Zero Waste Cooking This Past Week

I feel like this week I got into a groove for being super conscientious about zero waste menu planning.  Of course it was easy this week because a lot of activities haven't really started up yet.

My delicious homemade soup, salad and yummy gluten free muffins!

                                           
But still!  For instance tonight I made homemade vegetable soup.  I used chicken broth I made myself from a chicken that served us for 2 meals (Meal 1 was roast chicken; Meal 2 was quinoa cooked up with leftover chicken and veggies).  I made the broth in the slow cooker I've borrowed from my daughter.  To make the soup, I put in potatoes, mushrooms, carrots and onions.  It was delicious!  In addition to that we had a tossed green salad with lettuce, red bell peppers, cucumbers, celery, mushrooms and green onions - all bought package free in the produce section.  We had homemade salad dressing.  And we had muffins (King Arthur gluten free - there is a plastic sleeve inside the cardboard box).  So the amount of plastic used was:

1) Chicken bought from the CSA frozen and in a plastic bag.
2) Carrots were from a big 5 lb bag.  I usually buy carrots loose but when I was at the store, their only loose carrots had these huge tops on them still which were completely saturated in water from that spray they do to supposedly keep veggies fresh.   Well, I can't figure out how to use carrot tops so that means paying a lot of money for the leafy part I don't even use.  So I opted to go with a big bag of carrots instead.  But this was unusual.
3) Muffin mix plastic inner sleeve.

Another thing I did this week was to make peanut butter cookies.  These are gluten free and almost zero waste.

Peanut butter - I took a clean jar into Mom's Organic Market and ground my own peanut butter.
Sugar - Domino's in a paper sack
Vanilla - glass jar
1 Egg - cardboard egg carton

1 cup of pb, + 1/2 tsp of vanilla + scant 1/2 cup sugar + 1 beaten egg.  Bake at 350 for anywhere from 10 to 15 minutes depending your oven, how dark your pan is and how crisp you like your cookies.

We've discovered these cookies also make good breakfast cookies.  Get your coffee in your to go mug, two or three cookies and a banana.  Nice quick breakfast you can eat in the car!

Will (a.k.a Eli) Made the Cover of the Boston Globe!

I am delighted the Boston Globe cared enough to write this up.  I'm happy my son did such a generous and brave thing - though he's says it's only medium brave, not like, super, super brave!

Check out the article.  I think the writer really got the gist of things. Here's the link. 

 

I have to admit I didn't think the photos are so great in the article.  Here we have the back of Will's head!

Lord Jesus, may your gift of faith grow stronger in us every day and find expression in all our ways of living.  -Son of the Virgin Mary, have mercy on us.

The above is one of the intercessory prayers taken from morning lauds today.  I think it sums up all the new year's resolutions burbling around in my heart and head.  I always want to make new beginnings throughout the year because I am always so aware of all my shortcomings and failures.  Even though new year resolutions are so easily forgotten, especially by me,  I still have a need to keep trying.  Like Mother Teresa said, we aren't called to be successful but faithful. 

I think the two ideas I want to focus on this year are health and environment.

Health

First:  Bodily health
Drink more clean water - this means remember to change the filter in the fridge and also to look into getting more water filters for the house.

Eat for health - this means keeping on with the gluten free and more home cooking from scratch, avoiding junk as much as possible.

Walk - Darci Isabella (a youtube channel I've been watching - check her out!) goes for a walk every single day!  And they live outside Chicago where it can be bitterly icy cold. 

Daily stretching and physical therapy exercises for all my various little aches and pains - a little bit a few times a day.

For the kids - While S has regular exercise, both J and B don't have good habits.  How can I encourage them?

Emotional, Spiritual and Mental Health
Keep priorities straight

Reduce time on internet

Connect more with people

Have a daily prayer routine

Have set times to work on outside responsibilities so they don't become these heavy mental blocks I'm so good at building. 

Have set activities to do for those who are less fortunate than I.


Environment

Keep up and build the Catholics for Zero Waste Group

Get more involved with the Care for Our Common Home

Keep trying to get better at my own household habits.

Also, for my own home - maintain it so it is a pleasant refuge for those who live here.

Work on redesigning our yard and starting raised bed gardens this spring.



I think I'll stop there.  Better to keep it short and simple! 

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

 

Michael O'Halloran - Book 33

On a whim, I decided to read another Gene Stratton Porter novel.  I've read her Girl of the Limberlost which I loved and last year I read her novel Laddie which I enjoyed as well.  So I downloaded Michael O'Halloran on my kindle and prepared to have a cozy read.  Alas, that did not happen.  This book struck me as bizarre in so many ways.

