I hope everyone had a nice Thanksgiving. We went up to the Berkshires, which always gives us an excuse to spend time outdoors hiking. Here are some photos from the weekend.
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Taking Time to Spin
I am part of a spinning group that almost never meets. In between meetings my spinning wheel has the tendency to gather dust. Spinning is a very relaxing, meditative activity. It is something you can do while catching up with friends. I was really happy that we were able to meet before the holiday nuttiness began. It had been a while since I worked on my wheel and I ran into a few snags while plying my yarn, but ultimately I was able to finish spinning and plying the merino/tencel yarn that had been on my wheel for almost a year. It’s a 2-ply yarn that will make a lovely shawl or something else lacy. I spun it in a fingering weight yarn.
Here’s wishing everyone a happy Thanksgiving. Don’t forget to take time to relax with family and friends and enjoy each other’s company.
Fall Bike Ride
The weekend before last weekend (I’m about a week or so behind because of being buried in work) we had the most spectacular Fall weather. We needed to be outdoors in nature immediately and decided to go bike riding up in Dobbs Ferry, NY. They have a public trail that follows the route of the old Croton aqueduct. Although Dobbs Ferry is quite near the city, we haven’t spent any time there. It is a very quaint town with very interesting architecture. The homes range from pretty to spectacular. We had to pull off the trail to see the most amazing house. It looked like Willie Wonka lived there. I had to accost strangers on the trail to get more information on it and was told it was called the octagon house. Take a peek at this link to see some interior views. It’s really amazing – especially the dance room! I’m going to have to read more because I have no idea why there’s a phrenology model with the other photos.
It was nice to ride through the woods with the gorgeous fall foliage. I loved that this trail runs behind, and in some cases, through huge estates. Public access!
Here are some photos of the day.
How to Make Sauerkraut
I learned how to make sauerkraut in a workshop given by Sandor Katz. You can see his book Wild Fermentation in my booklist on the right. What I learned is that it is probably one of the easiest things you could make. So go ahead and impress all of your friends by making some.
What you need:
A variety of vegetables – You can go with just cabbage, but in the workshop Sandor used all kinds of fall veggies. I made a batch like that before and it came out delicious. In this batch I used a head of cabbage, a few giant carrots, a few radishes (the gorgeous finger-like ones above) a couple of turnips, an onion and some bok choy. It’s a great way to use up fall veggies from the farmer’s market or your CSA.
Slice and chop up your veggies. I shred the cabbage and bok choy and cut everything else about 1/8″ thick. Place them in a large, non-reactive bowl and add a lot of salt. For this amount of veggies, I added 3T of salt. Then you knead the salt into the veggies to break down the cell walls and start drawing out the moisture. I’m not sure if you can tell from the photos, but the veggies are starting to get wetter as I go.
Once you have a fair amount of water, you want to put everything into a jar or crock to ferment. I use a big Ball jar. You have to really smush the veggies into the jar and press down on them very firmly. Add all of the liquid as well. I got a huge bowl of veggies to take up about 6 cups of space in this jar. As you push, the liquid rises above the level of the veggies. You want this to happen. Keep the veggies pushed down under the surface of the water. I don’t have a fancy sauerkraut pot (yet), so I put a glass on the top, which weighs the veggies down.
You don’t want to seal the jar, but you do want it covered. Wrap a cloth or paper towel around the top and secure with a rubber band. And then you let it sit for a week or so. Now you have to de-program your brain and let this sit out unrefrigerated. It will even emit bubbles, which made me surprisingly squeamish the first time I did this. The length of time it takes to ferment depends on how warm it is and also how strong you like your sauerkraut. My batch is ready to bring up to my in-laws for the Thanksgiving weekend.
Buy Nothing Day 2011
In the same vein as my last post, here’s a link to info on Buy Nothing Day, which is Nov. 25th in N. America. I’ve been thinking about how to acquire less and reduce the amount of clutter in my home. Not buying anything is a great and obvious first step. I’ve been knitting away, making gifts for friends and family. We have a few sets of babies coming soon who will need something warm to wear. Baby clothes are a great way to make something cherished, and to use up the odd balls of yarn I have in my stash.
Being Frugal vs. Hoarding?
When does being frugal turn into hoarding? I keep coming back to this question lately.
Both my husband and I tend towards being pack rats. I think it’s my European roots, but I hate throwing perfectly good things away. It just seems so wasteful. We both like to hang on to things that we think may be of use down the road. We don’t have drawers of used nails, or twist-ties, but things get crowded quickly when you live in a small space.
