It Begins!

I don't feel like I've been a very good gardener of late. I hardly ever walk out to the garden, mostly because it doesn't matter. Nothing is growing anyway; it's either dead or stagnant. But here I find myself, suddenly, on a Sunday morning in January, feeling like I did in summer when I was engulfed in gardening to dos. I'm the first one up in the house, I have my coffee, I've already eaten breakfast and now I'm pouring over my seed box and cross-referencing my garden plan to make my list of Spring seeds to buy today. This afternoon is the official start of the 2011 garden. Onion seeds are going in the window*!

Yesterday we went out for brunch and sat outside in light jackets and had sunshine on our faces. It felt and smelled like Spring. It is almost trickster February in Portland. It's always so nice in February, sunny and mild. Then March comes and it rains again until June. It really is an evil month. This whole seeds starting + relatively warm temps + occasional sun is setting me up for some severe Seasonal Affective Disorder come March.

*I had wanted to get a real seed tray with lights going, but suspected I wouldn't get around to it in time. This fall though, I'll be starting my cabbages and broccolis under lights.

Attack of the Ants.

In one of what will likely become many posts about household items we are starting to produce ourselves I would like to share the latest experiment: Homemade Ant Bait. Since I started making my own laundry soap and cleaning solution (we've settled on a vinegar solution for general disinfecting spray) I really want to make as many of these household products as possible. One, if I make them myself I know exactly what's going in them, usually a mixture of vinegar, baking soda, borax, or castille soap. Two, if I make them myself it costs pennies compared to buying something in the store pre-packaged of said product. This is very true of ant bait.

Our house gets infested with ants on a regular basis. They are the little black ants, so they don't bite, but they are very annoying and are probably slowly eating away the walls of my house. I used to live in a rental about six blocks away from where we are now and I had the same ant problem there. Anytime it rains a lot or is hot outside the ants come inside and they are everywhere. Not after anything in particular, just wandering around on the kitchen counter, the cabinets, the floor, the bathroom sink, the back of the toilet, the medicine cabinet, my toothbrush! Eggck!

We have been using little ant traps since we moved in and buying a new set every few months. When we were at the store last weekend, though, and went to grab some ant bait we looked at the box. It was a liquid you put on little tabs of paper and hide around in the back of cupboards. We looked a little closer and saw that the only active ingredient was Borax. The box of ant bait cost $3.50 for probably a 2 ounce vial of liquid. Literally next to it on the shelf was a 76 oz. box of Borax for $4.50. Borax is also used in lots of household cleaners and detergents as well, so it's not just a one-trick pony.

Mike made up a batch of homemade ant bait last night. It was nothing more than diluted sugar water with borax. In an old glass he mixed the sugar water and added 1/4 tsp. of Borax. This was enough to make about a pint of liquid. Total cost of homemade ant bait: $.50. (Cost of Borax used: $.00026, the cost is almost entirely sugar.) Total cost for the same volume of ant bait bought at store: $28. That's some good frugality there!



Then he dipped cotton balls in the solution and placed them strategically around the kitchen. We also have a gallon sized ziplock filled with pre-soaked cotton balls ready to put out when we notice more ants.

Now, the question is how effective is it? Well, here's one of the cotton balls this morning. So far so good! I'll let you know if we see a decline in the indoor ant population in the next few days.

Tex-Mex Fix.

On Sunday night I must have been feeling homesick for Texas because even though I had little energy to do anything during the day I somehow churned out a from scratch enchilada plate, Tex-Mex style.

I made a double batch of tortillas so we can freeze some for convenience later. I'm starting to get used to doing this now that I've made tortillas several times. Mix Masa with water.

Knead for 5 minutes on a dry surface.

Roll into balls like Play-Doh.

Press and cook over high heat on a griddle for delicious homemade corn tortillas!

I also made a classic chili gravy sauce. I moved away from the chili gravy and over to verde sauce as a pre-teen, but I still remember the taste. This sauce brought me back to sitting in El Matador after church on Sunday eating cheese enchiladas in chili gravy and looking at the murals of the Matadors on the wall, the sticky plastic seats, the smell of frying chips and the pralines in the white paper sleeves you got on your way out the door.

The black beans I made previously and pulled out of the freezer a few hours prior. I think the freezing process makes these beans better. They mush together more and it's just delicious.

In the end this may not have been the healthiest meal in the world, but everything was made from scratch. No preservatives or strange additives and I'm pretty proud of that.

My bike story.

I've fallen behind on the Bold and True series, but better late than never!