Set in the city of 'Multiopolis' which is supposed to represent any Midwestern city during the WWI era, Porter tries to to be allegorical, I think.  We follow the lives of 4 couples:  Mickey, the nickname for the title character, and the little lame girl he rescues, Lily Peaches.  Mickey is a 10 year old orphan surviving on the streets of the city by selling papers.  He's a newsie.  Then there's Douglas Bruce and his lady love, Leslie, whose father is an important man in the city but who is unspoiled by her wealth  because she gets ecstatic going out into NATURE and listening to birdsong, mostly the tamarack swamp.  Then there's James Minturn and his rich, society wife who through slavery to her high society role has neglected her children to the point of death of their youngest daughter and thereby has alienated her husband.  And finally there is noble farmer Peter and his wife Nancy who come to Mickey and Peaches' rescue by taking them from the city to the country.

Mickey is supposed to be 10 but he teaches everyone how to be better people because he is a symbol of what the author thinks would fix the world.  I found his long speeches and all the slang and colloquialisms that were supposed to make him cuter, really cloying.  The book was just too didactic and forced for me to buy into it or to feel attached to any of the characters much.  It was, though, a neat glimpse into city life around that era.  I kept picturing Charlie Chaplin's The Kid while reading it.  I noticed that several times the author talked about the evils of immigrants coming in and taking jobs from real Americans.  This era was the height of anti-immigration and isolationism (in reaction to involvement in the first world war).

While there were some charming elements to the novel, it just didn't win me over and I struggled to finish it.  I even agree with the premise that we need more appreciation for the beauty of nature and music in our lives and city living alienates from that.  But the rather heavy-handed, sentimental presentation of these ideas turned me off.

For more book reviews go to Read 52 Books in 52 Weeks.

For more book reviews go to 52 Books in 52 Weeks.

Looking Back on 2017

This seemed like a hard year, you know with Trump in office with all the political ugliness and strain that unleashed.  Then, on a more personal note, Becky getting Hashimoto's has been a real struggle because of her depression and other symptoms.  And another thing happened that I don't feel I can divulge here but which really gave me sorrow.  These things cast a pall over the year.

But good things happened too.  I decided to become more environmentally and politically active.  I stepped out of my usual safe bubble and helped get signatures for a candidate.  I joined the environmental group at my church.  I started a zero waste facebook group for Catholics, I got more involved with helping the homeless in our area.

We didn't take a big family vacation this year, but Rick and I went on a nice long weekend to Staunton for our anniversary, and then we had a surprise trip to Boston while W was getting his kidney out.  Oh and I almost forgot, on inauguration day last January, we took a weekend trip to St. Michael as well.  So that was 3 weekends away this year with Rick.  I really enjoyed those trips.  I mean, the one to Boston had a lot of anxiety and just sitting around hospital rooms, but we also got to eat out one night at a nice restaurant and we visited the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum one afternoon.  So in spite of W's surgery, we still had some fun. We've decided it's time for us to travel more.  Rick even got me a calendar as a little Christmas gift:  a 2018 Let's Travel calendar.

Some first for 2017:

I met Leonie Westenberg, a long time on line friend from Australia!  That was cool.

I made yogurt for the first time.

I saw Man of La Mancha for the first time.  B was in that production and it was very well done.

What else happened?

Dylan turned two this year..  He loves to dance to Barbara Ann and Surfin USA both of which he can request by name.  We broke out the old Signing Time dvds and we are all learning or relearning sign language along with him.  And he's getting potty trained!  His mom is still trying to find her way, but she's such a help to me in terms of housework and now she's driving.  Oh yeah!  We got another car this year.

Sean became my 4th graduate from home school high school.  He attended the Berklee 5 week in the summer, but decided not to audition to the school after all.  He's teaching himself code and has been designing games as a hobby recently.  He's getting really good at playing the harmonica.  He got a job at Chipotle.

Joshua finally got around to taking an accounting class and discovered he liked it.  Something Rick and I had been saying for years.

I started watching lots of homesteading videos and I find them engaging and relaxing.  I love the whole subculture.

I got more involved with actually being a guardian to my sister Eileen.  I found us a new lawyer for her and we even went to court to change our guardianship arrangement.

On more of a downer note, our cat Milky passed away this year.  And when I went camping with the AHG troop at the end of September, I hurt my knee so badly that pretty much all of October hurt!  We are still trying to get B stabilized with her Hashimoto's.  That's an ongoing thing.  Trying to be gluten free and zero waste is an up hill battle due to the fact that I am so crazy busy and not at all naturally inclined to do lots of home cooking. But I'm trying to change things.  I honestly can't wait until I am no longer teaching at the co-op.  It just doesn't fit with me anymore.

Granddad has terrible balance and keeps falling.  He was just in the ER last week.  Now he and Peggy are thinking of moving into a retirement home and thankfully they are looking at ones much closer to us.  Granddad would get upset that we didn't visit him often but to drive to north of Baltimore and back in this area's traffic meant that pretty much the whole day was shot.  Now if they move closer we really can visit more.  So that is a good, late in the year development.

