Etiquette For the Recipients of Homemade Goods

You got canned goods, or home brewed alcohol, or fresh eggs; people love you. 

You bought things from a local small farmer or craftsman at your farmers' market; they didn't charge you near as much as they should have. 

Return their bottles and jars!

[Sanctimonious Statement Warning] For the most part we have become wasteful people. When it's impersonal we forget or become lazy about recycling. Let's make it personal again and give it back to the supplier to reduce their overhead. There are some obvious things that shouldn't be returned or be reused but, packing supplies and jars and such cost money and time. If I told you how much time I spend scraping labels off of bottles and jars you'd think I was crazy. For me, making jars/bottles of things to give or trade, is a labor of love. Just because I love it doesn't mean that I always enjoy the whole process. 

I am a homebrewer and homesteader so I recycle everything I can to keep costs down (I've yet to learn to do everything from scratch). Because I can't legally sell alcohol I give it away for free and take donations for supplies for the next batch. I have also trained my friends to bring me their empty bottles of wine for me to scrape, sanitize, and reuse. For the love of pete, I swear I almost never get my empties that I've painstakingly made clean and free of labels for their peace of mind! That's really what I'm doing it for, the illusion of new and clean. Never mind the 4 step (or more) process of cleaning and sanitizing (more than once) if there is even glue residue from the old label on my bottles some people turn their nose up at the chance to drink my awesome brew. I love getting new bottles...but, what I really want is my bottle back whenever possible because it saves me lots of time. 

Because I thought this post needed a picture and this was the most appropriate one I could find

I can/bottle vegetables, pickles, sauces, syrups, jams, ink, etc. and so does your friend/mother/grandmother. If that person isn't yard sale savvy, lucky, or sacrificing precious things to dark sale gods, they are spending a ton of money on jars and lids. While the jars can be reused for a long time (unless they explode) the lids and rings must be replaced every time, and that's not counting the time it takes to prep and sterilize them and all the equipment used before they put their love and food inside. Unless they tell you explicitly not to return the jars, whenever possible, you should. Common sense would dictate that if you are in constant trade with said person don't sweat it. If you aren't trading maybe you should consider it...maybe that person would really like something you make in return. Or, surprise Grandma with a box of jars...she's going to love you for being so thoughtful and just make you that much more stuff to fill them with. When it comes to your local farmer that has a licensed kitchen: ask them if they are under specific laws that prevent them from recycling the jars and if not give them back...they might give you a discount off your next order!

I'm mostly talking about food and alcohol here (because kitchen blog) but, it applies to other things too. You can return packing paper, boxes, egg crates, plastic bags, etc. If your gifter/craftsperson was inspired enough to use neat things like fabric wrapping instead of paper return that stuff if you can't use it because they probably will. When in doubt, ask. Or if they are the type of person who doesn't want to be a bother and gives you the passive kind of answer, like "oh it's really not that big a deal," you leave that stuff on their porch when you know they aren't home so that they can't argue and you know you've done the right thing.

Reciprocity isn't always neat and tidy like I propose. I've been guilty once in a while of not returning jars or making things to return in jars directly, but I try to always share with those that do so with me in other ways; and that is the foundation of community. And, while not everything I've said here may apply to your situation use that thing between your ears and come up with a solution that works for you. In other words: be canny for your canners. 

Pinterest Challenge: Upcycled Baby Gate Herb Drying Rack

I posted about a month ago about not letting cat flossing get in the way of things. By which I mean that we sometimes spend a lot of time looking at things we'd like to have or do and spend countless hours saving those ideas in notebooks or Pinterest instead of doing things. Sometimes we make excuses like not having the time (you know the stuff you're wasting pinning) and/or resources, or we make excuses about how we have more important things to do; see: flossing the cat.

If you're not already familiar with the new "recycling"  terminology I will help explain.

• Upcycled - a fancy way of saying recycled (modified) into something new, vs. recycling the materials to later be turned into something else.
• Repurposed - When you take something and use it for a new purpose. Can include repainting and Modification for completely different uses....or basically the same thing as upcycling and recycling. 

Either way, if you're looking for things on pinterest or the earth-sized-spider-feeder sometimes you need to type in the right words to find what you want. For this project I typed in "upcycled baby gate," because I had a baby gate that had been slightly damaged by dogs and the family I worked for was going to throw it out...and I despise waste. After about four hours of perusing the endless random tangents I got involved in (up to and including learning how to read Hmong so I could find better info on a really neat hat) I determined that I really needed an herb drying rack for all the herbs I was growing in the garden. I wanted something that would allow me to hang it from the ceiling and still have lots of space for drying.

Rack from the bottom now drying rosemary. None of the sprigs are tied, they are just pushed up from underneath and then pulled back down until the "branches" catch the sides of the grid.

On top of the rack some of the sprigs that were not bushy enough to hang on on their own are just laid out in the middle for drying.