I am very passionate about cycling as an alternative means of transportation. I never could ride my bike anywhere as a kid; we lived too far from anything and there were busy country roads surrounding our neighborhood. It never really occurred to me to consider cycling as a way to get around. Even when I started college and left my car behind I just walked places and it never once entered my mind to get a bike. In some of my college days in Austin I borrowed bikes and rode around by campus, which was super fun even in the heat of summer. It was freeing. But it didn't really stick in any way. It wasn't until I moved to Portland and had a cheap hybrid bike of my own that I started really noticing cycling infrastructure and using a bike as an alternative to my car.

I started playing games with myself when I first moved here to see how long I could go without driving my car. I would ride my bike where I could or walk or take the bus. It was the first time I lived someplace that gave weight to cycling as an option. Suddenly that busy street that bordered my neighborhood, that in any other city would have prevented me from riding somewhere, had a separate bike lane. Less than a mile away was a neighborhood shopping district with retail, restaurants, pet store and grocery market. My needs were all close. Not that much further by bike I could reach larger grocery stores, my bank, farmer's markets, gyms and just about anything else I could think of. Geographically Portland is pretty compact and housing prices don't vary that much from city center to suburb so it's easy to live within a few miles of downtown. Since I moved here five years ago I've never lived further than three miles from the city center.

I went for a while without a bike after that cheap hybrid. I moved to LA and bought a fancy car in the meantime. It was such a necessity there. As soon as I got back to Portland I wasn't sure why I had that nice car. Eventually someone had stumbled upon some bikes and I rode around a bit on the borrowed bike. I was hooked almost immediately. It also helped that this was just about the time gas prices were starting to skyrocket and get over $3 a gallon for the first time and pushing upwards of $4. I went out and bought myself an old Schwinn off of craigslist and starting riding my bike to work a few days a week and riding around town to save gas. I dropped 20 pounds in a summer when I went from car driver to bike rider. I'm sure it helped that my bike weighed 40 pounds on it's own. I also worked with a lot of people who rode as well. Suddenly it was the normal thing to go out after work with co-workers and you all rode to the pub together. If someone was driving it actually threw a little muck in the works.

After spending almost a year on my tank of a Schwinn I bought a shiny new bike. It opened up a whole new world of possibility. Suddenly those hills I avoided weren't that bad. It's amazing what more than five gears and an aluminum frame will do for you. I almost tried cyclocross, which some of my friends are in to. I chickened out at the last minute because I was afraid I was going to break my arm. Then, two months later I broke my arm. I was on my way to work heading through a lighted intersection with a bike lane (painted bright green for visibility no less) when someone coming the other direction went through the light without looking and hit me. As I was flying through the air I remember thinking, well, this is my day to get in an accident.

Accidents happen and when you are exposed against a metal box with a couple hundred horsepower the results are not always so pretty. I knew this would happen to me one day. With so many cars on the road it was only a matter of time before I was hit; it was just matter of the severity. My elbow essentially separated from the rest of my arm and I fractured my kneecap. No head injuries though - helmets FTW! I had to have surgery to fix my arm. Before I went in they told me it would be one pin to hold the elbow part of the bone in place. As I came to from surgery they said, "OK, so you have a plate and seven screws in your arm now.". Apparently once they got in there it was a teensy bit worse than they thought.

I eventually healed and got back to being active, although this is an ongoing struggle. There are things I still can't do without residual pain. I can make it through a yoga class just fine, but if I do too much on my knees I can feel it by the end of the day. I have some dull aching in my arm lately; I can only assume this is the meteorological 'benefit' to my accident that everyone keeps telling me about. When it rains I'll feel it in my bones now. I have a nasty scar. It turns my stomach a little when I catch it in the mirror. I can't put weight on the incision; the bursae is inflamed and tender. I don't know if that will ever go away. It is a reminder every day of what happened.

Which brings me to my point. I hate cars. I hate cars for so many reasons. Not only are they bad for the environment, expensive, a symbol of the greed-culture that we live in, but they are boxes that keep you enclosed and immune to a human experience. One of the reasons I love biking is that you are face to face with your fellow commuters. There is no window barrier blocking sound and sight. You are standing next to someone and often conversation develops. Sure, it's small talk. "Nice day, isn't it?", "I like your bike," etc. But it breaks down those barriers and suddenly the world becomes a much smaller and less scary place. In your car you become immune to that and for a lot of people suddenly that means they don't have to follow normal social guidelines. They can be assholes and almost kill you or cause you to be in an accident and it doesn't matter. They do things they would never do face to face to someone. I've done it before. Tailgating someone, slamming on your brakes because someone cut you off. Not until I got out of my car and onto my bike did I get free from that kind of disassociated anger. It's so much more real to me now.

