Green Pondering over 2008 January 1, 2009

A *lot* of things have changed over 2008.

I think the two things that stand out most in my mind is my huge change in relationship status (from a military wife to single mom) and the change my house has undergone.

I’ve always been a firm believer in turning off the lights when you leave the room. Turning off the water when you brush your teeth, using dishpans in the sink, instead of wasting tons of water (and then using the water to water plants). But I’ve never really had children old enough to help, or husband who stood behind me on it (and most of the time we lived on base which really isn’t conducive to much but staying in your house and not making waves)

But this past year and a half saw us:

• putting up a clothes line and using cloth diapers (back to my roots like I’d done with my first child)
• Using cloth wipes  in the bathroom and on the baby,
• using all natural soaps made by my friend/sister Holly, that’s including in the laundry room (and adding pennyroyal and teatree oil to the detergent which in turn keeps off the mosquito’s outside).
• Making and using cloth market bags.
• Making a lot more of our clothing,
• putting greener light bulbs in every single light socket we have.
• Putting in a garden,
• saving our own seeds,
• canning,
• making my own vinegar,
• making my own bread, tortilla’s, muffins, cookies etc from scratch.
• The only pre-made snacks we buy now are crackers and popcorn.
• Catching rainwater (in my pitiful system of 5 five gallon buckets placed strategically, but it’s what we can afford) to water my porch plants
• if it’s yellow let it mellow, if it’s brown flush it down….
• replacing things around the house as we can afford it that save energy (dishwasher that does actually save us gallons of water, messing about with the toilets and adding new insides until they saved gallons of water, new light fixtures in places where the lights tend to stay on a lot or were really dim, so we used 3 or 4 lights on instead of one)
• freecycling things as we came across them and realized we didn’t use them, or hadn’t used them in at least a year.
• composting all our non-meat food waste and putting in a burn barrel (with ashes going to the composter)
• Planning grocery trips for once a month (using less gas) and planning them for the most efficient use of gas/time.
• Got started cleaning out the forest behind my house, so far almost an entire car has come out of there, not to mention literal bags of broken glass (wrapped in plastic bags seriously) old washers and dryers, whole bottles, string like you wouldn’t believe, an old fence laying down on the ground and lots and lots of rusty cans. (yes, my tetnus is up to date)
• actually USING my fabric stash instead of buying new fabric. I only bought things that I actually used right away with the exception of my Halloween dress (which I didn’t end up with time to sew) and I probably spent about 30 dollars total on fabric, and that includes PUL for cloth diaper making!

This Year, there are more things I’d like to do

• buy a pressure canner and canning a LOT more
• sell my creative endeavors in my etsy shop, versus leaving them laying about.
• put in raised garden beds
• composting all kitchen waste
• having a LOT larger garden
• planting bamboo as a living fence around my property line
• Finding a way to store my laundry water and use it for garden water
• Getting a pump hooked up on my shallow well to use for the garden and the kids pool (and maybe laundry) (this will be difficult since it’s against city code even though the well has been there forever, but I live next door to the city water guy)
• Finish cleaning out the forest behind my house and using that area for random woodland flowers, a place to hang out, and hanging lots of ‘fairy’ ornaments, mostly wind chimes and various glittery hanging things according to the kids.
• Put up an addition on the house
• fix the back porch
• getting the chicken tractor built and getting chickens
• researching whether goats are ok in town or not and getting 2 if it’s ok with town codes. Wanting a milking goat.
• most likely raising rabbits for meat
• growing my own grains for MY gluten-free flour (on my way with amaranth and beans, however rice will be a bit of a kicker LOL)
• Getting a grain mill

I’m sure there’s a LOT more that I’ve forgotten in each list, but with my 17 month old heading into nap time (we’ve been awake since almost 6am) she’s getting a bit toooo bandit like to comfortably think and stay on the internet anymore! LOL

Gluten-Free Sourdough March 17, 2008

So I did it!!

I used the starter in my previous post (3/4 c brown rice flour, 1/4 cup ground flax seed and 1 cup kefir – though 1/2 water and 1/2 cup plain  yogurt with the probiotics in it ought to work)

So the bread, it was yellow, from the soy flour, had brown flecks in it, from the flax seed meal. It didn’t bake up as big as wheat bread, and the starter didn’t take 3 days to ferment like wheat starter does! It was ready the next day. (also keep in mind that these are all the gluten free flours I have on hand until my order comes in, what can I say, I got impatient and my boys wanted BREAD!)

So the next day (Saturday) I took out 1 cup of starter, then added back 1 cup of rice/flax seed meal-1 cup of kefir to the starter jar.