We have a technique we use to get rid of “perfectly good” junk. We hang it on the fence outside our apartment building and usually within minutes it is taken. It makes me feel good that that item isn’t being carted off to a landfill. But we still have clutter. We don’t have stacks of newspapers piled up on our floor, but we do keep a section to use to start our bbq. I don’t have mountains of craft supplies, but I usually have what I need to start a project on a whim. I am slowly trying to weed out books we haven’t read in years, but I like to hang onto my reference books (canning, chicken keeping, cooking, nature guides, etc.)
I can’t figure out how to live with less stuff without throwing things out and then having to re-buy them later. Certainly the obvious answer is to not buy things later. Learn to live with less stuff. See The Story of Stuff, which is a great video. Having a kid adds to this stuff exponentially. My daughter is constantly being given gift bags at parties and school, which are filled with cheap plastic toys. This stuff makes my skin crawl because it is fodder for landfills. Zerowastehome’s blog details how she has taught her children to refuse these things. I admire her, but I’m not quite there yet.
I know I hang on to things for sentimental reasons as well, but I think that’s what makes a house a home. Personal items that mean something to you. A friend of mine who has a very uncluttered home once said to me that she would come here to help me de-clutter. She would hold something of mine up, I would tell her the story about it, and then she would throw it away.
And, honestly I know I’m not a hoarder. I had a relative who was and it goes far, far beyond having a messy or cluttered home. It’s just in reading about the approaches psychologists use to help change the behavior of hoarders that I see similarities:
- Make more reasonable judgments when deciding if an object is worthy of keeping or not.
- Learn how to make quick decisions on whether to keep an object or toss it.
- Practice discarding items while sorting through the intense emotions they trigger.
I guess my dilemma is how to keep this stuff from making its way into my home in the first place (Just yesterday I filled a giant recycling bag of paper – mail and school papers). And how can I get rid of it in a way that doesn’t lead it straight to a landfill? And am I a “normal” person who just lives in a tiny space without much storage? Or would I just fill my attic and basement with stuff if I had an attic and basement?
What’s a girl to do?
Halloween Repurposing
This summer my daughter was a flower girl at a friend’s wedding. The dress was pretty, but not something she would ever get to wear again. It’s the kid’s version of the bridesmaid dress.
I was happy when she decided to be a vampire, zombie flower girl for Halloween for a couple of reasons. It was her first scary costume. And we could turn the dress into this…
A friend who works in theatre helped us zombify it. All we had to buy were the accessories (teeth, basket, tights) and we were done. This dress is a wonderful addition to Lindsay’s dress-up bin, where I know it will get tons of use.
We haven’t sent photos to the friends who had the wedding…
Greenwood Cemetery
Contrary to what you might think, Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn is a lovely place to spend a fall afternoon. We decided to go there this weekend to see if we could find any hen-of-the-woods mushrooms. These mushrooms grow under oak trees in the fall, and I thought there would be many old oaks there. I was right, but the place offered so much more.
We saw the fabled monk parrots when we first arrived. Their story is that escaped from a container at Kennedy airport and have taken up residence at Greenwood. You can see photos of them here.
We actually saw very few mushrooms considering the vast quantities of rain we’ve had. There were a few hen-of-the-woods, but they were old and woody and uprooted. I think the groundskeepers are too efficient to let big mushrooms grow there. But the day was beautiful and it was like walking in a lovely park.
Making Fruit Vinegar
I am in the midst of making my first batch of fruit vinegar. If it works out, it will be ridiculously simple. You just take some ripe or even overripe fruit, add sugar water and wait. I’m going to see how it turns out before I post a recipe. My elderflower experiment wasn’t the success I had hoped it would be.
My Apple Harvest
If a reader hadn’t asked, I might have forgotten to post about my little apple tree. In the early spring I posted about trying to pollinate my Sundance apple tree. I pruned branches from another tree and put the branches near my flowering tree in the hopes that the bees would do the cross-pollinating. You can read about the process here. The good news is that it worked and I had 5 apples growing on my tree. I don’t have any experience with dwarf apple trees, so I don’t know if this is a decent number for the first year of fruit. I also wasn’t familiar with this variety of apple, so wasn’t sure how it would look when the fruit was ripe. This apple is one of the 5 from my tree. The fruit is sweet and crisp and delicious. I’ve always dreamed of having a small home orchard, and although 5 apples is a laughably small amount, it is a beginning.