Dinner at my house is often an experiment. Usually one thing or another is a leftover item that didn’t get eaten the first time around, such as last night’s baked eggplant. Or, I’m just experimenting. I like to play around with recipes from my French or Italian cookbooks - the results never look as fabulous as the photos in the book — however I never said I was a gourmet chef. I just play around in the kitchen and sometimes dinner is great, and sometimes even the dogs won’t eat it (that hasn’t happened in years, though)

Breakfast: Banana bread (recipe below) and green tea sweetened with Stevia

Lunch: Leftover pasta w/tomatoes & garlic on top, and some of the roasted veggies

Dinner: Rice with sundried tomatoes, onions and the leftover eggplant from last night (recipe below) with creamed spinach

Vegan Banana Bread (makes one loaf)

I really have no idea where I stumbed on this recipe. I know I changed it a little bit (I change everything) but this is one soft, sweet, moist bread.

1/2 cup white sugar

1/2 cup brown sugar

1/2 cup “butter”

3 overripe bananas, mashed thoroughly

2 cups flour (I usually create a mix of ground flaxseed, soft white and hard red wheat)

1/2 tsp baking soda

1/4 cup soymilk

1 tsp vanilla

1/2 tsp salt

Toss all in mixer, stir for several minutes, then spread into a greased breadpan. Bake in a 350 degree oven for one hour. Remove from pan immediately and let cool on wire rack.

Rice with Sundried Tomatoes, Onions and Balsamic Eggplant (leftover)

I used brown rice but I am sure Arborio would have been a much better choice. However, risotto is a lot of work with all the stirring, and I was feeling lazy tonight.

3 garlic cloves, minced

1 red onion, chopped

2 tbs olive oil

1 cup rice

1/3 cup sundried tomatoes

splash of red wine

2 cups veggie stock

Sautee onions in saucepan with olive oil. Meanwhile, chop the garlic and sundried tomatoes in a food processor. I made my own sundried tomatoes this summer, they’re a little tough so I had to add a little olive oil to them for a few minutes to make them soft enough to chop. Once the onion was soft, I added the garlic and tomatoes and the rice, stirred it to coat with the oil for about 2 minutes. Add broth, cover, and let simmer for one hour. After the rice was nearly finished I added the eggplant leftovers. With the balsamic vinegar in the eggplant, I didn’t feel the need to add any salt.

Creamed Spinach:

1 pound baby spinach, rinsed

3 cloves garlic, minced

pat of vegan “butter”

4 oz mozarella “cheese”

1/4 cup soymilk

Sautee spinach in the butter over medium heat until fully wilted (about 3 minutes). Puree in a food processor or blender, return to saucepan with all other ingredients over low heat - stir until all is evenly warm and creamy.

When I first went vegan, I swear I thought I was going to starve to death. I’d thought I was all set to start, thanks to a vegan cookbook and a handful of recipes to try. I’d bought cashews and peanuts to have on hand for the munchies, a fridge full of veggies and tofu, and went for it.

Most of the recipes were terrible. I’d say a number of things on the list of ingredients in some of the recipes I’d never heard of. A lot of recipes asked for weird things like seitian and tofu - which is completely bland and tasteless until you learn how to freeze it, squeeze it, and marinate it.

Seriously, I lost lots of weight in the first few weeks - but mostly because I was STARVING.

If anyone wants to try switching to vegan, I thought I’d make their life easier. For the next 30 days I’ll post what I cooked/ate for each meal, and the recipes for them. It will also hold me accountable to eating 3 meals a day - many times I tend to skip breakfast or lunch, which isn’t exactly good for you.

Monday Jan 5:

Breakfast - bowl of oatmeal

Lunch - simple spinach salad - baby spinach, raisins and a little shredded carrot

Dinner - roasted veggies and pasta with roasted garlic and eggplant

Oven roasted veggies are super easy, and super yummy. I make a large pan of them because I’ll eat them for days. Basically, chop up potatoes, sweet potatoes, squash, tomatoes, onions and carrots - and any other veggie you might have on hand that would be good this way - put them in a glass baking dish, toss them all with a little olive oil and maybe some herbs of your choice (I used basil this time, rosemary is a favorite) and bake at 400 for an hour.

