My Really Good Goals for 2011

Posted by louisa on Monday 3 January 2011 in meta | 10 comments

I have set myself a list of goals for the year ahead – written up on my personal blog because they’re not all simple/DIY living related.

I did the same last year and found it useful – even if I did pretty much mentally abandon some mid-year. The most useful ones that weren’t a specific tick-off-done goal but one’s that helped shape my whole life – for example, I had a goal of “make a meal entirely out of things I’ve grown, raised, caught or killed” and in order to achieve that, I grew veg & herbs, raised chickens for the eggs and foraged for wild food.

My list is very simple/DIY living heavy this year! Here are the relevant ones:

• Increase the food output from our garden and cook a meal using things I’ve grown/raised/caught/killed completely off-grid
• Learn how to successfully take and propagate cuttings from every applicable type of perennial plant/shrub in the house/garden
• Make a piece of furniture for the house (woodworking)
• Make an entire outfit (to include conquering sewing patterns)
• Go fishing in the North Sea
• Buy no more than 12 items of clothing across the year*
• Specific food makery and/or eatery (because if I did them all separately it would take up half the list)
• Bake at least once a week
• Grow a sourdough starter and make bread from it
• Make a hard cheese
• Try ten vegetables (or veggie wild foods) that I’ve not tried before
• Build a cold smoking cabinet, try cold smoking more stuff & try hot smoking too
• Participate more in the real world – engage more with our local community and meet some internet people in real life

(* I’m going to explain this more fully tomorrow)

There were a few things I also really, really want to try but I didn’t think warranted goal status on that limited list:

• Keep records to track our usage of consumables – I mean, I want to know how many toilet rolls we use in a month, how much soap, how long it takes for us to get through a 10kg bag of rice etc. I might record absolutely everything we use for a month or so, and use that hardcore exercise to decide what is worth tracking longer term
• Have regular “eat only from the pantry & garden” weeks in the spring/summer, probably once a month
• Have more conscious “no spend” periods – minimum fortnights, possibly months, throughout the year
• Find a solution to the dog poo problem – something more useful than a cork up Lily-dog’s bum. Probably a dedicated wormery.
Collect and store more rainwater for use on the garden – we can’t use the main gutter at the back for rainwater but could still collect off the greenhouse, from a gutter at the front and possibly off the extension area too. To be explored and implemented.
• Make my own soap – something that’s been nagging at me for a little while
• Make my own vinegar – for some reason, I have a really strong desire to make pineapple vinegar (probably the efficiency of using up the scraps)
• UPDATED TO ADD: Make conscious efforts to reduce food waste at home – probably a period of monitoring it closely to see what we throw out (which I’ll post on here) as well as better menu planning.

It seems like 2011 will be a busy one!

I’m hoping that the last goal – getting to know more people locally and meeting internet buddies in real life – will help me meet some of my other goals — I’d love to find mentors for some of my learning-new-skills goals. If you fancy mentoring me, let me know! :)

What have you got planned for 2011?

2010 – A Really Good Year

Posted by louisa on Friday 31 December 2010 in meta | 2 comments

Everyone else is doing end-of-year round-ups and it’s inspired me to do one too. Feel free to skip if you don’t like introspection ;)

While my life as a whole has been up and down (mostly up but some deep downs), 2010 has been a fantastic year from a simple/DIY living point of view.

Growing

Our first growing season in our new house, this year was one of experimentation. We had fresh produce from the garden from March through to October – and have a cupboard full of preserved goodies as well as potatoes in store. I’ve written about our growing successes and failures before – our overall output was disappointing but my, my, I learned so much. I’m pretty jazzed by the potential of what we can achieve now we know more about the conditions etc.

Chickens

Our first four chickens arrived in June and we got another four (which soon depleted to three) in November. They’ve been ace!

They’re a lot of fun – such personalities! – and the egg output has been awesome. From the day they arrived in June until the middle of December, the first four provided about 3.6 eggs a day (ie, most days one each but sometimes just three between the four of them) – they’re still laying now just less than that (especially as one has entered an early moult). The new girls have yet to start laying but hopefully they’ll start soon – and that’ll provide cover for when the rest of the originals going into moult.

