How much variety do I usually get for breakfast, in reality? Well, honestly like everyone else, I get into a rut. I’ll have oatmeal every morning for a week and not even add blueberries to it. Many times I just slather some butter and jam on a few slices of bread, warm up water for tea and call that it. Every morning during the warm months of the year I make fruit smoothies, changing only the fruits that go in it.  How’s that for exciting? Weekends I’ll make something fancier like baking powder buscuits or pancakes, which I’ve posted all those recipes previously.

Truthfully speaking, I rush breakfast except on weekends. I just need to eat and move on with the day. I’m well aware that the first meal of the day should be big: “breakfast like a king, dinner like a prince, supper like a pauper” and all that. Still, I can’t seem to break into that. Breakfast never really excites me.

You can always add a fruit bowl to your oatmeal or cereal in the morning, variety being the spice of life and all that. However, from here on, I’m nearly out of breakfast recipes. There’s always another fruit bread or muffin, like pumpkin or cranberry bread in the Fall, or apple muffins even peach pie for breakfast.

I love pie for breakfast. Actually, nearly any dessert makes a great breakfast in my opinion. Chocolate cake is maybe not ideally health-foodie, but think about it this way: far better to ingest those calories and the caffeine in the morning when you have time to work it off during the day, right?

At any rate, I want to focus more on dinner recipes from here on - reason being, lunch is usually leftovers for me - I very rarely need to cook anything fresh, and how many people actually have access to a kitchen during the weekday?

Without further ado, today’s recipe:

Creamy Fettuccine

This wont fool anyone expecting a heavy cheese dinner. Oh no, no sir, it will not. But it will still satisfy cravings for a creamy pasta dish.

1 tsp “butter”; 1 small yellow onion, chopped; 2 cloves garlic, minced; 1/2 cup finely chopped mushrooms; 6 oz silk tofu, 1tbs white wine, 1 1/2 cups soymilk; 1/2 cup finely ground raw cashews; 1/2 tsp salt; dash nutmeg, 2 tsp minced parsley (fresh) for garnish, 1# fettuchine

Heat butter in skillet over medium heat - add onion and garlic and sautee for 5-7 minutes. Stir in wine and mushrooms.

Blend tofu, cashews. onion mixture, soy milk, salt, nutmeg in a food processor until smooth, transfer back to pan and heat on low. Serve over fettuccine.

Mushroom Stroganoff

Quinoa Pilaf

French Toast

Sometimes you can substitute an overripe banana for eggs - this works very well for cake recipes and in this case, French toast.

2-3 bananas, mashed; 3/4 cup soymilk; 1 tsp cinnamon; 1tsp vanilla; vegan “butter”

Stir bananas, soymilk cinnamon and vanilla until mixed very well (you can use a blender or food processor). Dip bread slices into the mixture, coating both sides. Fry in “butter” on a medium-hot skillet until golden brown.

I like to spread warm applesauce with cinnamon on top of mine, rather than use syrup.

Lunch: Quinoa Pilaf

If quinoa (pron. “keen-wa” is a new one for you, you are in for a treat. It’s sorta like rice, only not. This recipe atually comes off the box, is light and still filling, and pretty quick to cook up.

6 cups cooked quinoa (according to directions on box) 1/2 cup carrot, diced; 1/2 cup green onions, diced; 1/2 cup celery, diced; 2 cloves garlic, crushed; 1/4 tsp oregano; 1/4 cup olive oil; salt to taste

Sautee veggies in oil until onion is clear, then stir in oregano. Add to cooked, hot quinoa.

Mushroom Stroganoff

I have worked, and worked, and worked to make this recipe great. It’s finally at a state where I am confident enough of it to serve it for company, that’s saying a lot.

1# egg-free pasta; 1/2 cup chopped onion; 1tbsp oil; 1# “burger crumbles” (optional, I use 2 portobella mushrooms instead); 3 cloves garlic, minced; 1/4 tsp pepper; 1/8 tsp salt; 1/2 carton tofuitti “sour cream” and 3/4 cup white wine; 1# button mushrooms, sliced

Cook pasta according to directions. In skillet over medium heat, cook onion until golden. Add all other ingredients save wine and sour cream. Once reduced, add wine, sautee without lid until absorbed. Mix in the sour cream, once warm, serve on top of pasta.

Mmm bread… everyone needs bread when on a vegan mealplan. Something has to make the fruit and veggies stick to your ribs until the next meal!

