The Year of Using It Up

 Hello dear friends!  Sorry about such a long lapse in posting, I've been in a sort of "retreat from the world" mood lately.  As many of you know, I am deaf, which causes me to live quite an isolated life to begin with, but every decade or so, someone will say something or something will happen that sets off all the pain and frustration that comes from having, as my mother calls it a "nice little"' handicap.  So I retreat even further into my own little world and mourn for all that could have been.Oh self-pity and all, you know? So anyway, that is where I've been.  Just shutting out the world.

Anyhow

This year Ran, Jamie and I decided that this was going to be the year to use up everything that we could.   I've been studying all sorts of WWII war rationing videos to glean any information that I could from them.  Unfortunately, they are not much help, as we eat on less then the rations already.  Well, except for coffee. Ha!  I have to say, a lot of the recipes were absolute rubbish.  It's as though they didn't want people to enjoy food.  And if it came between eating liver and kidneys or not having meat, I would have  been quickly adopting the vegetarian lifestyle!  Actually, we were vegetarians for many years, and never found it much of a hardship and I really don't remember why we went back to eating meat.  I guess sometimes a person just wants a good burger. Anyway, it has been slow going cleaning out our small freezer because we only eat a few pounds of meat between the three of us in a month.

Our motto is food either feeds you or it feeds a disease.

Makes decisions about what is healthy pretty easy doesn't it?  It doesn't take a Philadelphia lawyer to figure out which foods are unhealthy; anything artificial, processed, high in nitrates,  made as a substitute for the real deal, too fatty,  too much sugar, etc

Our second motto is to eat what we grow.

Most of our food comes from our own garden.  We do buy a lot of dried beans because it takes a lot of land to grow 25 pounds of dried beans.  But we do grow some interesting heirloom varieties. There's something exciting about eating a variety of vegetable that someone in the 1700s ate.  At least to someone that loves history like I do. The rest of the beans I purchased at our Amish scratch and dent store.  They cost 75 cents a pound there as opposed to the bulk food store that charges about two dollars a pound.  They are usually older beans, which take longer to cook in a pressure cooker to soften.  Mostly, once a month I can up a couple pounds of them ( 2 pounds will make around 9 pints) using the method I described in the previous post.

Lentils can be bought quite inexpensively at the foreign food stores or found on the foreign food aisle.  Since we discovered Ran's wheat allergy, we have been making tortillas from lentils.

Red Lentil Tortillas

1 C. red lentils

2 C. water

1 tsp. salt

Rinse the lentils and pick out any of the bad ones. Soak the  lentils overnight in the water. Rinse. Stir in the salt and whirl the lentils in a blender or food processor until with just enough water to make a makes a smooth batter ( like a very thin pancake batter).  Heat a griddle pan with a small amount of olive oil (olive oil is the only oil we use) and prepare like you would a pancake, only thinner (like a crepe).

One of our favorite meals it to make some sort of rice or barley or couscous (some sort of filler-upper) some chopped  stir-fried or sauteed vegetables, some sort of bean and some sort of sauce or chutney and roll them up in these tortillas.  The vegetables, filler-uppers, beans and sauce depend upon what cuisine you are aiming for.  Somedays it might be Spanish rice, refried beans, corn, tomatoes and salsa or guacamole.  Another compilation is garbanzo beans saffron rice, carrots, onions, celery and one of my home-canned chutneys. Your imagination is the limit.

Since we don't really enjoy canned fruits  or juices and a little jam and jelly goes a long way (trying to avoid sugar) I make lots of canned chutneys, barbecue sauces, pickles and ketchups from our fruit.  You'd be amazed at how these things make something as mundane as rice and beans into something wonderful.  We  eat fresh fruit directly from the garden beginning with the first stalks of rhubarb, then the strawberries, followed by raspberries, blackberries, gooseberries, etc. then into the fall when the fruits in the orchard ripen.  This supplies us with fresh fruit from April until November.  And some of the pears and apples last until the end of December.  During the winter months we eat oranges and bananas. And some home-canned fruit sauces.

Motto number three is to eat what is in season.

That means this week we will be eating Curried Lentil Rhubarb stew for one of our meals and another meal will  probably contain dandelion fritters or dandelion salad.

Making Sweet Potato Slips

Speaking of gardens, we are growing the most glorious sweet potato slips this year.  For years we have tried to get slips going the old-fashioned way by sticking toothpicks around the base of the sweet potato and putting them in a glass of water (like forcing a bulb) to little success.  This year we just took the sweet potato and buried  (lengthwise) it in some potting soil half-way up the side.  And waited and waited.  What seemed like forever, we finally started to see some roots and then some eyes.  After the eyes had grown big and healthy we broke them into small starts and planted them in pots.  Sweet potatoes really don't grow very well up here in Michigan, they need a longer growing season, but we plan to plant them in bins of dirt, so it won't take the dirt so long to warm up.  We'll see how it goes.  Always experimenting!

Motto number four is use what you have.

This applies to everything, not just food.  Been trying to use up every little scrap of material from the old scrapbag. This homely little charm quilt made a big dent in it.

I know my picture is rubbish, but it is difficult to get a good angle as the room this loveseat is in is only about eight feet across and I'd have to climb into the fire to do any better.  And I'm not willing to do that, not even for you, dear readers. Ha! BTW, I found this little loveseat at the Goodwill (finding small furniture for a tiny house is difficult) for $14.  It was a good quality loveseat made in Hickory NC with down cushions, unfortunately it was covered in a very 1980s floral fabric that would have made Barabara Cartland swoon.  Fortunately, I had a bunch of very long linen looking curtains that I had purchased at a garage sale.  So I reupholstered the loveseat from them.  Not a bad little loveseat for $19!  Unfortunately, it has those sort of loose back cushions that always look sloppy, so I made this little quilt to fit over the back and matching arm covers.  I have to say, the light color is not the most practical color for a bunch of gardeners, but we make do with what we have, thus one of my afghans tucked into the seat.

What else?  Oh!  I finished my socks and I finished my sampler.

So now all my projects are finished for the month and I can start fresh for May.  I'm planning on knitting a Fair Isle vest and use up all those little balls of sports weight yarn left over from other projects.  And I have a lot of sewing projects planned.

Speaking of which, spring is church rummage sales season!  I couldn't believe my good fortune.  For the longest time I have wanted to reupholster a small wing chair in one of the 1980s Laura Ashley style fabrics ever since I spotted an illustration in the Holly Hobbie Treasury.  You know the fabric?  The little ditsy print, floral sprigged type?  Anyhow, I searched and searched forever for such a fabric and couldn' find any, at least not any at a price I was willing to pay. Walked into the rummage sale and there was an entire bolt of it in the corner!  Oh happy day! I also found four yards of red flannel (wanted to make myself a red flannel petticoat forever) four hooked wool chair pads, a pair of Sperry Topsider leather boots (for gardening), a pretty chambray skirt, that I'm wearing as I write this, a beanie baby for Violet (she likes the weird ones) and Ran found a very nice Woolrich pullover.  Guess how much. $20 for the whole lot! Bless the dear ladies that run the church rummage sales!

Other than that we are just puttering.  Cleaning here and there, going out into the garden and planting a row or cleaning up the flower beds.  We have discovered that we no longer have to be act with such urgency.  Things get done in their own sweet time.  They always do.  And if they don't, well, there's always tomorrow.  Hope you all stay safe and enjoy yourselves!

Hugs

Jane