Suzie,
I dropped some firewood by your fire ring. Hope that’s ok …
Mike
the fisherman
This made me happy. Thanks, Mike. Anyone want to have another fall fire with me?
{neighbors}
1
Tag Archives: voluntary simplicity
{how to make} Sumac Tea
Sumac has something of a dangerous reputation. Turns out, the red berries are just fine for making a tart tea or wild juice. It’s high in vitamin C, so drink up. Just don’t make this with white sumac berries — that’s where the bad rap comes from and trust me, it’s easy enough to tell the difference.
What you need:
- 6 or so clusters of wild red sumac berries
- pitcher or other container
- water
- thin cloth or coffee filter
- optional: maple syrup, honey or sugar
What to do:
- Put your berry clusters into the container and cover with cold water.
- Crush the berries up a bit.
- Let sit until the flavor is right for you (20 minutes to a couple of hours).
- Strain.
- Add sweetener if you like.
- Enjoy!
{how to make} Dandelion Wine
The dandelions are out! This means spring and, what is becoming one of my favorite springtime rituals, dandelion wine.
I came across the recipe a few years ago in (the unfortunately defunct) Arthur magazine. Until this time I had thought dandelion wine merely poetic myth — so of course I had to try it. Turns out it’s a fun project and a great wine to share with friends over the winter solstice (after it ages).
As an added perk, dandelions offer a variety of health benefits, reports Nance Klehm of Arthur. “Consumed, they are a magnificent digestive, aiding the heath and cleansing of the kidneys and liver. Amongst vitamins A, B, C and D, they have a huge amount of potassium.”
So if you can hunt down a gallon’s worth of chemical-free dandelions around town, get pickin’.
What you need:
- 1 gallon of freshly-opened dandelion flowers (rinsed)
- 1 gallon boiling water
- 4 oranges
- 4 lemons
- 4 lbs. of sugar. This is a lot of sugar. You can get away with using a little less if you’re not going for high alcohol content.
- Yeast. A teaspoon or so will do the trick but if you want to use a whole packet of bread yeast, that works too. Note: don’t use brewer’s yeast. It doesn’t work and you’ll end up with a moldy batch of sugary tea.
- 1 slice of stale bread
- Optional: cloves, stick cinnamon or powdered ginger
What to do:
- Make dandelion tea. Pour boiling water over your dandelion flowers and let steep until blossoms rise (a day or two). If you’re experimenting with added herbs (cinnamon, cloves or ginger), let them steep with the flowers.
- Strain the liquid into a big glass or ceramic bowl, squeezing every last drop out of your flowers — that’s wine in there.
- Add the juice and zest of your lemons and oranges
- Add your sugar and make sure it’s dissolved and mixed in.
- Sprinkle your yeast onto the stale bread and let it float on top of your wine-to-be.
- Cover with a thin towel — it should be able to “breathe” but you want to keep critters and dust out.
- Stir daily (at least). You can also taste it to keep tabs on how the fermentation is coming along.
- When you’re pretty sure it’s finished fermenting (roughly a couple of weeks, but this varies depending on temperature and altitude), strain and pour your wine into some freshly washed wine bottles. Stick a cork in it and hide it away until midwinter!
Adventures in Urban Composting: vermiculture
I have a small apartment with virtually no yard. And truly, I don’t think my landlord is down with adding a permanent “lawn” fixture that appears to be a trash can (and is in fact filled with decomposing organic matter). Plus, I wanted my compost to turn to dirt faster than once a year. Call me impatient, but they say with a worm compost you can harvest fresh soil every 3 months! Thus, it was my fate to create an indoor worm compost.
I chose to do it myself, short of digging up the worms (I might be dedicated to d.i.y. but I refuse to be the crazy woman out digging for worms in the city). For that part, I found an adorable local flower shop, Amelia, selling red wigglers by the pound. They very kindly did the digging for me while I looked at their pussywillows and admired the resourceful ladder-shelf.
Worms in hand, I headed to the nearest hardware store to find 2 opaque, 8-10 gallon storage bins with lids. They look something like this:
And forty dollars (worms + bins) later I was ready to start drilling.