Besides, there are so many yummy things you can do with bread. Smear fresh garlic and vegan butter on it for garlic toast, or toast it for breakfast, or make French toast out of it. You can pile hot food on toast, or make sandwiches.

I worked a long, long time at coming up with a bread recipe that I really like, is reliable, and makes 3 loaves at a time. You can always freeze one, or give it to a neighbor and spread the yummy goodness around. However, my recipe is not fully vegan. It has honey in it - you may use molasses or sugar instead, though you will have to play around to get the sweetness just right.

When it comes to making bread, the secret is in the rising and kneading. You must, MUST knead the dough for 8-10 minutes. I was lazy for a while and stopped when the dough felt close enough - unfortunately, you can’t get away with that every time. Also  be sure your yeast is fresh. There is nothing more disappointing than taking flat, heavy loaves of bread out of the oven rather than big, poofy yummy goodness.

A word on wheat flour: I grind my own, and I often experiment with what works best. Most of the time I use half Hard Red wheat and half Soft White, but the best is where I have used 3 cups of hard red, 2 1/2 cups Spelt, and 1/4 cup ground flaxseed, with the remainder being all Soft White wheat. For the recipe below, I’ll rely more heavily on Soft White and Hard Red. If you cannot get anything but store-bought, use more whole wheat flour than the white cake flour.

Also, whole wheat dough should be a little sticky - not so sticky that you cannot work it without getting it caked on your hands, but not so dry it doesn’t try to adhere to anything, either.

Whole Wheat Bread (3 loaves)

3c warm water (110 degrees), 4 1/2 tsp yeast, 1/2 cup honey, 5 cups Soft White flour, 3tbs “butter” or olive oil, 1tbs salt, 3 1/2 cups Hard Red, more olive oil or butter for spreading on top after baking

In large bowl, mix water, yeast and honey. Add the 5 cups of Soft White, stir, and set 30 minutes until big and bubbly. Mix in 3 thbs of butter/olive oil, salt, and add 2 cups Hard Red. Keep adding flour until you can work it on a floured surface. Knead 8-10 minutes, adding flour as neccessary.

Place dough ball in a greased bowl, cover with a wet linen towel (warm water) and let rise in a warm place to double (in winter, I set mine in the microwave, since I don’t use it for anything else). This takes 40-60 minutes.

Punch dough down, divide into 3 sections. flatten each section on floured surface to about 9×12″ and roll up tightly. Set into greased 9×5 bread pans and again let rise until the dough has topped the pans by 1″

Bake at 350 for 25 to 30 minutes. Remove from pans immediately and let cool on racks, brush tops of warm loaves with melted “butter” or olive oil.

Now you have bread - now what?

First, enjoy a warm slice of it smothered with butter about 10 minutes after you took it out of the oven. Warm bread with “butter” is one of the most wonderful pleasures of life.

Breakfast: hot toast, with butter and your favorite jam of course

Lunch: Tomato and “cream cheese” sandwiches

Dinner: Teriaki Tofu Burgers & Sweet Potato Fries

Tomato and Cream Cheese Sandwiches (stolen from www.veganyumyum.com)

2 tomatoes, sliced 1/4″ thick, pinch salt, 1tbs olive oil, splash balsalmic vinegar, tofitti’s “cream cheese” and 4-5 basil leaves

On medium heat, sautee tomato slices in olive oil. Add salt. Once starting to soften, add the vinegar and turn off heat. Spread cream cheese on bread, layer chopped basil on top, and the tomatoes over that. You may grill the sandwiches, but I’m too impatient.

Teriyaki Tofu Burgers

1# grated carrots; 1 medium onion, minced; 4 garlic cloves, minced; 1pkg firm tofu, drained and diced; 2 cups breadcrumbs; 1/2 cup teriyaki sauce, 1# mushrooms, 1/4 tsp pepper, water & oil for shaping

In oiled skillet, add carrots, garlic, onion and sautee about 4 minutes. Add tofu and sautee for about 1 minute. Transfer to a medium bowl, stir in bread crumbs, teriyaki sauce and pepper. Add water/oil as needed to shape into 8 patties.

Fry patties on both sides until crisp and brown, about 3 minutes each side.

Sweet Potato Fries

2 medium sweet potatoes, 1/4 cup olive oil, salt to taste.

