Become NEARLY self sufficient

the broccoli leaves nearly to skeletons, but we got 2 more flowerets yesterday. Also yesterday, I made “fried salad” that is, stirfried greens and stuff. Most of my lettuce is starting to bolt, between 2 weeks of not being picked and almost continual rain.

The resulting forest required a large amount of weeding yesterday and I also picked enough greens to make a “mess ‘o greens” for dinner with 1/2 a tomato, a red bell pepper, and some onion. Not the most imaginative dinner I’ve ever made, but it was pretty cheap as the main component came out of the garden.

Also this year’s leeks have budded and the garlic has proud green shoots. Soon, I’ll harvest one of the leeks and let the other go to seed. When the garlic has bloomed and kneed over I’ll dig it up too.

I’m out of commercial garlic, all I have left is the end of last year’s harvest, 3 or 4 (?) heads. I need to use ‘em up before I get THIS year’s harvest!

Tonight’s dinner (DH’s birthday) is lasagna w/homemade marinara, fresh peas, salad (greens from the garden, tomato, pepper and a balsamic vinegarette). The birthday cake is going to wait until Thursday probably and that will be carrot muffins or carrot cake w/ricotta icing (instead of cream cheese).

I hope the ricotta icing works, it will make it fat free, something we try for these days!

jkd

hand lotion from olive oil that I intend to try and I have a friend who wants the recipe too. The original post (not the reference from curbly) is here:

http://www.wabisabibaby.com/blog/index.php/2008/09/how-to-make-an-all-natural-lotion-with-only-3-ingredients/

And I spent part of this morning talking to DH about what we need for next year’s garden. (We have 1’ of snow out there now.) The largest piece is that we need to make most of the beds deeper. There simply isn’t enough soil out there for plants to produce enough to do more than supplement our food purchases. Of course, the fact that I work in a farm stand make it easy to get fresh produce, but THAT doesn’t help us become more self-sufficient!

jkd

I have been working for a little bit on wasting less, mostly in terms of food.

Ideas: Using the bits you normally toss, squash seeds, pepper ribs, etc. I’ve been working on this for a while. Small broccoli leaves are yummy, as are the stems. (If they’re really hard, peel ‘em.) etc. I have acquired many “keep, don’t toss” ideas & uses for many things like that.

I need to be much better about deglazing pans and using that resource ; it’s so easy to overlook. My latest effort this way was after we had sausage one weekend, I made gravy from the fat & leavings in the pan and froze it.

DH made biscuits this a.m., and I was thinking sausage would be good, remembered the gravy and had that instead. It took very little time to zap in the microwave. (I was afraid it would burn on the edges before the center thawed. It’d be better to put it in the fridge the night before!) Less fat, cholesterol, etc. than actual sausage would have been and used what we had better. A hit!

Now if I could just repeat that more consistently….

jkd

P.S. There’s a British group about this, here’s a link: http://www.lovefoodhatewaste.com/recipes and there’s an American blog too, http://wastedfood.com/

1)I have always wanted to
2)The main character in my novel is responsible for the food supply of a lot of people, that’s her job
3)I’d rather depend on me than Monsanto to feed me safely!
4)I don’t think that we’ll be able to afford to eat soon otherwise.

There are also several problems with this:
I have not got the requisite skills: I’ve never raised livestock, butchered meat, made soap, canned food, etc.

I don’t have enough land to do many of the things that would make this easy, like raising enough wood to heat our home. My estimate is that I’d need 9 more acres to do that.

On the other hand, I work for/with people who have many of the skills I don’t re livestock and canning. And, I found what I thought I’d given away years ago, the Rodale plans for a home-made unpowered food dryer, so those are plusses!

I do raise, dry, and freeze food, but it supplements what we buy at the supermarket or the farmstand, it doesn’t replace it. Although, I haven’t been buying tomatoes for the past week or so as our larger tomato plants have suddenly decided to produce!

jkd