Simple Meals and the SNAP Challenge

I'm pretty proud of how I've been doing these last few weeks in terms of cooking good, simple meals and making plenty of leftovers. I changed my menu planning strategy to include lunches (I'd only ever planned for dinners before), and that made a huge difference. By looking at my menu plan and knowing that I am counting on taking leftovers for lunch, I do a much better job of cooking larger amounts of food. The middle of the week is always kind of rough- I have a lateish night on Tuesdays and a very late night on Wednesdays. So usually I throw something in the crockpot on Tuesdays, and plan ahead so I already have something for lunch on Thursday and don't have to cook anything up when I get home at 10 PM on Wednesday night.

 Making buttermilk biscuits on Saturday night. I didn't have the time to make bread (accounting for all the rising time), so this was a quick fix until I could get to it on Sunday evening.

I never buy buttermilk, but adding a tablespoon of vinegar to a cup of milk does the trick!

This week, for my nutrition class. I've been on the SNAP Challenge: having to eat for a week on a food stamp budget. (For those of you outside the US: SNAP stands for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and used to be called Food Stamps--it's the government's food assistance program for low-income people). SNAP benefits are issued on a monthly basis, and the average daily amount of the benefit is $4.38 per individual. It's highly highly inadequate to purchase truly healthy food, although the system is getting better and SNAP is accepted at many farmers markets now. It is, however, slightly more money than what I have budgeted for myself for food on a monthly basis. But I am very advantaged compared to many people on SNAP: I have three good grocery stores within walking distance and lots of experience of how to get healthy meals out of very little money. 

Cauliflower with melted cheese. Green onions were one of the only fresh vegetables I had the fridge when the challenge started, so I've been eating them on everything!

However, for this exercise, rather than calculate out what I could eat on $4.38 per day, I amended the challenge to mean that I couldn't buy any groceries from the time the assignment was given. I have a lot of dry bulk goods in my cupboards, but my fridge and freezer were already fairly sparse, so I figured it would be a fairly realistic challenge. Also, I've been on SNAP in the past and remember that that was usually the case: I had plenty of dry beans and rice and rolled oats, but had to plan and budget very carefully to get fruit and vegetables and meat to last the entire month.

I started to crave something sweet. These are Cape Cod oatmeal cookies with almonds and raisins, from the Fannie Farmer Cookbook. 

This pasta recipe is another one from Jamie's Ministry of Food. It's SO easy and really delicious.

Chickpeas for protein, with paprika and some (kind of old) chard from the community garden.

I'm eating far less fruit this week- I only had two bananas in the house, and the rest has been canned peaches. Also mostly frozen vegetables, and I am definitely eating far more bread and grains that I usually do, just to fill myself up. I've managed some good meals, but it's taken a lot of planning and calculating to spread out my protein sources through the week. I'd highly recommend trying to do this, if you aren't already living on a small budget, to get some perspective into the food situation of a huge portion of the US (and the world). I'm getting curious to find out what other people's experiences are with this.

In other news, my paperwhite bloomed this week! It smells heavenly.

My Home Has Quirks

I'm adjusting to a few idiosyncrasies I've discovered about my apartment. The one requiring the most attention is the moisture build-up. During the night the insides of many of the windows get covered with condensation (primarily the ones in the bedroom and laundry room, but it happens to a lesser amount in the living room too) which runs down and pools on the windowsills. So every morning I have to go and wipe it up in order to prevent massive amounts of mold. It's probably time to look into some moisture-absorbing packs of some kind. My friend Bonnie was telling me about some reusable ones that you can plug in once they are full of water, and it dehydrates them again. Anyway, in spite of the decent insulation and the modern windows in my apartment, something in the design makes them prone to large amounts of condensation, which requires attention every day. Also, the floors are freezing. Lovely flooring, but really cold! I have a suspicion that the flooring was laid directly on a concrete pad, with no insulation in between.

The lighting was another issue. I've had to buy some tall floor lamps (thank you, Ikea) to help light the living room and kitchen, because the ceiling lights were dim and the beams in the ceiling blocked the light from half the room. Then, on Sunday, the main ceiling light in the kitchen went out, so I took off the globe and found that there was only one light bulb in there, when there could have been two! I took the globes off the identical lights in the living room and bedroom, and found the same thing- HA! I walked down the street to the hardware store and got some compact fluorescent bulbs- I thought I was getting the "soft white" ones, but accidentally got the daylight spectrum, which turned out to be a happy mistake. At first I was dismayed by the bright white light (an old coworker of mine referred to those as "alien autopsy lights"), but then realized just how much more they lit up the room. The floor lamps are still necessary, but the extra daylight-spectrum bulb makes a huge difference.