Clean and slice potatoes lengthwise about 1/2″ thick. Toss on baking sheet with olive oil, sprinkle with salt and pepper. Bake at 425 for 20 minutes, turning once about halfway through.

I’m going to swap around what I’d usually have on a Friday morning for what we like on Saturday or Sunday mornings in case you need to run to the store on your way home to pick up an ingredient or two.

I confess that, on weekends one or both of us will sleep late, we’ll eat a late breakfast and then an early dinner - thus only eating two meals on Saturday and Sunday. Maybe you should call me The Lazy Vegan but seriously, one must have priorities. On the mornings where I wake up early and hubby is the one sleeping in, I usually do something bad like drink a cup of coffee as my weekend treat and that kills my appetite until about 10:30, when hubby starts to stir.

Breakfast: Vegan pancakes - there are a LOT of recipes for these on the web and in every vegan cookbook out there. Some are great. Some are awful. Seriously give-them-to-the-dog awful. I’ve tried a lot of recipes and was happy with one until somebody came up with the perfect lazy Saturday morning version. I could kiss her for this: they’re the “easy weekend pancakes” from www.veganyumyum.com. OMG. Literally, put all the ingredients in a blender, mix, and pour. No messy bowls. Just the blender to clean. *squeals*

I will say that I double the recipe. My husband can put these away in a hurry, and we usually have 2 left to give to the dogs, who really love pancakes for some reason (maybe because a lot of the rotten recipes became their breakfast). Link: http://veganyumyum.com/2008/02/easy-weekend-pancakes/

Dinner: I recently tried this recipe from another great food blog. I can’t remember if Alison is vegan or not - I don’t remember ever having to come up with a substitute for an egg and I’ve not found a meat in her blog anywhere.  When I made this particular dish, my neighbor had to ask me what on earth I had made for dinner last night, because it had smelled SO GOOD. And it was very, very good.

Wine Braised Lentils are meant to be served with mashed potatoes - and Alison includes a recipe for some potatoes that sound fabulous but require something I’ve not found in my tiny store and will just have to grow for myself sometime: parsley root. If you find it, will you send me some?

Link to recipe:

http://www.alisonslunch.com/index.php/site/comments/wine_braised_lentils_with_parsley_root_potato_puree/

I forgot to mention that the minestrone soup recipe makes a LOT of soup - I’ll be freezing half of it but it makes so much we could still take that half and eat it for lunch and dinner the next two nights.

Breakfast: blueberry muffins - this is super easy to change out to a vegan recipe. You can replace eggs with a banana (the conversion is a half a banana per egg), use soymilk to replace milk and the vegan “butter.” The result is banana-blueberry muffins but totally yummy.

Lunch: spinach salad with fresh sprouts and shredded carrot: if you’ve never grown sprouts, you should totally try it. These are high in so many nutrients and are so good for you - plus they are SUPER EASY to grow. All you need is a Mason jar and some cheesecloth under the band (no lid). I used a tablespoon of alfalfa seeds - soak them overnight in about an inch of water in the jar. In the morning, dump out the water and set the jar on it’s side in a dark place (I use my kitchen cabinet), with the seeds spread out as much as possible along the side of the jar. You’ll want to rinse them off a few times every day for the next three to four days. Once the sprouts are the size you like, set the jar (on it’s side still) in a sunnier place to green them up. You can refridgerate them from there and they’ll keep for a few days.

Dinner: I’m calling it leftover night. Tomorrow night I’ll make vegan chili and cornbread - since it will be pretty cold on Friday!

Today I felt a little lazy. Maybe it was all the rain but I didn’t do a whole lot of cooking today.

Breakfast: Fruit Smoothie: 2 bananas, handful of blueberries, one apple, 8 ice cubes, soymilk to right consistency, toss all in blender until smooth.

Lunch: leftover Tomato Rice and Eggplant mixture

Dinner: Asti-style Minestrone (from Pasta & More, Time-Life Books)

1.5 cups red kidney beans; 1/2 small savoy cabbage; 2 medium potatoes, 2 carrots, diced; 2 celery stalks, sliced; 1 cup rice; 1 clove garlic, minced; 2 tbs parsley, minced; salt & pepper to taste; 4 tbs grated parmesan “cheese” (otional)

Put the beans in a large pot, and cover with cold watr to about 2 inches above the top of the beans. Cover and simmer over low heat for about 30 minutes. Cut the cabbage in 1/4in thick strips, discarding the core. Add the cabbage, potatoes, carrots and celery to the pot, stir, and cook for 30 minutes more. If needed, add a little more water, though the soup should be quite thick. Add the rice and after 15 minutes, add the garlic, parsley. Taste for salt and pepper. Turn off heat and let minestrone stand for a few minutes while the rice finishes cooking. Serve with the “cheese” separately, if using.