I loved the roasted garlic and the diced tomatoes over the pasta, that was absolutely great. The eggplant recipe was a bit of an experiment. Personally, I’d keep the recipe on the eggplant side but cut back on the balsamic vinegar, maybe water it down, and serve it with some sauteed spinach or some other yummy green. Recipe for that is here:

http://southernfood.about.com/od/eggplantrecipes/r/bl00810k.htm

You can substitute rice cheese (or soy cheese, though i have found the rice stuff melts better) for the parmesan, and veggie boullion works well to replace beef or chicken broth/boullion. If using boullion instead of veggie broth: don’t add salt until you’ve tasted the dish! Many times I’ve found the salt in the boullion is plenty fo the dish.

Enjoy!

I love Halloween. That’s not really cool in an ultra-Baptist Southern town but boy, do I miss making my house look scary.

All the best tricks are nearly free. See, walking a narrow path is frightening in the dark. So if you know a friend who has a tree they cut down lately, the dead branches (with rustly dead leaves) are perfect for creating a trick-or-treater cattle run. Better yet if someone dressed in black is hidden in those branches and shakes them. Cow bones? oh yes. Torches in strategic places. A handmade coffin with a masked body in it who appears dead, then sits up? Priceless.

Adolescents used to scream and grab on to each other. Kids hold Daddy’s hand really tight, and we were nice to the little kids and took the black rags off our faces.

Alas, kids here don’t go trick-or-treating. They “trunk or treat” in church parking lots. Parents dress up their cars or put up tents, and kids go around the parking lot to collect candy. Oooh. Scary.

I’m wondering if I can even dress up for work tomorrow. I was thinking of being Sarah Palin. I’m not trying to be political but the thought of someone that clueless being that close to presidency is a little scary. So is the alternative. At any rate, I look similar enough to Palin, though I don’t own the fancy glasses or a red suit coat. A green skirt suit will have to do. Can I call you Joe?

The one “safe” activity here though is pumpkin carving. Not many people here do that either (Pagan holiday! OMG!), but we get together with the neighbors, eat chili (vegan of course) and cornbread and carve away.

We never did that as kids. I love it - and the added tradition of roasting the pumpkin seeds in a little olive oil and sea salt.

The seeds are high in LOTS of nutrients, good for you on many levels. Since we hollowed out four pumpkins last night, I’m awash in seeds to be cleaned up and stored. Here’s what you do:

Dry the seeds on towels overnight. Roast them (dry, no oil) on a cookie sheet in a single layer for 15-20 minutes at 160 degrees.

Easy, huh? Much easier than my rose hips, which I need to hollow out the little seeds from the inside of, and then put back in the dehydrator. They’ve spent 12 hours in there already so the insides wouldn’t be all pulpy and I can extract the seeds easily. Ummm… Easier. Haha.

Happy Halloween!

I love the holidays.  I love the parties, the decorating, the yummy baking and good cooking and the fact that I can hide the inevitable weight gain with bulky sweaters. I love the crispness in the air, the music everywhere, and the smells of woodsmoke as people light up their fireplaces at night.

What I don’t like is the blatant commercialism of the holidays. Every year it seems the stores are putting out their Christmas trees earlier and earlier - Target had two isles dedicated to Christmas at the end of August - and I was there looking for tiki torches for a summer party! Not a tiki torch to be had, either.

All this commercialism has made the holidays a financial nightmare. It’s too easy, even on a budget, to find yourself charging $2,000.00 on your credit card just for gifts for everyone. The holidays shouldn’t be about digging yourself into debt and waking up on January 1 with a hangover and a stress attack as the bills come in.

That’s not what the holidays are about. Not that long ago, gifts were handmade - and if they were bought, there was usually one gift for each child - not 10 or more and one BIG gift.  So, as often as I can, I make presents for my friends and family. Last year I made aprons, other years I have made placemats, ornaments, painted Santa Claus figurines, formulated dry soup in a jar, and given out herb sachets. The hardest part, of course, is finding the time to do these things. I always intend to start making presents in September so I have all of December free to dedicate to baking and fun activities like stringing lights in our trees outside.