Aside from the extra winter workload, I’ve been stunned by how little work they are – food & water are topped up once a day (they always have more than enough), quick visual inspection of the coop every day-ish (remove any giant piles of poo/top up straw & shavings as appropriate) and a full clean out once a week. It’s an hour a week in total, max. I do typically spend more time with them though – because as I said, they’re so much fun. Their arrival has been one of the highlights of 2010 for me.

Cooking

Baking bread in the winter – how do you do it?

Posted by louisa on Wednesday 22 December 2010 in cooking, frugal | 11 comments

We’ve got out of the swing of baking bread recently – partly due to general winter lethargy and partly due to the fact that we’d struggle to get yeast do its thing.

It would be very difficult to grow a slow rise bread – one that needs a good 12-18 hours to rise. With our woodburners in the office & living room, we get a room temperature of 16-18C (60-65F) for a few hours during the day but for the rest of the time, it is much lower than that. The kitchen is poorly insulated (it’s an addition away from the main body of the house with lots of windows and a hard-to-insulate flat roof) so has frequently been see-your-breath chilly (especially last week when the central heating was out and it was even colder than normal). Opinions differ on the ideal temperature for yeast activity but it’s typically seen as 25-35C (75-95C) – we don’t even come close to that. (Admittedly we rarely come close to that even at the height of summer but it’s warmer, and more consistently warmer, than it is now.)

I’m loathed to use the (electric) oven as a warming box – not only would it be using energy, it would need a lot of management – turning it on and off – since the temperature setting doesn’t go anywhere near low enough for the oven thermostat to manage it. And 12-18 hours of that sort of management isn’t realistic.

Lethargy aside, we would like to get back into baking bread ASAP – it would save a lot of frozen-faced walks to the shop and, of course, shops are going to be closed over the next couple of weekends anyway/out of stock because of snow issues.

We could possibly manage some shorter rise time breads when a woodburning is running – leaving them for longer to account for it still being a bit cool – or even, if I had to do it, in the oven. That’s not out of the question, I’m just a sucker for slow rise bread: I haven’t perfected a non-slow rise loaf recipe yet and I suspect now might not be the time to work on one!

Are you still baking bread at the moment? How are you managing? Have you got any suggestions for things I could try? Or got a fool proof pretty-quick-rising loaf recipe?

Spicy stuffing with chorizo recipe

Posted by louisa on Tuesday 7 December 2010 in cooking, recipes | 0 comments

At the end of last week, we bought a chicken. We don’t eat that much chicken really and when we do, we tend to get on-offer pieces so I’ve probably only roasted whole chickens a dozen times or so and they’ve been ok, good even, but not great.

This time I decided it was going to be great. I decided I was going to try one of those “stuff a lemon up it” recipes but when it came to it, I didn’t actually have a lemon – and was too tired, post-dog icy walk, to go to the shop to get one.

So, I thought, what else can I STUFF in there instead? What do other people use to STUFF chickens? What sort of things do people use for STUFFING chickens? I think my brain was having a bit of a lazy Sunday afternoon because it took me ages to realise what I was asking.

There are loads of recipes out there for sage and onion stuffing – the good old failsafe – but as I said, I wanted it to be great so that wouldn’t cut it. As may not be a surprise to the observant, we were going for a spicy rub for the chicken and I wanted a stuffing to complement that. This is what I came up with.

Chorizo and chicken go really well together. There isn’t enough chorizo in it to overwhelm the meal but enough to give it a delicious, smokey taste. The pepper adds sweetness and the chilli, unsurprisingly, adds spicy heat.

John said it was the best stuffing he’d ever eaten. The chicken was pretty ace too – a longer marinading time would have added to the flavour but it tastes good and was wonderfully moist. Basically, WIN.

Quick Spicy Tomato & Lentil Soup recipe

Posted by louisa on Tuesday 9 November 2010 in cooking, recipes | 1 comment

Spicy tomato and lentil soup is a great, hearty soup, which can be made quickly & simply – and from cheap, store cupboard items. As a result, it’s one of my favourite emergency soups when we need something quick and warming – it only takes about 30mins from start to finish.

The observant may notice a pattern with the things I cook. What can I say, we love spice-inspired endorphins. ;) Again though, like with the spicy butternut squash soup from a few weeks ago, for us, this is more flavourful than highly spiced – easy to add more for head-exploding spiciness though.