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!

Dear reader, I am going to apologize in advance for this post. It is going to seem terribly un-Christmasy, unholy, dispirited, and rude.

I am sick of Christmas as it is celebrated today. For an entire month, I watched people run around like crazy ants trying to get all the presents they could (and couldn’t) afford for friends and family. They had to wrap them all. They had to mail some of them, deliver others. They had all kinds of holiday baking to do. Parties and get-togethers with their various social clubs – the children’s holiday party, the garden club, wine club, you name it – all of them have their own little party and all of them need each person to bring both a gift for the exchange and home-baked goodies for everyone to gorge on. Christmas cards must be written. Decorations must go up. Then just before the day of, everyone travels to go see family, or works hard to get the house looking spotless and themselves looking fabulous after a train wreck of a month that requires so much out of us all.

And on the day of, exhausted and bloated people watch as all those gifts are unwrapped with zeal by children who, by and large, already have a roomful of “stuff” that they have no room for, and who don’t understand the effort or appreciate another Barbie or stuffed animal – they keep unwrapping, a sort of glazed-over expression in their eyes after the third present, in the hope that the next one is the Big Thing that they wanted. Barely a thank-you passes their lips as they take off to play with the one item that worked for them.

The adults, maybe having a few morning mimosas to help them cope with the chaos, exchange pleasantries as they swap gifts – rarely, again, anything that they actually NEEDED. The practice of re-gifting exists for a reason, many of us already have too much stuff. Throughout the year, we help ourselves to whatever we perceive we lack in our homes and wardrobes – the gifts we get, typically, are not things we would have gotten ourselves, but out of guilt they will hang around our homes for dusting, or some of us will re-gift them, taking care that the re-gifted item waits a few years and goes to unrelated persons.

Have I summed up my reasons for the dislike of the season yet?

Let me now say, I truly love the idea of the holidays. I love the decorations and the idea of holiday cheer. I love that so many religions celebrate something around the same time year and that there should be a reason for celebration as the days of winter keep getting shorter and colder. It gives us something to look forward to, in theory, to help us get through half the winter with anticipation. We can get through the other half of winter anticipating the arrival of Spring. Not so bad a deal, really.

The problem is that the good cheer doesn’t exist. That the holiday centers around all this commercialism. I find myself short on sleep, harried, stressed and even grumpy throughout the month. I’m a busy person to start with, like much of the rest of the world, and throwing in all of this on top of what is my busiest business month of the year is nothing more than madness.

And so, I’ve pondered how we can make the holidays less stressful, more joyful.

The answer is only to pare down. If all of our associations and meetings didn’t have to have a holiday-centered party, it would help, wouldn’t it? If we didn’t have to buy so many presents and stretch our budgets so terribly, it would help, wouldn’t it? If we didn’t have to sit down and write a hundred holiday cards, it would help too, right?

Pardon me for seeming cheap, but I made most of our presents this year (and last year). I’ve decided that’s what the holidays were originally – you made presents. There were not piles of them unless you were wealthy. Which, we are not, and neither are most of our family and friends. Making presents takes time, more than shopping does – unless we plan ahead a little. I was able to pad presents with homemade jams and apple butter, which appears to be appreciated. If I make presents now for next year, before the weather warms and draws me outside, then I have that much stress out of the way. If I plan ahead and make extra blueberry jam for everyone, then I’m ahead. If I plant extra herbs to make herb sachets for my friends that like to cook, then all I have to do is dry them and I am ahead there too.

Gift wrap also bothers me. It costs money, it kills trees and it winds up in a landfill in massive quantities every year. I tend to like bags, which get reused every year. I like baskets, which people tend to keep or re-gift, with everything out in the open. My mother spent a lot of time one year cutting fabric in various widths to use for our family wrapping instead – absolutely brilliant. We use this fabric year after year, and it just feels special. Newspaper can even be dressed up with good ribbon – and I’ve re-used ribbon for years.