So now my bedroom has gone from this:

To this:

It's SO much nicer. I was lamenting how terrible the light in my apartment was for taking pictures, and this has improved it immensely. I never use the flash anyway, because it washes everything out, and now I really don't need to. In the kitchen, you can really tell the difference in the light quality:

Before:

 

After:

The curry sauce is a super easy one from Jamie Oliver's Ministry of Food. I made it with some delicious chicken from a stewing hen that was cooked up in the crockpot, and found that it keeps really well as leftovers too. I made the pie on Saturday night, in a fit of late-night baking. I still had two gallon bags of frozen apple pie filling I made back in September, and one of them sprang a leak in the freezer and left an ooze of gummy sugary syrup all over the other frozen things, so I decided to go ahead and bake it up. And then realized that it takes one person (even me!) a long time to eat through an entire pie, so I ended up taking some to friends. It turned out pretty good, even if the texture of the apples wasn't as nice as with fresh ones.

The best side effect of pie-making: the little strips of leftover crust, baked up on their own with cinnamon and sugar. Yum! 

Speaking of baking, I've also discovered that my oven bakes quite a bit hotter than the one I was used to. I haven't actually charred anything yet, but my latest batch of bread came out far crustier than I would normally go for. I'll need to experiment a little bit with the timing and temperatures and modify my recipe. 

One other quirk I ran up against is funny in retrospect, although I almost had a breakdown about it at the time. The second night I lived here, I went to use the shower for the first time, and couldn't for the life of me figure out how to turn the shower on. I could tell that the water pressure and temperature were great, but it was only coming out of the tap, and there was no little tab or thing to pull or push to divert the water into the showerhead. I tried everything I could think of, and looked everywhere, and began to wonder if I had inadvertently rented an apartment that didn't have a functional shower, and that the landlord hadn't informed me of this particular fact, and got really wound up about it. It was too late at night to call him and ask, so I took a bath instead, and called the next day. He directed me to pull down on the ring around the bottom of the tap, right where the water comes out. I had tried that numerous times, and couldn't make it work. Finally the maintenance guy came and manhandled it into position. I'd never seen a shower that worked that way, although in all of my efforts I had tried it--but the fitting was so very stuck I couldn't make it budge. The first few times after that, I had to really yank on it, but by now it has loosened sufficiently that it's not an issue at all.

Really, it's a good little place, just some new things to get used to, most of which make funny stories in the end.

Finally, a Freezer!

Back in the spring, we started talking about how we really needed to get a small chest freezer to put in the basement, to give us the space to store all of the rabbit meat, stock, and the heaps of veggies we're growing this summer. Never in the past have we been able to produce the bounty we are this year; for the first time we are putting up an abundance of food for the winter. Last year our garden was minimal and planted late, and we didn't have the community garden plot. The rabbits didn't come to us until October, and it took until early this spring to butcher our first meat rabbits. But now we are full to overflowing with good meat and veg. What with one thing and another, we didn't manage to get our chest freezer until two days ago, on Sunday, but now we are set up to store everything we are growing.

We took awhile to investigate the various options for freezers, not wanting to buy one brand new and pristine (i.e., expensive) if we could help it. We set a budget of $200 for a small freezer, and I'm happy to say we spent well under that. We knew we wanted to get a chest freezer and not an upright- chest freezers are much more efficient, and also, I think, a lot easier to sort and access things in. We searched all of the appliance outlets and scratch-and-dent stores in town, but didn't find anything that compared to a score found on Craigslist: a 7 cubic foot chest freezer being sold by a guy over in Oregon City for $145. It's about ten years old but in really good shape and the perfect size for our needs. Matt figured out all the logistics, driving to Beaverton to borrow his dad's van, then down to Oregon City (about 25 minutes from our house, and the official end of the Oregon Trail!) to pick up the freezer. Back at home, we wrestled it awkwardly down the basement stairs (there was a substantial amount of swearing involved) and to its place by the south wall.

I wiped the inside down with vinegar to give it a quick clean, we plugged it in, and we were able to check that off our summer list! It will add a chunk to our electrical bill (though it remains to be seen how much that will be) but will be such a savings for us in the long run, and ideally it will keep trucking long enough that we can take it with us when we move and use it for many years to come. Freezers that are well taken care of can last a long time- my parents have used the same massive chest freezer for my entire life.

While Matt returned the van to his dad's, I shifted everything out of the fridge-top freezer into the new one (once it had gotten to freezing temperature), then defrosted and cleaned the small freezer, which it badly needed.

 It looks so big when it's empty! (I also cleaned off all the fingerprints and smudges on the appliances, and have now decided that I will never again have chrome appliances if I can help it: they are thoroughly cleaned, but just these light smudges and drips have left permanent stains...)