I haven’t started yet. I’ve known what I’m making for just about everyone for several months, but haven’t managed to create the time to sit down at my sewing machine and get started yet. Pretty soon you’ll see the light in my art space on pretty late at night. Come December, I’ll have the holiday music on to help light a fire under my kiester to get faster at them.

So what are you making this year?

Everybody’s talking about Wall Street.  Every morning we all read the news to find out what bank collapsed today, check on our IRAs, 401Ks and our stocks to see what kind of money we have lost now.

I feel terrible for all the people who have lost lots and lots of money lately. All the good, hard working Americans who have been dutifully giving half their paycheck to their 401K or IRA, only to be watching that money disappear now. Many of them were probably about ready to retire. We heard about all the folks after Enron collapsed and felt for them - this is bigger than Enron. Heartbreaking.

More sad are all the people who have been foreclosed on, or who have had to walk out of their homes and hand the bank the keys because they couldn’t make those payments after the rates increased on them. For many in Florida, it wasn’t just that their mortgage payments doubled, but so did the cost of insurance, electricity, gasoline and taxes. A person can only take so much.

Even my little neighborhood in my little town has seen foreclosures. One was a lovely family that was struggling after their third child was born. Now they’ve moved in with her mother, the house sits empty, and the grass is two feet tall - this is hard to see after knowing how he always worked to keep that yard so neat and tidy. I miss seeing the kids playing in the backyard, and the mom sitting on the swing on the back porch, watching them play. You don’t often see children playing outside anymore, or a parent willing to watch them. It’s just really sad.

Which brings me back to my topic. What’s all this running around for, anyway? We in this culture work hard in school so we can get a good job, where we again work hard so we get noticed by the boss and get a good raise so we can afford a big house and a nice car and all the trappings and start a savings plan and put money away so we can retire and finally enjoy life. We are barely ever home with our kids, we are barely home to enjoy the homes we work so hard to pay for. And we eat processed crap because there is no time to make a real meal. We’re tired all the time, we take Ambien to make us go to sleep and drink a quart of coffee to wake us up.

Who designed this treadmill?

A friend and I were out riding our bicycles and I was talking about how I am taking a break from doing jobs I don’t love but that pay well and instead doing things I like and being a little broke, but happy. I said I felt like life was too short to run around and work my ass off instead of enjoying life. Don’t get me wrong - I’m definitely working my ass off between four jobs, managing a garden, cooking meals, keeping house, hanging laundry on the line, making as much as I can around the house and processing food for winter. But I love it. I really do. My rewards are many - I love, love being at home. It’s all these little intangible things, like seeing how the sun enters my kitchen in the Fall, something I’d never seen before. And other things too - like the self-reliance thing I talked about a few posts ago. I don’t feel dependent on consumerism to make things work at home, I can make them.

Back to the bike ride, my friend says, you know, it took her until she was 50 to realize that she would never be a millionaire, would never have a maid to clean her home, and that life was slipping away from her. Part of the influence in her realization was her parents. They worked until they were in their 70s, planning on doing lots of traveling when they retired. They retired and… they were too old to travel anymore. All that work and saving, for what?

Which is probably what a lot of people who are sadly watching their portfolios shrink are asking too.

I’m not saying “live for today and spend all your money” - but I do think we should live a little bit, each day. I’ve realized now that I know how much I love making fresh dinners and growing my garden and fitting in that bike ride a few times a week, I just can’t get a full time job. I would die inside from knowing what I am missing.

This treadmill that our culture has created over the past 70 years - getting us off the farm or out of small towns where the cobbler fixed shoes or the baker made bread - and instead making us work for faceless companies that barely know our names and could outsource our jobs to India or China at a moment’s notice - is empty. Is this what life should be? Working our lives away and being so dependent on buying our clothes, our pre-made food (ick?), big houses, nice cars, and having to watch our paychecks go right out the door for a mortgage, a car (or two), daycare (because we have to work), lawn maintenance (because again, we have to work), a housekeeper (because we can’t work full time AND do the deep-cleaning)… is this really living?