Holiday cards? I’m sending out new year’s cards this year. Knock that off the December list, and let me feel more hopeful about the coming year now that I can focus on it and not the festivities at hand. Or, just send e-cards – no extra killed trees, no postage, no guilt from the gas the postal vehicles use (if you’ve thought that far – I was just trying to survive December, everything else is an afterthought).

This of course leaves all the holiday decorating and baking and parties – but aren’t these the best parts of the season? Maybe if more people were able to start in on the holidays earlier, then more of that wonderful holiday cheer would spread and the holidays may be that much more joyful in the coming years.

Here’s to hope, and next year…

Last night I was working on my seed catalog order while my husband watched the news. I was writing out locations for each little crop when a teaser for the next segment came up talking about how the mortgage crisis wasn’t even half over, and that there was a new wave of mortgages that they had never heard of that were about to hit.

Well, I had heard of them. Why the heck was 60 Minutes (linke: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shYJ_KkbzWg&NR=1 )trying to say they hadn’t heard of the Alt-As? I’d known about them, maybe because we lived in Florida during the massive frenzy and I had seen all the ads. No money down, 3% teaser rates for three years… I had a friend go for one, getting himself a half-million dollar home while he was self-employed and the company wasn’t making any money. Another was what they called “NINJA” loans - no Income, No job, No assets - but they’d loan out the money anyway. No-doc loans - meaning you didn’t have to prove anything. I could have borrowed $100,000 on my little business, and never shown a single tax statement from the past few years.

For some reason, I had mentally put these loans in the same category as the sub-primes. Knowing the Alt-A’s teaser rates were probably coming due starting a year ago (as my friend bought his home four years ago), I thought some of these were already coming due and were part of the same crisis.

Apparently not so. And, the largest wave of these is expected to hit in 2012.

So much for a short-term crisis with a recovery in 6 months to a year, folks.

Not that I really had much hope for that. I really didn’t - I’ve been trying to brace for a depression for a few years now, but sometimes, hearing how someone thinks it will be a year helps to raise hopes a little bit. For myself, my gut instinct says we are in for the next 6 years, and recovery will be slow.

This is scary. Really scary. I have too many friends that are already hurting, people whose spouses have lost their jobs, friends who are not counted in the nation’s unemployment rate because they lost their job 6 months ago. Friends who fight about money constantly. And one friend whose 4-year-old son asked if he could get a job to help his dad make money. The same child offered up $1 of his allowance to help the family have fun on vacation. “Talk about making a grown man cry,” he told me.

I’m not saying all of this to be depressing. I do my best not to get down about the economy because there’s only so many things I can do: I can take care of myself and mine, and help whomever I can along the way. To that end, nearly half of my backyard is being turned to vegetable and herb gardens. I’m saving seeds from fruits and vegetables we buy, and I and working that clay all winter - adding everything I can to it - to make the best possible crop of veggies I can out there this spring and summer.

When I was a kid, my mother often made my clothes. Most of the dresses I wore to school were handmade. I liked this, until other students at this private school (who were probably jealous and whose parents probably both worked) said I must be poor, to have my mom making my clothes. I’m sure hearing this hurt my mom’s feelings, but she did still make some of my playclothes. I had a favorite, lemon-yellow shirt that she had copied off of another shirt that we had bought - she made it a size larger, so I could wear it longer. It wasn’t that my parents couldn’t afford to buy clothes - sewing was mom’s hobby as much as it is mine now (probably more). But it’s also a wonderful skill to have, especially in difficult financial times. Clothes now are often so cheap it’s easily worth it to go to a yard sale to get what you need - the hard part is, a lot of times those clothes originally came from Wal-mart or Target and fall apart after a wash or two. The old vintage stuff is the best - tried and true. I still wear one of my husband’s flannel shirts from when he was a kid - it survives, year after year, wash after wash.

Still, it’s good to be able to stitch together your better clothes. The coats and pants and party dresses. It’s also great to be able to make the accessories for your home. I made our curtains - all of them. I’ve made tablecloths and runners, napkins and placemats, bags and purses that never go out of style because they never ARE in style to begin with. And I never throw scraps away - there are nearly always things you can do, even with those pieces. If you can’t sew, learn. Now. Learn a new skill - knitting or cooking or gardening or something - anything - that might help you in the lean times ahead.

Hang on to every dollar you make now, folks. You may need every penny pretty soon.