Construction Notes:

This is a really low-tech design that utilized things I had laying around the house and took all of ten minutes (it took me a lot longer to blog about it). The great thing about this particular style of gate is that the frame is made of pine which is soft. I was able to quickly disassemble the gate with a saw and then sand the rough edges. Next I screwed a cup hook in each corner. I applied a little wood glue in the joints and then "lashed it together with nylon cording.

As you can see I am not an expert at "lashing" corners.

The whole rig is suspended from another cup hook in the ceiling. The suspension is two equal sized pieces of nylon cord that are looped through the short sides of the rack (folded in half and then knotting the loose ends). Both strings are then brought together and slipped on the ceiling hook.

View of one side's string

View of the pyramid the two strings create at the ceiling

So here is my baby gate rack (and I still have another piece to use for something else). Admittedly I'm so backlogged on blogging that I've lost the original link that I got the idea from. But if you are looking for other great ideas on similar repurposing projects pinterest is a great place to start. If you want to follow my board of crazy things you know what to do.

Next pinterest challenge backlog will be citrus infused vinegar cleaner, but not until I've posted all about my homemade vinegar.

Chicken updates and SNAKE!

We recently updated the chicken habitat a little. I finally got around to grommeting the tarp roof and attaching it via shower curtain hooks that I had on hand.

And In the pictures you can see that we are still employing the recycled low tech method of keeping our chickens. Their coop for roosting is a large plastic dog kennel for example. 

Bolted frame, loose wire that needs replacing, and zip ties; oh my!

It is getting near time that we consider making a new structure for them entirely. The tractor we have was a hand-me-down. It is tied together with zip ties which need to be replaced fairly often because they dry and crack from the sun. The center pole has also bowed quite a bit from water weight.

The hens like to play a game of king of the roost on top of this bucket sometimes.

I've been so busy with other projects I forgot to post my obligatory Happy-Chicken-Mama-first-eggs-of-Spring

And then....SNAKE!

This is not THE snake, this is A snake that was lurking near the perimeter.
 

Last week my boyfriend came in from the morning feeding of the velociraptors and calmly informed me that there were only two eggs today....because there is a large snake in the computer monitor, and that I could tend to that at my leisure. We have been known to have all kinds of the really nasty kinda snakes out here so I went prepared with a sword (because I'm lacking a more practical machete), and a robotic arm (because I don't own a snake stick),  and all the knowledge I have about snakes from when I used to hang out with a herpetologist years ago. By the time I got out there it had moved on so I was not able to identify it. 

We looked through pictures and as best as we can guess it was some kind of "black snake" or rat snake, and not the venomous types.

The repurposed Computer monitor complete with fake egg

The snake in question was curled up inside the computer monitor digesting his meal whilst the chickens complained in the other corner of the tractor. Two of the hens laid on top of the dog kennel later and took turns sitting on them.  We knew we would have to deal with snakes eventually so we reviewed our research and employed a strategy.

 The first stop was to the craft store to purchase wooden eggs. They cost about a dollar a piece and have more uses than just tricking snakes. We had read that snakes might grab these as an attack of opportunity vs. the actual eggs and that it would cause them digestive issues and well... what would happen if you swallowed a wooden egg whole? There is another interesting thing that occurs with the deployment of decoys: the chickens tend to lay near them. My apologies I don't have a nifty picture of this because the boyfriend was trying to be nice today and brought in the eggs for me before I could snap a shot. 

Real eggs with fake eggs

On the one hand this really makes it easier to collect eggs from my feisty girls who love to make it a hunt every day. On the other hand I'm not sure what the odds are on the snakes picking the fake egg over the real ones if they are all just laying in one convenient location. You can also see that most of our eggs are quite small in comparison to the wooden eggs which are much more duck-sized. 

Step two was to find some snake-away. We wanted to completely free-range our chickens but, found that there were too many predators in our wooded home and we just didn't want to have to keep an eye all the time or chase them around for their own protection. As a result we keep them in the tractor and move them every few weeks. During the winter they tend to stay in one place but we give them lots of straw to play in. We have a fenced in portion around the house that serves as a perimeter in case we wish to let them run or in the case of runaways when we're moving them. So we put some snake repellent around the outside perimeter. Snake  repellent may have "chemicals" or more specifically sulphur that you don't want near your chickens! Read your labels well and take precautions. We chose the most natural one we could find and we didn't put it that close to the hens. 

The black snake in the picture was found OUTSIDE the chicken area the day after the snake repellent so, I assume it did its job. We've also tried to be more vigilant about collecting eggs to avoid more losses. Some further reading indicated that having a larger quantity of chickens would be a further deterrent for snakes. I think five is enough for now. 

P.S. Dorking eggs are some of the tastiest ever!

Homemade Reese’s Shapes: A Lesson in Substitutions and Rhetorical Questions

Because you can’t mess up peanut butter and chocolate, right?

I saw a post about handmade Reese’s eggs cycle through various friends in my Facebook network and decided I had to try it. The pin, as you may be familiar with, is from The Recipe Critic blog, http://therecipecritic.com/2013/03/homemade-reeses-eggs/.

