Ordinary Time

Food is really one of the joys of summer, isn't it? In the past few days we have enjoyed salads completely from the garden, we picked the most cherries from our trees since we planted them, and the hens are going all out in terms of egg production.  (These were from several days; we'd let them pile up a bit.) Strawberries are ripe this week, but I don't know if we're going to get time to go picking this year. Of course, once you pick a bunch of fruit, you have to do something with it. I know I don't have time for that. Maybe I just buy some already picked to enjoy fresh. I also noticed that the black raspberries are starting to grow, but we probably have another week before they're ripe.  The perishable nature of summer fruit, though is also a problem. With pears and apples, they can sit around for a bit if I don't have time to do something with them immediately. Summer fruits? Not so much. And that is all I have for you tonight... my musings on future guilt...

I've written a lot over the years about homemaking and choosing to stay home to raise and homeschool my children instead of taking a paid job outside the home. For the most part these are older posts, written before social media influencers were even conceived of, much less being such a societal force. And they were definitely written before the whole trad wife thing. Sometimes when I notice older posts are being viewed, I'll go back and read them to see what I said. Sometimes current me needs to chime in, particularly on parenting posts, to explain I know more now and don't listen to clueless younger me.  Recently, I've been seeing those older homemaking posts having a lot more views than is typical. I'm thinking current me needs to go and add some disclaimers lest anyone mistake my writings as being in support of patriarchy and the less than healthy trad wife thing. Because I'm this my thinking hasn't changed, but how I might now go about wording it would ...

I've written about this probably more than once over the years, but it might be time to revisit it. I'm still managing to keep our weekly grocery budget under $200 for eight people. That's with 90% of our groceries being purchased at Aldi. Not included in that number are trips to Costco, which are probably once every five weeks, an occasional bulk order, and the Chinese market. At Costco I buy paper towels, toilet paper, tissues, olive oil, peanut butter, some seasonings, mayonnaise, honey, and sometimes sun-dried tomatoes. That total is usually around $125. I tend not to buy much food there because often it costs more than at Aldi. The Chinese market I go to every couple of months where I stock up on ingredients that are impossible to find at my regular stores. This total is also around $125. The bulk order happens when I need more wheat or oats and I'll throw some other baking items in as well when I'm ordering. Figure around $150 for that depending on the price o...

With everything done for the Artisan Market and two last napkins to hem, I now have enough time and brain space to deal with the aftermath of Thanksgiving. You're probably thinking that is just a lot of picking up and laundry. While I do have laundry... all tablecloths are washed, two are ironed, and I hope to get to the linen napkins next week.. that is the easy part.  What is far more time consuming is dealing with the turkeys. Yes, that's plural, as in three. The actual turkey is long gone. After Thanksgiving we had many sandwiches, turkey pot pie, and turkey soup. Y. used some of the very last of it to make herself some turkey and mushroom jiaozi. But there are still the bones. Bones make great stock and I never throw them out.  Today turkey #1 was officially finished. I canned five quarts of turkey broth and froze 2-1/2 more quarts.  I would have canned seven quarts but there was an incident. As the canner started to come down to no pressure, I started hearing concer...

As I was moving laundry around today I noticed something on one of the sheets in the dryer. I took a closer look to see why the nearly white sheet was purple. Here's what I found.  This is the bottom sheet of a much loved and used set of Pokemon sheets. We all know that children's sheets are made out of less than stellar fiber woven at a low thread count. They were not designed to last, especially bottom sheets.  It seems at some point a child wanted to use the sheets, discovered a tear in one, and proceeded to mend it. This filled my heart with a little joy today both because it wasn't thrown away, and a solution was thought of all without involving me.  Looking a little closer at the sheet, I think I may have to do a bit more significant repair work to keep it from shredding completely. But I do love the fact I'm only now discovering it. 

I went to the grocery store (the not Aldi one) for just a couple of things such as toothpaste. I came home with a little meat because $0.99/pound is my stock up price.  Of course, there was always the vague question in my mind if I would be able to find room in the freezers for it all, particularly the turkey. But I managed. And make no mistake, this ability to stock up on meat at a very good price is privilege. You need both enough discretionary income so that you can spend what ended up being quarter of our usual weekly grocery budget on meat I don't need immediately. And then you need to have the extra freezers in which to store it. This is how I keep our weekly grocery budget to reasonable amounts, but if we were living closer to the bone we wouldn't be able to take such advantage of really good deals. 

A stable where P. works has a lot of pear trees which produced a lot of pears. I had her ask if I could collect some. This is why I had a half bushel of pears taking up space in my kitchen for the last two weeks. Not only did I need to wait for them to ripen, but I also needed my bulk order to come in so that I had lids. Part of the order I picked up yesterday had canning lids... 120 of them, so I should be set for a while. With lids on hand and pears that were definitely ripe, today became a canning day. G. did all the prep work which was enormously helpful.  I ended up with six large (~quart size) jars, which all sealed. I realize six quarts is a lot of pears, but given how large the basket was, it seems as though there should have been more. I had a brief moment of wondering why I didn't bring home more pears. G., however, having done all the peeling and slicing, thought the amount we had was sufficient. I think somewhere in my genetic background some ancestor must have survived...