Later, Matt sorted and shifted everything to organize both freezers. Our roommate, Lisa, eats a lot of frozen food, so all of her frozen things will stay in the upstairs freezer where they are convenient to her, along with all the ice cube trays and the things we use regularly, like ginger root (which we peel and freeze to prevent it molding), the bag that holds veggie scraps for making stock, and a couple packages of hamburger and sausages. The chest freezer will store larger containers of ice, the rest of the meat and fish, all the containers of stock, frozen berries, and all of the veggies we are blanching and freezing (sorted by variety into paper bags, according to the system my dad has always used).

Plenty of space left for more to come.

It feels really nice to have this task done, another step towards self sufficiency. The next thing to start working on is cold storage for the root vegetables. I think we'll be able to manage well with bins of sand in the garage for the potatoes and carrots and turnips, but we just need to come up with the bins and the sand! 

Putting Up the Harvest

We picked a big heap of green beans yesterday morning, and while we were at the community garden, another gardener somewhat hysterically forced two big yellow zucchini on us (the reality of zucchini- there will always be more than you need). Time to start filling up the freezer for winter! Or rather, stuffing it to the gills- we're on a quest for a small chest freezer this week, since with our massive garden bounty this year plus the rabbits, the little one atop the fridge is no longer sufficient.

For veggies like beans, chard, corn, and broccoli, blanching and freezing is a great way to store produce. It's a pretty simple process of plunging cut veggies into boiling water, then into ice water to cool. This website has a good run-down of blanching times for different vegetables. Caveat: one guideline that we choose to ignore is that you should blanch summer squash. We just shred it and freeze it without cooking it. I know you're not supposed to, but we actually find that the quality and texture is much better when we do use it (we cook it in fritters and muffins and such), and have never had a problem with it going into the freezer raw. Still, everyone should make their own decision about that!

The final haul! With lots more to come in the next few weeks. This is the first year we've blanched and frozen peas, since it is the first year we've grown shelling peas. We'll do a taste test in the next  couple days on the blanched ones and see how they worked out. 

Bounty

I love this time of year. The garden is bursting with goodness, it's salsa season, there are barbecues and potlucks to go to, and we've been having loads of thunderstorms at night, but warm days. The whole season speaks of growth and abundance.

Yesterday's garden basket: ingredients for salsa! (and a branch of cherry tomatoes that I broke off. I'm clumsy. They are now ripening by the kitchen window). 

Guacamole in our lava rock mortar. YUM.

 Tonight's garden basket

Which turned into a stone-ground pesto...

...add some pasta...

Dinner!

More potatoes.

 Another batch of rabbits were butchered today (sorry, the terrible lighting makes this look far more gory than it is in reality).

Tonight's task: shelling the Alderman peas. 

This is the time of year when it is insane to go on vacation, because the garden gets ahead of us! Up next on our list: picking the green beans (which have gone totally apesh*t in the last couple days of mild heat), blanching and freezing the peas and beans, and harvesting the garlic! (I pulled up one bulb today, it's looking very good). 

It's been a busy week! Since getting back from the Spokane area, we spent the last two days celebrating Matt's birthday, first with family on Wednesday night, and then with friends at our house last night. I surprised Matt at his Wednesday party with an ice cream roll-up cake (which I had snuck off to his mom's to make in secret the night before), Jessa and Elliot gave him an ice cream maker (!!!), his dad gave him a massively generous gift of high-quality tools, and he also received The River Cottage Meat Book, Back to Basics, and a couple other very useful books that we're both excited about. At our barbecue last night, there were oodles of small sweet children running around, old friends and new (several young urban farmers that Matt met recently), an impromptu jam session, a fire in the brick fire place, and a lighting storm that created an amazing atmosphere as the sun went down. It's been a nice few days, but I'm glad the weekend is here now, for us to catch up with things!

Pausing...

...After one very stressful week and before another. So I'm afraid this will be another quick and random update. My life this past week has been +/- 6 hours of sleep per night and a lot of this:

But I did manage to play hooky for a few hours this weekend, to do some work outside and take a trip to the community garden. This is what our plot looked like when we got it a month ago:

And this morning, complete with peas, carrot seedlings, lettuce sprouts, and a variety of flowers:

And before-and-afters from the north side:

Today we planted some potatoes, radicchio, oakleaf lettuce, and cilantro, and mulched the paths around our plot. Next week we'll plant all the rest of the space in corn and beans and squash, and then it will really get going!

Since gardening is the thing that's keeping me sane right now, that's about all that's on my mind besides school, so here's a glimpse of what we've got growing around the property:

 Our bright green lush lawn (and apple blossoms!). You can catch a glimpse of the sorry state our lawn was in just a couple months ago, when we decided to move the chickens off of it:

The lilacs are blooming, and the backyard smells heavenly. Sleeping with the window open, we can smell them first thing in the morning. 