As my first pintersperiment I chose these. I love Reese’s shapes. Something about them just tastes better. They taste saltier to me. They have a more pleasing texture than the regular cups. They are pleasingly shaped. I can’t quit them.

Like the start of any well-meaning science experiment I gathered my supplies according. The only thing I did not have in stock was shortening. I chose butter as my substitution. For my second deviation I chose to make a totally different shape and used the Alien Egg Ice mold I got my boyfriend for Christmas because that’s the kind of geek I am. With this I am prepared to not feel horrible if my eggs look nothing like the picture (Hypothesis) because that is exactly how it will most likely turn out.

Silicon Ice Mold of Alien Egg Awesomeness

Birth

I created my peanut dough as per the recipe except for two things: I added salt and omitted the milk. I was also too lazy to break out the mixer and mixed it by hand. I didn't need the milk at that point as it had exactly the texture I was looking for. After evidence gathering on the blog site I determined that the milk was there to make it easier to mix and not be so “crumbly.” I did not have this problem.

I lightly dusted my mold with flour and proceeded to create little half eggs that, in retrospect, look deviously like something inappropriate (if someone had sliced it on the bottom and flattened it out). I froze them as directed and moved on to the chocolate phase.

I should add here that I have no concept of "lightly" flouring anything.

Substitutiary Fluidity

Let’s talk about substitutions, otherwise known as variables. When cooking, there are plenty of options for use as substitutions. Maybe you need to change a recipe for the sake of allergies, taste, health, or availability. In this recipe the ingredient in question is shortening. The reason for the shortening in this recipe is to create a more fluid chocolate to dip or spread over our eggs. As the Recipe Critic suggests, her recipe tastes less oily than the commercial one, so I threw oil right out of my lineup. Here is a quick guide to alternatives for shortening:

Oil – depending on the oil it could take away from the sweet. Coconut oil might be a good alternative. Oil is typically a straight measurement substitution for shortening.

Butter – you will almost always have to add a bit more butter than the recipe asks for in shortening by about 1/16^th- to 1/8^th more.

Lard – I associate this with a savory dish and not with sweet. It can, like oils, can potentially change the flavor of your dish slightly. You need to use 1/16^th - 1/8^th less than the required shortening.

And if your recipe is of the type that would be able to use it, fruit sauces or even nut butters could be used at about half the requested shortening amount. This recipe was not going to work with either of those options.

Why Not?

The recipe suggests that you might need more than one bag of chocolate chips. I have one. I have also accidentally (didn't even bother to measure) added too much butter in an attempt to make the chocolate an acceptable level of fluidity for coating. So now my chocolate is too fluid and too oily looking. With determination and little thought I head to the pantry and find dark cocoa powder. At this point you know my experiment is a self-fulfillment of my hypothesis. I also know that in terms of Alien eggs, the grittier the better, so it does not matter at all that the mixture starts to look like a mud pie I made in kindergarten and I am going to apply it to my frozen rock of peanut butter anyway. It’s not like the mold impression was going to show through the chocolate, but I will know it’s there.

Dipping the frozen eggs in my measuring cup of ill-mixed choco-mud was not feasible so I used the back of my spoon to “spread” it over all of my peanut butter eggs and soon it looked like the picture… of the egg chamber in Alien. 

Because my mixture was hard to spread, and because I realized I had no wax paper, I coated the tops and sides as best as I could and put them back in the freezer for a few minutes to set before doing the bottoms. I then got impatient and froze them again to set the bottom so I could get to the best part of the experiment: data gathering.

And now for the results and comparison poster section of my science project:

My Egg

Movie Prop Egg 

My egg chamber. Eggs shown back to back for dramatic effect

Movie Egg Chamber

More horrifying view of how quickly eggsperiments can get out of hand

How Did It Taste?

It tasted like victory and don’t you forget it. Once I realized that the recipe called for all that extra sugar I had to counteract it. By adding the salt I created a slight counterbalance and brought back some of the peanut flavor. I also like saltier baked goods so; it was win-win for me. Next by adding the unsweetened  dark cocoa powder I neutralized a little more of the overall sweetness of the mixture.

Chocoholic Boyfriend Approved

Pinter-Experimentation

First off I want to say I am not a Pinterest addict. Hand to whatever deity you pray to; you aren't either. Let’s just say I am an avid hobbyist and use it as a functional tool to store ideas for later use. Sure… that’s what we all use it for. But are we really doing anything with all those pins or is it just another time-waster list of things we wish we could do something with?

The challenge is thus: Take a pin (that will inevitably lead to 400 more pins amounting to an infinite pile of pins to choose from) and  DO IT. Make a goal schedule like, one a week or two a month, or whatever seems reasonable to you.

Warning: Do not binge pinsperiment! Don’t expect your results to be anything like the original picture.

Directions: Take pictures. Breathe. Be honest. Post about it soon after. Talk about your variations and reasons why. Laugh. Repeat.

That list was a reminder to myself… Gone are the days of looking at magazines and pin boards and just wishing I could create the lovely items within. It is time to start doing.