2018 will be my last year of homeschooling (well, 2018-19).  And it will be the year of my 30th wedding anniversary, God willing! (I had to say that just in case I jinx things and we wind up in a car accident or get cancer or something. . . .oops maybe saying that jinxed things!)  Anyway, Rick and I are thinking about taking a grand trip somewhere next fall.  That will be fun to plan.

And we are going to concentrate on fixing up our yard this year.  That is a worthy project that I am looking forward to as well. 

I am ready to ring out the old year and ring in the new!  I plan to roast chestnuts and drink sparkling apple cider and be in bed by 11:00 p.m. 

To Do List

Christmas Day is over.  Today is the feast of St. Stephen, the first martyr.  So a blessed day to you all!  I am typing this on my new laptop.  I'm having the usual problems getting used to it.  This Dell seems to require a lot more passwords to things.  Also, I can't figure out how to download my photos from Christmas.  I also got a new phone, but the phone is an Apple.  So basically I switched from Apple to non-Apple for my laptop and from Android to Apple on my phone.  And I am very confused now!

The day after Christmas is always a relief to me.  It was a lovely day and if I knew how, I'd load a little video of Dylan playing with his favorite new toy, a noisy little train that runs around a track.  He was completely entranced by it!  Hannah and Peter were here all day.  This is the first Christmas we've spent with them in 5 years.  So that was nice.  Hannah did much of the cooking which was great because I was feeling fairly flustered about it all.

Sean got a new harmonica, Becky got a banjo ukulele, Sean also got a steel drum.  Lots of music which is always fun. 

It was a rough couple of weeks before Christmas.  Becky and Josh both got the flu really badly.  They are slowly recovering.  Will has been recovering from his surgery, but that is also slow going.

Today:
Clean kitchen (not quite clean from yesterday)
Breakfast for folks
Buy pet food
Envelope stuffing for Family PASS
Call vet to get cat medicine
Read a lot
Clean something else in the house
Research reverse osmosis water filters
Contact subs about getting my books back
Dinner?
Does S work tonight?

I'm sure I'm missing something!

Reading Challenge 2018

By the time 2017 ends, I'll have read 34 books.  I'm finishing up a book by Gene Stratton Porter right now.  I'm finding it kind of bizarre so I'm struggling to finish it.  And also I still, if you can believe it, have about 50 pages to go in City of God by St. Augustine.  I HAVE to finish reading that by the end of the year.  I just gotta.  I'll be so depressed if I don't.  I began the year doing an on line group read of that book and I stalled out in the middle of it and have been trying to finish it ever since.  This year has not been an especially good one for reading.  I spend way too much time on line.  So one of my New Year's resolutions is to curtail the time on line and spend more time reading.  Also, I think 2018 will get easier for reading because I am planning to not continue teaching at the co-op next fall.  So beginning in May this year, I'll have more free time.  And hopefully my 19 year old will finally get his driver's license this Christmas break and eventually my 16 year old will also get her license this year.  This will free me from lots and lots of driving I've been doing.  The older I get, the more draining I find driving to be.

Anyway, Simpler Pastimes alerted me to this 2018 book challenge.  I still plan to try for the 52 Books challenge as well.  I tried to do the bingo challenge hosted there and I do believe I failed in that.  The problem was an awful lot of the categories were fantasty/sci fi related and I just am not a fan of either of those.

1.  A 19th Century Classic - I still have one more book to read by Nathaniel Hawthorne and then I'll have read them all.  So The Marble Faun for this category.

2.  A 20 Century Classic (must have been published at least 50 years ago) - no clue yet.

3.  A Classic by a woman author - perhaps The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.  I think that might be the only Bronte novel I haven't read?

4.  A Classic in Translation - I think I am going to tackle Dostoyevski this year.  I am thinking of trying to listen to the Brothers Karamozov on audio this winter.

5.  A Children's Classic - my son who is recuperating from surgery mentioned that one of his friends came over and read Rootabaga Stories by Carl Sandburg out loud to him while he convalesced.  I thought that was pretty charming!!!  So maybe I'll read Rootabaga Stories for this category.

6.  A Classic Crime Story - no clue yet  (ha ha - no clue!  Get it???)

7.  A Classic Travel or Journey - no idea but I am excited about this one!

8.  A Classic with a Single Word Title - Ruth by Elizabeth Gaskell

9.  A Classic with a color in the title - I've never read The Red and the Black by Stendhal, so perhaps.

10.  A Classic by an author who is new to me - ????

11.  A Classic that scares you - Long poetry tends to scare me.  What if I tried to read Ovid's Metamorphoses?

12.  Reread a Classic - leaving this one open.