I have a half bushel of pears getting riper by the moment in my kitchen. I need to find some time to get them into jars. I have canning on the brain which explains this post.  Since I do a lot of canning and write about it here, it seems like a good thing to share some safety information. Botulism, that would be the scentless and tasteless bacteria which can grow in jars that have not been correctly processed is deadly. Really, it's not something you want to mess around with. And this is one of those cases where the Internet is both bad and good. Good that it allows people access to recipes and practices that have been tested and proven safe. Bad because not everyone realizes that using these recipes is important and that anyone with a camera and social media account can share misinformation.  First up, let's talk about Roboseal. This is a vacuum sealer that removes air from dried foods in jars and prolongs their shelf life. This is fine, but it seems that there are other voic...

Let's talk about food and grocery shopping again. It's one of those topics which fascinate people in regard to large families. I know this because it is one of the usual questions I get when people find out how many children we have. And even just with six children at home now, that is still more than is typical. There are two other reasons, though, that I want to revisit this topic. The first is my grocery bill this past week and because I recently finished reading Ultra-Processed People: The Science Behind Food That Isn't Food by Chris Van Tulleken.  [I realize that a definition of ultra-processed should be added here. It is any food that contains ingredients that you wouldn't find in your kitchen or have names you don't recognize and cannot pronounce.] Before I begin, let's just address the elephant in the room and that is that RFK, Jr. has a vendetta against ultra-processed food. Frankly, the man is a loon and shouldn't be in charge of matching his own s...

I'm two-thirds of the way finished with reading, Ultra-Processed People: The Science Behind Food that isn't Food by Chris van Tulleken. It is a fascinating book and so much more than just about ultra-processed food. It has history, human biology, brain science, and sociology. While I will probably write more about the ultra-processed food bit once I finish it, I came across something this afternoon that I wanted to share with you in terms of adoption. "Flavour signatures of particular smells and tastes also allow us to identify food from our cultures -- historically food we would know to be safe. This learning starts before birth. Julie Mennella at Monell Chemical Senses Centre did an experiment examining how food choices during pregnancy influence future flavour choice. During the last trimester of their pregnancies, participants drank a big glass of either carrot juice or water for four days per week for three weeks. They did the same thing while lactating. Then, as the ...

Today was pickle day. G. and I made ten quarts of dill pickles and five pints of bread and butter pickles. Plus, they all sealed! We still had some cucumbers left, so at some point I'll make and can some sweet relish. I did save some brine from the dill pickles if there are still some cucumbers left after that. I used nearly three gallons of white vinegar today.  I also juiced another 24 cups of choke berries. I think I have one more batch to juice and then I can make jelly. Fascinating times over here, but it keeps me sane because I can't really focus on all the bad stuff.  And for those who read to the end even when all I wrote about is endless canning, a brief update on how the community college classes are going for everyone. The shirt answer is they are going well for everyone. What has been interesting is all three have come home saying they are the only ones who answer questions in class. (They are all in different classes.) I'm fact, Y. came home and announced her m...

It's the end of the growing season, the country's descent into hell in a hand basket is speeding up, and I have a bit too much free time due to not enough clients this month. All of that together is a recipe for me to engage in an obsessive canning and making fest. The making end I shared yesterday, so today it's canning. The direct correlation between my existential dread and preserving food continues.  Yesterday, I popped over to my favorite family run farm stand where I know they sell in amounts suitable for canning. (Remember the corn ? Same place.) I wanted to see what was on offer because the pantry was bare of Dilly beans and dill pickles, with the bread and butter pickles running low. I was in luck and bought 25 pounds of beans and two packs of pickling cucumbers. With G.'s help, we did all the beans today. Those 25 pounds of beans ended up making 13 pints of Dilly beans with enough fresh beans leftover to have with dinner.  Only one out of the thirteen didn...

The first item is canning. Last weekend I went to my favorite farm stand to get some sweet corn for Labor Day. My choice was to get two dozen ears (which is what I went for) or a bag of over five dozen ears and not quite half the price per ear. Guess which I picked. It was a lot of corn. So everyone are their fill, but we still had quite a bit left over.  This was not all of it. That evening, my first plan was to find a spot in one of the refrigerators to keep it (it was all blanched) until I could tackle it later in the week. Not surprisingly, it didn't fit in any refrigerator. So I. and I found ourselves cutting corn off the cob on Monday evening. I ended up with 18 cups of really good frozen sweet corn.  But wait, there's more! Eight cups more to be exact. This I set aside to make corn relish with. This is what I did today because I was worried about it going bad before I could get to it. I'm happy to report that all six pints of corn relish sealed. Items still on my can...

