We hosted the Christmas festivities this year, something we’ve never done before. Here’s what I learned: three pies is excessive for eight people calculate serving portions based on the weight of the chicken breasts, not on the number of chicken breasts if serving a large breakfast to the assembled masses, reduce the scale of dinner – don’t overstuff everyone twice hot spiced cider may have been more popular than wine at 4pm when menu planning, figure out not only how much of what ingredients to have, but also plan baking times so that you don’t end up with a completed …
Category: homesteading
The garden is winding down. I dug out the last of the potatoes today and wished, again, that I’d been keeping track of how many pounds we grew. I gave today’s collection of green beans to the neighbors, since I’ve decided that 5 quarts in the freezer is enough. There are more than 2 pints of sun-dried tomatoes in the fridge, and bowls of tomatoes on the counter waiting to be converted into pasta sauce. Ian is responsible for eating the paprika and mariachi peppers – they’ve both turned out to be too hot for me. Tomorrow, I’ll check on …
It’s a lovely summer day… complete with the sounds of nail-guns and saws across the street where they are framing the two new houses that will be diagonal from us. I’ll be very glad when the framing and roofing and siding are done and the bulk of the noise moves inside… which will probably be sometime in October. I’ve started harvesting tomatoes. Caitlyn especially likes the orange cherry tomatoes and will eat them non-stop if I let her. Strangers are so impressed that she “willingly eats tomatoes!” She also eats carrots pulled right out of the ground and green beans …
There was a bit on NPR this morning about a power company in Massachusetts that is trying to get customers to conserve energy by providing immediate feedback on how much energy they are using. Use your toaster, get a readout on a little devise that says how much electricity your toast is using. Same for your clothes dryer. (I missed the name of the devise they are using – sleep fog and all). And then it occurred to me: why not have these kinds of meters for everything? A display in your shower that tells you how many gallons you’ve …
We have 2+ quarts of homegrown peas in the freezer. I think maybe I’ll get another quart from the plants before they call it quits. Time to start thinking of what goes in the pea-space in the garden… Caitlyn really likes the ABC song, although she has her own version of it. “Little Tiny ABCs” goes something like: “A B C D E F G, um, uh, um, Next time won’t you sing at me.” If Ian or I sing it with her, she dips in and out of it, dropping out around M N O P and coming back …
I can’t decide if it’s funny or sad. I mean, it’s seriously cool that King County Metro, Seattle City Light, and Seattle Parks and Recreation have started renting goats to clean up overgrown hillsides. It almost makes me wish we had some overgrown space around here so the goats would come to visit – Caitlyn would love it. But, it’s not like goats are a new technology. They’ve been eating aggressive plants, and winning, for, well, for as long as there have been goats. It’s us silly humans that gave up on goats in favor of machinery and chemicals. Never …