Here’s how: Drill 20 holes at the bottom of each bin, big enough for the worms to crawl through. Around the walls of the bins, drill more holes. These should be too small for worms to crawl through. Drill 20 holes like this in the lid as well.
Shred enough newspaper to generously cover the bottom of the bin. Wet it and squeeze out excess water (you want it damp, not wet) and put it in the bin. Put your worms in with just a little food to get them started.
You have the beginnings of your compost!
Watch to make sure it doesn’t get too wet (or dry) in there. Signs of too much water include mold, fruit flies and condensation. If this happens, let it air out for awhile and, if it’s a recurring problem, drill more holes. Signs of too dry include worms dying or trying to escape (though this can also happen if it’s too wet). Just be attentive and you’ll be fine with happy worms and — soon — dirt!
Adventures in Urban Composting: a rough guide to choosing your compost
Deciding to compost is the first step. Picking the right compost for your lifestyle is the second, possibly more confusing step. After choosing one for myself, I made this flow chart (yes, me) to help you (yes, you) find your perfect fit.
Stay tuned for the next (com)post, in which I’ll reveal the compost I picked and how I made it.
Adventures in Urban Composting: preamblings
Every time I clean the bathroom at work I see it. A little sign declaring, “Waste is a choice.” This sign, small and below eye-level as it may be, haunts me.
In context the sign is simply saying, “throw your paper towel into the compost rather than the trash.” Innocent enough.
Lately, though, every time I see it I imagine myself at home, throwing my apple cores and broccoli peels into the trash.
I don’t compost. I wish I did.
I grew up sorting my compost — my mom wanted the rich soil for her gardens. I’ve lived in and worked at places where others have taken the leap, yet I go home and make excuses for sending carrot tops and garlic peels to the landfill. There, they decay amidst other trash, rendering them useless and creating methane, a potent and extra-villainous greenhouse gas.
No more excuses. I’m gonna do it.
But how?
Here is my first resource: Urban Homestead. It’s a book, but the people who made it also have a website.
Second resource: composing how-to from Eureka Recycling
So now I’m off to do research and collect ingredients. Be back soon to get things started!
{how to make} Yogurt
Yogurt! So smooth and soothing, delicious sweet or savory. Use it like sour cream, but get the health benefits of probiotics. What an amazing food. And it’s easy to make yourself!
What you need:
- milk
- a little yogurt for a “starter” (1 T for every 2 cups of milk). Once you’ve made your first batch you can use your own yogurt to start future batches.
- a bowl and a cover (lid, plastic wrap, cloth)
What to do:
- gently heat the milk until it’s warm to the touch
- pour into the bowl
- whisk in starter yogurt
- cover
- let sit in a warm place for 12 hours or until the contents move as one
- refrigerate
- Enjoy! For best results, don’t stir!
Diary of a Winter Biking Virgin: last days
In case you didn’t notice, it’s spring now.
Spring has its own tricks and traps. The mornings are icy and very slippery, the afternoons and evenings are muddy and very messy. At all times there are pot-holes, which are dangerous for bikes and bikers. But the sun is feeding us hope and we have the energy to live again.
This will probably be my last post. I always thought I would sum things up with the positivity of bike commuting and my general feelings of success and radness. While the act of bike commuting has been overwhelmingly positive, I would say that there are parts of my life that were changed by it somewhat negatively.
I could no longer drive to visit family members 50 miles away. While I could bike there (and have in summers past), it’s not practical to make a day trip. I’ve been seeing less of my parents, sisters and nephews. I don’t think this would sit as sharply in my heart, but in the past couple of weeks my father nearly died and was subsequently hospitalized. I am borrowing a car to be able to see him in the hospital, and I feel fortunate that I’ve been able to.
I hate to go all indie film on you and fill this ending with contradiction and uncertainty. I guess those filmmakers were right when they told us that real-life issues don’t reach resolution in an hour and a half — or even a winter. We tried to make the best of hitting a deer and now I’m questioning whether we made the right decision. We’re not in control and I’m not sure there are any right answers.
I’m still biking though. Since my sister and I are sharing the borrowed car, each of us ends up biking to or from the hospital with some frequency.
I still love being on the bike. I still believe it draws me into the city and allows me an intimacy I couldn’t otherwise access.