When the apple trees are dropping apples and you have to grab the good ones while you can. If you want to can apple pie filling, that is. This is because only evenly shaped apple fit in the peeler/corer device and I really don't want to peel dozens of apples by hand. So this morning H. picked, G. spun the apples through the peeler/corer, and I took off any last bits of peel and blanched them. We'd done twelve cups of peeled, sliced, and blanched apples by noon.  Then I spent about four hours in the after turning them into pie filling and canning it all. I ended up with 13 pints of caramel apple pie filling to store. Well, there are 13 pints sitting there. I actually ended up with 9 pints to store because four jars didn't seal. The masses are thrilled because this means I need to make pie this week to use them up. I am not thrilled because I really wanted them all for later and making pies was not on the week's to-do list. It really seems as though the failure rate for B...

This morning I finally finished bagging up the last of the frozen blueberries. As I was working on it, I realized I thought U-pick places such as the one J. went to with the masses was a good deal, but I had never actually done the math. And to clarify, they picked at a place where you just pick the fruit. There are no activities or petting zoo or concessions. The commercialized places are rarely a good deal , plus I find them tedious and annoying. But as usual, I digress. All this to say, I actually did the math when the blueberries were back in the freezer.  The total amount of blueberries frozen was 44 cups. We baked with and ate at least six cups, plus J. and everyone baked and ate probably another six cups. I'm going with 56 cups of blueberries total, but that is probably a little low. I did some math and learned that we paid $1.25/cup of blueberries. So that seemed like a good deal, but I wanted to be sure, so I looked online at frozen blueberry prices. Our local chain grocer...

Since H. and R. had picked so many apples on Friday and they were covering most of our counters, it was time for J. to begin his cider pressing activities. He has kind of fine tuned the process this year to make it more efficient. This is a good thing because the apple trees are loaded. Step one is to grate the apples in a food processor. The next step is to press them with that guillotine-shaped thing there in the center of the table.  J. has it set up so that it has a jack pushing down a block of wood inside the strainer which is holding the grated apples. The key piece to this is the paint straining bag that holds the apples inside the strainer. It is so fine that only cider can come out. Plus they're cheap and washable.  The strainer is sitting in a foil pan with a spout cut out of it. In probably about an hour J. processed all the apples that had been picked and had about two gallons of cider. These early apples that he's using are pretty tart which makes a great tasting ...

I was taking a weaving class for much of the week and tonight was the Inclusive Game Night that our church hosts once a month. This means I don't have a lot of extra energy for writing. The weekend also promises to be busy, so I'm not sure you should expect too much for the next couple of days, either. Maybe Monday things will go back to normal and I'll have brain space to write.  I did get some nettle leaves dehydrated today, though. 

A long while back, Y. had mentioned that she would love to be able to just pick different ramen from the wall of ramen at our not-so-local Chinese market, so that was one of the gifts we gave her for her birthday... a ramen shopping trip. Her birthday was in February. Sometimes the stars just don't align easily, but today I rectified this and we had our shopping trip.  She knew what kind she wanted so opted for bigger packages of those. I'm pretty sure one of those is blisteringly hot. They did get carried up to her room to ensure their safety in the face of the swarms of locusts which inhabit out house.  I also did a bit of stocking up. I have been reading about tariffs and supply chains and what not, and it suddenly occured to me that a good portion of our regular pantry staples are Asian products imported from various Asian countries. A moment of panic seized me that I would either not be able to find or afford our usual items. So...  Pretty much all those bottles came...

You all know that I really don't like to spend a lot of money on food, so it's probably not terribly surprising that I find the idea of foraged food intriguing. I actually have a pretty good sense of what wild food we have growing on our property, but what to do with that wild food isn't quite so clear, such as stinging nettle. This seemed like a perfect excuse to get some books. (Though isn't everything the perfect excuse to get books?) I was spurred on to acquiring these books because the tons of stinging nettle we have growing by the creek was coming up and I wanted to do something with it other than make tea or in a pasta sauce. Here's the first of several books I've found.  It's a beautiful book with interesting looking recipes, though probably a bit heavy on the mushrooms for some of my children's (and my) taste. It was Y.'s night to cook and she was game to try the nettle recipe.  It tasted pretty darn good and we will make it again. But I don...

It took a while before the Trad Wife label made it into my consciousness. Much of popular culture tends to bypass me, and I think it was one of my children who first brought it to my attention. Curious, I then had to look it up. My immediate reaction was not positive, but there was no blog post about it at that time, because I needed to come to terms with it all. This was mainly because on some superficial level, my life and those glossy social media Trad Wives were kind of the same. I knew they weren't, but I truly didn't have words to explain the difference.  The library to the rescue! A while back, I came across the concept of Radical Homemakers. this sounded promising based on what I read, so I put the book of the same title on hold. And waited and waited and waited, until yesterday when it finally arrived at me library. And while I've just started reading it, I think this is my answer. From the introduction: "Some of the Radical Homemakers I came to know professed...