In a glass bowl I mixed together

2 cup soy flour

1 2/3 cup brown rice flour

1/3 cup flax seed meal

I mixed these together until it was uniform in color/texture

Then added:

2 cups warm water

1 TB honey

1 cup sourdough starter

I mixed throughly, and left it in the glass bowl covered in a kitchen towel to rise. Usually this takes about 9 hours, so I left it overnight. I try to time things so that when I get up in the morning I can finish the bread.

So yesterday morning (Sunday) I turned the glass bowl of risen dough over into a larger bowl, mixed in

2 cup soy flour

1 2/3 cup brown rice flour

1/3 cup flax seed meal

2 tsp salt

1 TB honey

and kneaded these altogether until the bread had a good elastic texture. BUT it NEVER got as ‘thick’ feeling OR as ‘elastic’ feeling as wheat bread. Something in my little baker heart just told me to stop, so I did LOL.

Anyways, I put the now shaped like a loaf bread dough into my loaf pan (greased with coconut oil on the bottom and the bottom 1.5 inches of the sides) and covered it with a towel to rise. By about 1pm it was ready to go. Like I said, it hadn’t risen as much as wheat flour does. Which was disappointing considering the sourdough starter was practically out of it’s jar it rose to high so fast (not my experience with wheat sourdough starter). But it smelled right and it hadn’t risen any higher for about an hour.

So I filled a pyrex baking dish with water, put it in the oven and pre-heated the oven to 350. I’ve found that if I DON’T put water in the oven with the bread I get a very hard crust, that my kids don’t much like. So I use the water. You don’t have to.

When it was preheated, I placed the dough in the oven and the ‘oh please, oh please!’ praying commenced.

About 45 min later I took it out. It’d split a little on the top, but it was a good uniform brown, not spotty (my oven is old, and cheap to begin with) and not overdone. Yay!

Crowded about with children and boyfriend all clamouring for a bite, since it smelled really good. We broke out the butter, slathered it on a few pieces, and all bit in.

I got two thumbs up from the 7 and 8 year old boys, and the picky boyfriend liked it too (though I’m not sure that’s a good thing, he’s a weird picky, liking bland food)

The boys are excited because they get sandwiches for lunch today!

I’ll post pictures of them later (I hope, if life doest swallow me)

Sourdough Gluten-Free Bread experiments March 14, 2008

 First, I’ve got to talk about sourdough starter. It’s NOT difficult to start. For *me* it’s hard to remember to feed it everyday after I’ve got it going, and/or remember to stir it. But that’s me and my memory problems. One of the reasons I like sourdough so much is that if you are doing it properly, it’s WILD yeast. NOT yeast from a package. Since I’m allergic to the packaged and brewers stuff, utilizing wild yeast is pretty important to me!

THIS is the best article that I’ve seen on making/using sourdough, it covers all the fine points and though his process was more complicated than mine  the first time I tried sourdough. I’ve used sourdough before, so I’d recommend following HIS process!

So! This morning I’ve started my experiments with gluten-free bread.

For Sourdough starter I’ve got:
3/4ths cup brown rice flour
1/4th cup flax seed meal
1 cup organic whole milk kefir
I’m going to let this sit for a maximum of 3 days, or until it smells all yeasty and bubbly.

When the starter is ready to go, I usually add 2 cups of warm water, a TB of honey, and then 4 more cups of flour, the only flour I have on hand at the moment until my order comes in from Barry Farm, are soy, brown rice and flax seed meal, which is what they had at my local health food store, Another Way. So unless my order shows up in the next few days we’ll be trying a mix of those 3 flours.

My boys are missing bread something fierce, I found a mix for waffles and pancakes at my local Big Lots, for only a 1.70. I need to go back today and buy the rest of them LOL, since they WERE such a hit. Really, the kids said they tasted better than Waffle House waffles hehehe. Not as good as my regular ones (I didn’t add any sugar, vanilla or spices like I normally do, wanting to see what they tasted like) but still good. I also used the mix to make a short cake as I’d bought 3 boxes of strawberries on sale. The shortcake wasn’t as good the next day cold, but it was still decent. The mix is white rice flour with soy flour.

Anyways, the plan today is to get to the grocery store (we are going to try Winn-Dixie, since I hear they have a GF section), sew some more mama pads, finish putting together my new cultivator . Then put my new brown quilt on my bed. Oh and get the cloth diapers off the line. Hopefully this small amount of things to do isn’t overwhelming. I don’t do well grocery shopping, to much smell/noise/people/lights/chemicals and I usually come home exhausted. Wal-marts the worst. So I’m going to try and avoid them like the plague unless I absolutely HAVE to shop there.

So I’m out..