 The vision I have for our summer yard is coming to life: lots and lots of flowers and vegetables, including a border of nasturtiums in several places. 

 Potatoes around our front yard.

I planted a tomato on top of a potato. Whoops!

More tomatoes hardening off to go into the ground next week. 

In other news, Matt and Elliot butchered four rabbits this afternoon. It all went well, and they calculated the cost of raising our own meat to be $3 per pound. Not bad! It was sad to say goodbye to the bunnies, but we're really excited to be finally reaping the rewards of raising them. It's a fast cycle- they were just tiny babies a couple months ago. I didn't watch the killing, but I did observe some of the skinning and processing. When the boys have their process down to a science, then I will be a part of it too. Luckily, rabbits are some of the easiest animals to kill and skin. This all deserves its own post, but sadly I don't have time for that at the moment, and I wanted to make sure I mentioned it! The meat is resting in the fridge now, and tomorrow night we'll have braised rabbit for dinner. Here's to another step towards self sufficiency!

With that, I'm off into midterms.

Our Sunny Saturday

It's been a really glorious weekend here. After working hard all week, I was able to take a day off from schoolwork yesterday and spend a good long Saturday with Matt, soaking up the sun (and wind) on a beautifully clear, crisp day. We started the morning right with a good sleep-in, then whipped up some buckwheat pancakes (using the recipe from Nourishing Traditions) and ate them with some yummy local bacon and a variety of canned and frozen fruit and berries that we have been rationing out carefully since this summer. Those peaches and raspberries just taste like little spoonfuls of sunshine, it was perfect.

(Click on Photos to Enlarge)

We spent a couple hours of the afternoon working outside and doing some organizing in the garage, reveling in having the sun shine down on our faces and the clear, cold wind blowing spring towards us. Matt cut back the roses that we have badly neglected since summer, leaving all the new growth that has popped out in the last week. I took a wander around the property, picking up bits of garbage that have blown in, been dropped in our curb strip, or been dug up by the chickens. Then I went and played with the compost heaps, giving both of our active heaps a big turn while the sun was on them.

Both heaps are coming along wonderfully.

Until last week, this section was still full of sticks and other big yard debris, but finally we got it all sent off to the city compost site, and this space is now free for all of our chicken- and rabbit-straw. It will compost on its own, and we can also take from these heaps to add to our other compost piles. We are keeping the two piles separate because the rabbit straw and droppings can be applied directly to the garden as mulch, but the chicken stuff can burn plants if it isn't yet composted. Matt asked how we would keep straight which heap was which- I said Rabbit goes on the Right, because they both start with R! 

Taking a good look at the havoc the hens have wrought on our backyard this winter, we have begun toying with the idea of fencing off the western side of the yard, under the lilac trees, to create a large chicken run that will connect to their coop:

With this big section fenced in, they'll still be able to free range, but we'll be able to reclaim the lawn before summer. Last summer the chickens were too young to be ranging much, so we had the lawn free of chicken poo and full of nice green grass for lounging around on, and a great yard for summer parties. Since we've been letting the hens out to range most days, this is what our back lawn now looks like:

Because it's winter, the grass hasn't even been able to fight back. We'd like to have it green and healthy again for summer, and also we're pretty sure our landlord wouldn't be too excited to see it like this. So I think we'll be perusing Freecycle for some more chicken fencing and temporary fenceposts.

We had a beautiful hike around Powell Butte later in the afternoon, with glorious views of Mt. Hood, Mt. St. Helens, Mt. Adams, and from the top of the butte, a view of the very tip of Mt. Jefferson, away to the south. Back home, we cooked up one of my very favorite curries for dinner, which we hadn't made since before we went to New Zealand. It's so delightful, all spices and pineapple and sweet potatoes and coconut milk. The recipe is in this post. It's also wonderful because it's completely lactose- and gluten-free, and you could easily make it without the chicken and substitute veggie stock or water for the chicken stock, and have a vegan meal.

As you can see, the recipe makes a very generous amount of curry, which happily means I'll be eating this for lunch for the next few days!

I have a goal for myself for the coming week(s), which is to be more productive in the evenings. Unlike the last couple weeks, when I crashed into bed and veged out every night after dinner, I want to accomplish at least one small task every evening, whether it is finishing knitting a dishcloth, baking a batch of cookies, or doing some mundane task like organizing my desk. I want to do more with my time, and I know from experience that doing these small tasks helps me keep my energy up.

I hope you all had a lovely weekend, and that you are feeling rested and ready for the week ahead!