I could list article after article of cyclists who have been hit by cars and left for dead on the side of the road. After my accident I really had to evaluate how much I loved and believed in cycling as a form of transportation. When it comes down to it, it's something I love to do, it's healthy, it's environmentally friendly, it's cost effective. The only downside to riding a bike is cars. And it's not even so much the cars, but the drivers of those cars who lose their connection with the world when they step into their metal boxes. It's my lack of faith in humanity that really scares me about riding a bike. When I thought it about it I realized that I can't stop something that means that much to me just because I don't believe in the goodness and responsibility of other people. I have to do what I think is right and what I love, even if it scares me most of the time.

Since my accident I have been incredibly jumpy and paranoid. I still have a hard time getting out there. But each time I do I feel a little bit better about it. Each time I get home unscathed I feel a small victory inside me. And each time I get to roll down the street with the wind in my hair and if I'm lucky a little sunshine on my face it makes it worth it.

My brief history of German bread.

I've found a new hobby. Genealogy. I signed up for ancestry.com and I got hooked. I was curious, mostly, about my mother's side of the family. A distant cousin on my dad's side compiled a family history genealogy book back in the early '90s so I am fairly familiar with the history of that side of the family. My mother's side on the other hand I knew were from Kansas, but that's about all I knew.

From the part I have uncovered so far I have learned that the vast, vast majority of my heritage consists of wealthy, land-owning, English yeomen dating back as far as the 12th century. Almost every single line I trace back ends with the founders of Salem, MA (no witches yet), the founders of Boston, MA, generations of Medieval English knights, and Medieval families whose surname is that of the town they hailed from. That is all lines I have traced back, save one. All this ancient English blood comes through my great-grandmother's line. If I take my great-grandfather's I find myself on the German-Dutch border in the mid-1800's with a line of Swarts who ran a small family-owned bakery in Mittling-Mark, Germany. I found a distant cousin who has done a lot of research on the Swarts and has a flickr account with old family photos. There were even pictures of the old grain carts and tubs once used in the Swart bakery, now converted to flower planters.

I have to admit that I think this is pretty damned cool. If you know me, you know I am a bit of a German-phile. I am always trying to keep up on the language (though I have been waning of late) and obviously I love baking. One of the reasons I have always said I loved kneading dough and baking bread is because it makes me feel connected to generations of women behind me. But now I know it's not just the women behind me, but the men too. The whole family of bakers.

So, this weekend I wanted to do a little honor to my German baking ancestors and make a German bread. I found a recipe for pumpernickel out of a cookbook I haven't used before, so it was a little bit of a gamble. It started with a mixture of rye (2 cups) and white flour (6 cups), caraway seeds (4 tsp.) and salt (2 tbsp.).

It called for 2 and a half tbsp. yeast, which is more than I would ever think to use for a recipe.

It also called for caramel color to give the pumpernickel it's distinctive shade. I didn't have any of that, but there was a note that said you could make your own.

I made the caramel all right, but the recipe said the dough should now be "chocolate brown". It was not. Anyway, with the caraway it's really more of a rye. From this point on I stopped calling it Pumpernickel and just settled on Rye.

So, on with the rye bread!

After about 2 hours of rising the dough was just about to burst forth from the bowl.

I divided it into two loaves and let them rise in pans for another hour. Then I baked at 350 for 45 minutes.

The result is a very pleasing rye. It's Mike's favorite rye so far. I'll keep it in the roster, but next time I'm doing a real pumpernickel with molasses and everything.

Yeast.

I'm baking today. It's a pumpernickel (that doesn't look very pumpernickely). I'll be posting a photo log of that when it's done. But, I used the last of my active dry yeast for it. Now the question: Do I buy more yeast? Or do I start going au natural and making everything with homemade sourdough starter? It's a big cliff to jump off...

New Soap.

I started making laundry soap a while back. The first batch I made was a powdered soap. It seemed to work fine, but it was more clumpy than powdery and I worried about its dissolving abilities in the washing machine. Though I never saw any spots or clumps stuck to any clothes or left over in the basin once a cycle was done. Either way, it wasn't cost-effective. It required the use of castille soap, while an awesome soap and multi-functional, is a little pricey. This new mix equals >$.05 per load. I'd say that's pretty damned frugal.

It's recipe #7 off the list. I only made a half batch to start. It was surprisingly simple. For some reason before making it I couldn't get my head around cooking soap; it just seemed like it would be so messy. I was, of course, neglecting to remember that it's soap. When I was done I just had to rinse. I grated half a bar of soap and dissolved it in water, but didn't boil. I had another pot of water heating on the back burner that I was adding to my bin while I was dissolving. Then I added some washing soda to the water until it was dissolved and added the soap mixture and stirred it all around. When it cooled we ended up with this awesome gel-soap. I feel like my clothes are cleaner and smell a little nicer too. That fresh smell is from the bar soap addition, I'm sure. Check back in a few more years and I am willing to bet I'll be making the bar soap that goes in here too.