since I was eleven or twelve.  Here, it's optional.  I just don't get that.  It's a well established fact that recycling is good for everyone.  It cuts garbage costs, cuts landfill use, and reuses things that we use every day anyway.  So to me it doesn't make sense to allow recycling to be an option anywhere in the country.  It should be mandatory everywhere.  I rarely see recycling bins anywhere in this city.  There's a bunch of bins in the Wal Mart parking lot but they only recycle office paper.  Our apartment complex doesn't have any bins at all.  So we have to drive our stuff down the the WM drop-off point, which sort of defeats the purpose of the exercise since that wastes gas.  Oh well.  We're driving our mid-90's truck on almost straight E-85 right now so our costs are around $2.80 a gallon instead of a dollar more.

Woot!

I made cloth baby wipes today.  I feel so "green."  We had a bunch of random pillow cases floating around that belong to sheet sets we no longer have.  So I cut them open and then into 8 inch squares.  I just get one wet before I change Yeled's diaper and toss it in a caddy (half of a gallon milk jug) when finished.  Once Yeled and I have our baths later tonight, I'll leave some of the bath water in the tub, add vinegar, and toss the used cloths in to soak overnight.  According to what I've been reading about laundering cloth diapers (got a plan for those too, lol) the vinegar soak should get rid of most of the odor and stains.  In a couple days, I'll have a bunch of reasonably clean cloths to wash with the next load of laundry.

So diapers.  We bought a box of gDiapers a couple months ago.  I  love them.  They have these flush-able inserts that are about the coolest thing ever.  Unfortunately, the inserts are super expensive.  I've got a couple inserts left and I'm going to use them as a template for cloth inserts that will fit into the gDiaper cover and liner combination.  I'll use cotton for the outside, with a cotton batting core.  On paper, it looks like it will work.  We'll see if it will actually work on Yeled's baby butt.

One Down, Many To Go

The first experiment in new money-saving measures was an impressive success.  I washed three police shirts, two police pants, three other random pairs of pants, a denim skirt, and about a dozen shirts in early evening yesterday.  Put them on hangers and hung them to dry on the bathroom shower curtain rod about eight pm.  Everything was completely dry when I got up at six-thirty, except for the uniform pants which were damp where they'd been folded.  Those are out finishing up on the balcony railing.  I'm rather pleased with myself right now.  My laundry dollars now stretch twice as far with little in the way of extra work.  Pants and shirts have to go on hangers at some point anyway!

Now to get a sourdough starter started.  I've got lots of recipes, ranging from regular old bread, to pita, to challah and biscuits to try out.  According to The Glycemic Index Revolution, sourdough is better bread because it doesn't digest as quickly thus preventing one's blood sugar from spiking and dropping constantly.  Since I have issues with low blood sugar from time to time, this is a very important point to consider.  I also appreciate the duel advantages of not having to buy baker's yeast and, more importantly, bread.  

Let's say I get twenty-five pounds of whole wheat flour and ten pounds of white flour to mix in.  I'll spend around thirty dollars on flour.  Another ten for twenty-five pounds of sugar.  A couple bucks for a box of salt.  Our water bill is around fifteen dollars a month.  So about sixty dollars total for all these supplies.  Thirty-five pounds of flour will keep us in bread for about three months.  I'd spend at at least the same amount on already-made bread as I did on supplies and with wheat being one of the things going up in cost, I'm sure the bread on store shelves is going to go up in price significantly.  The base goods (flour, sugar, etc) will increase somewhat also but not as much as the finished product.  So, off to make sourdough starter.

In a large jar with a screw lid (I'm using a quart canning jar), stir 1 cup flour and 1 cup water together.  Leave the jar open on the countertop for up to three days, until the flour and water mixture gets bubbly.  Add another 1/2 cup each flour and water, stir to mix, cover with a porous lid (I just took a nail and hammer and punched holes in the lid, and put in the refrigerator.  Add 1/2 cup each of flour and water on a weekly basis.  What you do with this starter varies by recipe so I'll post details as I try new recipes.

The Things I Can Do

First, hello world.  I'm pretty notorious for starting these things and losing interest after awhile.  I promise to do my best not to completely neglect my project this time.  I can say for certain I will not post every day.  I'm the mother of a six month old boy, hitherto known as yeled.  There's just not enough room in the day to blog all the time.  

I do have good reason to show up here every few days:  My husband, hereafter described as Ba'al, and I recently had a long discussion about the current state of the economy.  He's a federal police officer and has been for long enough that his job is reasonably secure.  But we both realize that his salary will almost certainly not keep up with the costs of basic living.  So we developed a plan.  We're now on a hard-core, no frills budget that will allow us to bank around $800 to $1000 a month.  Over the next three years, we will use this banked income to pay off our past credit obligations and establish a down payment fund.  By the end of that time, we'll have saved up enough for a hefty down payment on a piece of land.  We're hoping to get twenty to thirty acres.  A year to two years later, we should be able to put a temporary house up on that land.  After that, well, we'll see what happens then.  Right now, we just need to get to a point where we can grow much of our own food and build equity.  This blog is all about how we're going to accomplish our goals.

I have a second, more personal challenge.  As I noted in my profile, I grew up with a sense of conservation that many people are just now discovering.  What annoys me about green=trendy is that it costs so much to be green if you do it the trendy way.  I can't afford to buy brand new $20 organic cotton onesies for Yeled.  He grows too fast.  I can go to one of the many thrift stores in town and buy nearly new organic cotton onesies for $2.  I cannot justify $5/lb organic strawberries shipped in from G*D knows where.  I can afford to go to one of my many farmer's markets and buy strawberries picked that very day from a farm just a few miles outside of town.  Yes, I understand what makes "organic" theoretically better for my body.  I also understand that if that organic produce is not from the same area I live in, the costs and pollution of transportation outweigh any benefit to my body.

Since we're on this hard core budget, I need to cut costs wherever I possibly can.  And cutting costs, incidentally, can also be very very green.  If you make your own pasta, you don't pay $3 a box.  You also don't add the packaging into a landfill so you save money, eat a better product, AND do something good for the environment.  My personal challenge is to find as many of these green cost-cutters as I can.  

Besides the fact that these short cuts save me money, and the fact that they're environmentally better for all of us, there's the fun in it all.  Yes, fun.  I take a great deal of pleasure from figuring out new short cuts, finding new uses for things I already have, and getting really good deals in unexpected places.  Example:  We just got a solid oak dinning room table.  It is the sort of table that grows with a family.  It seats four in it's present configuration but has three extra leaves and can expand to eight and a half feet long.  Like I said, it's solid oak and in beautiful condition.  We paid $80 for this table, leaves, and chairs in the local D.A.V thrift shop.  Do the happy dance with me!  My family will never have to buy another table.  When we first saw the set, it was marked at $148.  When we went in a week later to buy it, there was a tag sale going on and the table had the right color tag on it to get 50% off.  How much fun is that?!

To get to the title of the post, I've begun a list of things I can do to save money and help the environment.

• Ruthlessly turn off all lights when not in use.
• Unplug appliances when not in use.
• Limit use of the A/C by utilizing fans and open windows as much as possible.
• Figure out a cloth diaper system practical for our small apartment and shared washing machines.
• Make fabric wipes for Yeled's butt.
• Line dry clothes instead of paying for dryer time.
• Recycle everything that can be recycled.
• Get and use a self-contained compost bucket.
• Buy used clothes, furniture, and household items.  As a sign in a local antique shop reads, "buy green, buy antique."
• Instead of buying pre-made kitchen things (like pancake mix, pasta, and so on) make these things at home.  Why buy them if I can make them myself?