Maybe this setback in the economy is a chance for us to re-evaluate what is important to us. Maybe we don’t need a big house. Maybe we don’t need the Hummer. If we downsize, maybe we can afford a small home and not have any payments in a few years. Maybe both parents only need to work part-time, and can spend time with the kids, enjoy the yard we mow, take walks or ride our bicycles to the store or the post office. Maybe we could help our teachers, or get involved in an aspect of the community, plant gardens or take up hobbies and sell our creations online. Maybe we don’t have to hate Monday morning anymore.

If we think about it, maybe it can be done. Maybe we can have our cake and eat it too.

Check it out, folks! The new look is definitely easier on the eyes than the previous WP skin (or was it the basic skull that was there? At any rate, it was bare bones).

A few weeks ago I bought a used dehydrator for veggies and such. After reading through the book that came with it, I must say I am so excited to have this thing! I was initially only thinking of drying tomatoes and all kinds of herbs with it, but did you know, I can make “fruit leathers” (like Fruit Roll-Ups) too? As I read, I kept getting more excited. I can make crackers. Trail mix. Dry all my herbs with no fears of mold or mildew. My own energy bars for my 40+ mile bike rides…

This thing is going to get some serious use.

So on to Expriment In Drying #1: “Sun” Dried Tomatoes.

I have all kinds of great Roma tomatoes coming in, some larger on certain plants than others. A few plants have consistently been producing fruit that isn’t much larger than a cherry tomato – perfect for slicing in half on a salad, or for drying. So as hubby and I got dinner in the oven, I set to cleaning and slicing up several dozen tomatoes. I ran the machine for about 10 hours. If course, you do have to flip the screens, and the fruit, about halfway through to ensure even drying, which involved me getting up at 3am to fulfill this task. If I were smarter, maybe I’d pick a day I was at home and do this during normal waking hours, hmmm?

Not all of them were perfectly done though. The ones that were nice and crispy-rubbery dry I put into a bag. The others were really close to being finished but not quite – those I put in a jar with olive oil, some salt, some vinegar, and some herbs and put in the refrigerator. They should be really good in a few days in some pasta. I don’t want to keep them very long out of fear of Botulism or something awful like that.

Sun Dried Tomatoes #2

This time I sprinkled some salt, garlic powder and oregano on the tomato slices before drying. They smelled fabulous, my whole house smelled like good Italian food for hours. The results did not disappoint either… WOW are they good! Hard to not sit there and snack on them like a bag of potato chips. Then again, why not?

We’ve been on a bit of a blueberry bonanza here. We’ve gone picking twice and brought home about 6 gallons worth of blueberries. Some got frozen. Some went into muffins and pancakes. A good many became jam, and the jam is disappearing very quickly. The frozen ones go into our morning fruit smoothie breakfasts: 2 bananas, a handful of strawberries and a generous handful of blueberries, 8 ice cubes and a splash of soymilk).

I’m not sure that there’s anything tree-huggery about getting your hands on all the organic blueberries you can, but it’s definitely frugal. Blueberries are EXPENSIVE in the store, which is why we never have any. They’re so good for you too, being high in antioxidants - antioxidants being the current poster-child for preventing all kinds of diseases and cancers and general aging (who knows for sure?).

Blueberry jam, odd as it may sound, is actually really yummy and goes well on just about anything. You can use the basic recipe on the sure-jell box. I’m going to experiment with using apple peel as a natural pectin for my next batch, since we’re down to one jar already. Just by making my own jam I’m probably saving us some money - at $3.98/jar at the minimum for inorganic jam, I’m reusing old jars and am only footing the cost of sugar and the electricity to boil the mess for a minute.  Once you’ve made jam once, you wonder why you’d ever buy a jar of questionable origin ever again. It’s really easy, it doesn’t take long, and the results are fantastic.

Many visitors remark, upon leaving the stuffy cars they’ve been trapped in for hours while they traveled to see us, that the air here seems wonderfully clean and fresh. I’m inclined to agree. We live in a small town that is surrounded by exceedingly rural conditions – mostly woodland – and our home is situated at the top of a hill. Consequently we are blessed with both good drainage and a gentle breeze.

It is just this air, and enjoying this air, that makes hanging the washing on line so pleasurable to me. The job is full of little pleasures, from carrying the wet linens out in an old wicker basket, to enjoying the breeze and listening to the birds while I carefully hang each item.

