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.