Tonight I rode home as the sun descended. It was easy to sense that the fleeting evening light in my eyes was the end of a day, a small part of a lifetime. I went a little out of my way to ride by some old haunts. I wasn’t as interested in reliving memories as I was in seeing who was there now, how things may have changed. 
To my surprise, things looked very much the same. Yet I no longer belonged there. I was the one that changed, simply by growing older — hopefully growing in every sense of the word.
Time passes, lives begin and end. All we can do is appreciate moments of beauty, show gratitude, cultivate love and try to grow.
{how to make} Kombucha
As promised and at long last: the post on making your own kombucha. Hurrah! You can save a lot of money this way, if you’re a kombucha addict. Also, it’s fun.
What you need:
- 1 gallon of water (distilled is good but if your tap water is tested and safe, use that)
- a big pot
- 1 cup of sugar
- 8 bags of black or green tea. If using loose tea, 4 tablespoons (a quarter cup) will do the trick. Use simple green &or black tea. You don’t need fancy blends and definitely no herbal tea!
- a big glass bowl: large enough to hold your gallon of tea. Other shapes can be used but a high surface-to-volume ratio is desirable for fermentation. Try to find something at least as wide as it is tall. Always use glass. Kombucha is acidic and toxins from ceramic, plastic and types of crystal will leech into your “healthy” drink.
- A “mother,” also known as a SCOBY (symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast).
No no, not a Scooby! Although, it does look a little like a monster and you might find your self singing, “Scooby Dooby Doo, where are you?”
Here’s what I’m really talking about:
It can take awhile to track down a scoby if you want one for free, but it can be done. I paid for my first one. Now I know that anyone who makes kombucha has a new scoby every couple of weeks. I gave them away to friends, family members and strangers who posted scoby-wanted ads on Craigslist. You might also find one through the Kombucha Exchange Worldwide. If only I had known!
The nice part about building a kombucha community is that even when you lapse from making the stuff for awhile, you know someone who can give you a mother when you want it again. It’s kombucha karma, I suppose. You give it away and it comes back to you again.
Now I suppose you want to know what to do with all of this stuff.
What to do:
- boil your water for 5 minutes
- add the sugar, stir until dissolved, boil for a few more minutes
- add tea, turn off heat
- cover and bring to room temperature (an ice bath can help if you’re impatient)
- put some fermented kombucha (comes with the scoby) in the glass container, swish around
- pour the tea into the container (make sure it’s about room or body temp (slightly warm to the touch at the very highest)
- place scoby on top
- pour the remaining fermented kombucha on top
- cover with cheesecloth, paper towel or other breathable fabric
- let ferment! This will take about two weeks. Taste it!
- At the end you’ll have a baby culture and some nice kombucha to drink
- bottle
- save a culture with a cup or so of kombucha for your next batch
- start again!
Essential Oils {101}
Essential oils are the volatile essences of plants extracted using steam distillation. They are known for their pronounced scents, but retain other properties of the plant in concentrated form as well. Essential oils are powerful. Except in rare and specified cases, do not apply them directly to the skin or household surfaces. Dilute them in water, oil or baking soda (depending on what you’re using them for). You’ll probably only need to use a few drops at a time.
Basil: repels insects.
Cinnamon: antiseptic, repels insects.
Citronella: repels insects
Clove: antiseptic
Eucalyptus: disinfects and clears stuffy sinuses.
Grapefruit: antiseptic
Lavender: anti-bacterial and generally calming. Used in easing depression, anxiety and tension. Repels insects. To treat insect bite or sting (or plant sting), apply 1 drop of lavender oil directly on the bite or sting every 5 minutes. Stop after 10 drops.
Lemon: degreaser with refreshing scent. Long used for that “clean” smell.
Lemongrass: repels insects
Lime: degreaser and general cleanser.
Orange: degreaser, can alleviate depression and fatigue.
Peppermint: degreaser, refreshing, also used to alleviate depression and fatigue. Repels insects.
Pine: degreaser, disinfectant, also used for signature “clean” smell.
Rue: repels insects
Tea Tree: anti-bacterial, anti-fungal and effective against some viruses.
Thyme: antiseptic and repels insects
White Cedar: disinfectant, uplifting scent.