It also allows me a chance to really inspect the state of each article of clothing. My husband will wear shirts until they are so full of holes they are technically more hole than shirt, and so it is good for me to catch this problem before he does. Once the item is dry, I can cut it into rags (a practice he protests no matter how many holes decorate his shirts).

As I hang each item with my wooden clothespins (the plastic ones just don’t work so well) I think of my grandmother, and her mother, and countless generations of women from whom I am descended. I probably don’t hang the washing as they would. Compared to them, I’m a novice. My mother hung clothes on the line every once in a while when I was younger, and I only dimly recall that shirts should be hung upside-down and that the pins should be removed as you take things down – leaving them up is tacky (and bad for their life expectancy if left out in the rain).

I’ve found that I’m much more inclined to fold each article as I take it down than when I just take a giant wad of warm clothes out of a dryer. From the dryer, the folding just seems like this giant pile of clothes to fold, and I really have hated that part of the washing. Now though, it’s just as easy to fold the pants and shirts as I drop them back into the basket, and I don’t mind coming inside with a basket full of warm, fresh-smelling, folded laundry.

Despite the roughly ten minute time investment that it takes to hang the clothes up rather than chuck them into a dryer, it’s a great break from my computer routine to carry that washing outside. There’s something satisfying about glancing out my office window and seeing the sheets flapping in the breeze. Something old, and quaint, and a basic sign of life, and knowing that those waving pieces of cloth are flags declaring that I’m trying to do my part for the environment… and saving money at the same time.

In our consumer culture, it’s too easy to equate being unhappy with needing something. We look outside ourselves to find happiness – food, clothes, the latest toy. Many times, this just doesn’t cut it, or the joy is temporary. Now throw in frugality, and you have a starvation reflex building up. If you are cutting back on your budget or trying to live a frugal life and are still looking for outside things to make you happy, then it’s easy to feel deprived – creating a belt-tightening/splurge cycle. This is what happens when you cut back, cut back, cut back, then feel the need to “reward” yourself with something – a new wardrobe, or car, or a short vacation. Afterward, you are back on your starvation diet and feeling miserable because the wardrobe isn’t quite working for you, or the pleasure is over.

So how do you live frugally, and happily?

It took me a while to understand why I was happier in college, when I had $3 that had to magically feed me for the week, few belongings to speak of, rotten roommates who didn’t do the dishes or clean the bathroom we shared, and my idea of a good time was riding my bicycle through Flatwoods Park. I didn’t have money to go out to dinner, or to see a movie, or get myself some cool looking clothes like so many of my classmates did. But I was happy, why?

The answer was pointed out to me in Your Money or Your Life – the authors explained that there is this curve, where at some point after your basic needs are met and you accumulate your worldly possessions, that the thrill of each new thing grows less and less. You get your first car. You buy your first home, a good TV, an equipped kitchen… and from there the thrills go downhill. Another new car is fun for a week, then reality and payments set in, and it doesn’t make you happy anymore.

The trick is to learn to live in the moment. Enjoy what you have, and see the beauty of each moment of your day. It takes practice, and it took a while before I felt like I was applying it as frequently as I should. But over time, I’ve gotten better at appreciating these little moments. For example, as I type this, it’s a simply gorgeous day outside, and I am enjoying the play of light on the wood floor behind me as it filters through the young leaves of the sugar maple outside. Spring is here, and all the trees have new leaves and growth, everything is green and it’s a joy to glance out the window for a second or two as I type.

I re-appreciate my slate-tiled bathroom every morning. I always wanted a slate-tiled bathroom floor, now I have it. I enjoy watching my dog try to catch bees, or watching both dogs run and play in the (admittedly weedy) yard. I could go on explaining these little things forever – they are just little details that make me smile and be glad for the moment. I get infinitely more pleasure from the smell of the soup I am cooking as I slice veggies on our wooden board, the late afternoon sunlight catching the bottles my husband and I painted back when we were dating on the kitchen windowsill, than if I just sliced veggies for dinner because it’s one more thing I have to do. See? It’s a mindset, and it needs to become constant. You just learn to appreciate that which your senses tell you is nice in every moment. The next thing you know, you find yourself a very happy and satisfied person.

Live in the moment, and there is no deprivation.