Ok Ok Ok. So I've been at a professional conference all week, and I haven't been stellar about doing daily tips every day anyway. Soooo, I'm going to change the term to quick tip and get them up as often as possible. Life has a way of getting in the way. So onto the tips.
So the last post was about vinegar. There are in fact several other condiments you can make for yourself and cut out the middle man. The simplest is probably mustard. Buy some mustard seed (NOT Ground, trust me on this. You really don't want to grind the mustard before making your mustard). Now put the mustard seed in a sealed container with vinegar overnight. This is why you don't use ground. Were you to grind it right away it would be REALLY hot mustard. The soaking mellows the mustard's spicy sharpness considerably. I've always eyeballed this, but I figured for this post I'd get some ratios for people. 5 tablespoons to about a half cup of vinegar is pretty good. You can go any vinegar for this, the home made from the last tip is nice. You can mix in other stuff like wine or probably even beer. The trick is to keep it at least half pickling quality vinegar. The recipes I've seen say this keeps for 2 weeks. That's hogwash. I've talked with people who make mustard and have checked on this. As long as your liquid is at least 50% pickling quality vinegar then you're dealing in microbially hostile acidity levels. If you use all vinegar honestly it keeps . . . well practically forever in the fridge. I recommend making batches of the stuff and keeping it in small jelly mason jars. It works beautifully.
Way cheaper than store bought if you can find a bulk source for the mustard seed (read: Sam's club or online), and you can do whatever you want with the flavoring. Also a nice way to make something snazzy with that half a glass of white wine left over that you really aren't sure what to do with.
Thursday, November 17, 2011
Friday, November 11, 2011
Daily Tip: Make Your Own Vinegar
So I was just going to do a condiment post, but this one ended up a bit monstrous. So I'm doing it on it's own and I'll post others later. My focus is going to be on products that are overpriced and not particularly high quality in the grocery store.
White Wine Vinegar: This isn't exactly a sandwich condiment, but some people use a ton of vinegar in their cooking. I am one of those individuals. Store bought white wine vinegar is in fact mostly distilled. It's for lack of a better description over priced crap. You can make your own with some mason jars, a little cheesecloth, a bunch of cheap white wine, and a little starter (a small bottle of unfiltered, unpasteurized apple cider vinegar in our case).
So first a word about cheesecloth. This product is crazy expensive in the grocery store. I suggest buying it in bulk. It might seem like a big investment, but if you're going to start doing things on your own in the kitchen more regularly you'll find it very worth it. I use cheesecloth ALL THE TIME. If I had to buy it in the store I'd have filed for bankruptcy by now.
Next on choosing white wine. The huge jugs, or the boxed wine will do. When I first looked up how to do this all the guides said "pick a wine you would drink, because the better the wine the better the vinegar". This is true, but not true enough. The vinegar I've made from cheap boxed wine is excellent. As in some of the best vinegar I've ever had, because we're all used to the mostly distilled waste passed off as wine vinegar in the grocery. As this blog is about being self sufficient and doing for yourself I am NOT going to recommend that you go out and get snooty wine to intentionally spoil. That's just silly.
Now to make the vinegar. Start by running your mason jars and rings through the dishwasher with a hot dry. Then take them out while they are still hot and fill them 80% of the way with your wine. Between the alcohol in the wine, and the acid in the vinegar it will become this is all the sterilization I've ever needed. Now put enough apple cider vinegar in each jar to leave about an inch of air space. Now take a few layers of cheesecloth and lay it over the top of the jar and put your rings on. There, the work is done. Put the jars in the back of a cabinet somewhere and forget about them for . . . oh say 3 months. (Hey it's easy, I didn't say it was fast) Take the vinegar out and test it by tasting a little. If it doesn't taste and smell enough like vinegar put it back and check once a month for flavor. When it's how you want it replace the cheesecloth with mason jar lids. Technically at this point it's a living breathing thing. So if you blast through vinegar at a rapid rate then you are in fact done. It will be good for probably 6 months this way, give or take depending on conditions. (I won't lie that's me being conservative and not wanting to give bad advice. I've kept this type of vinegar longer than 6 months, but I don't know for sure how long it will last. So be careful if you try to go longer) If you use it in raw applications like salad dressings then the live culture is quite good for you. It will be cloudy, and will never settle if you leave it alive. If you want to keep the vinegar for more than a year then you want to give the sealed mason jars a 10 minute boiling water bath, make sure the water doesn't reach the rings. If you really want it to keep there is a process for adding sulfides to the vinegar to extend it's shelf life, but I've never done that and used my vinegar for up to a year or so past when it finished brewing. So I don't recommend it, the sulfides aren't really good for you anyway.
If you boil the vinegar then the particulate will start to settle and you'll eventually be able to "decant" the clear vinegar off the sediment. There is nothing bad about the sediment, but the clear vinegar does have a cleaner taste, and is more attractive if you care about such things.
So some background on why you take some of the steps you take. The vinegar requires oxygen to brew. So the cheesecloth let's oxygen in, while keeping dust and other nasties out of the liquid. I tried a few other approaches and I found that the brewing just took way too long. Using the cheesecloth approach I was able to brew the vinegar much faster than trying to keep it in bottles.
Second a word on pickling. If you follow specific pickling recipes I do not recommend using this vinegar. Pickle recipes are carefully calibrated around a specific acidity, and that acidity is necessary to make the preservation safe. That said if you are willing to go out and buy some ph test strips you can play the chemistry game of getting your vinegar to the exact same acidity as distilled from the store and going from there. Because I don't use specific pickling recipes when I pickle I just make sure that my vinegar is more acidic than distilled (which I keep around for cleaning purposes) and go from there. I test this by weighing out a set amount of baking soda on my scale and then using a dropper I put drops of distilled vinegar on the pile of baking soda till I get a drop that does not react. I then do the same thing with my home made vinegar, and if the reaction doesn't stop happening faster with my home made vinegar then I let my acid keep brewing. It's not precise, but as long as my vinegar is more acidic than distilled then I know I'm in safe territory. Also, because it's brewed and not distilled even at higher acidity it has a more delicate flavor. So I don't have to worry about overpowering myself. If you want to use your vinegar for pickling you MUST take the pasteurizing step of running your vinegar through a water bath. The live culture will do all sorts of strange things to the pickling process.
I know this was a long post, but a lot of people love my vinegar, and I wanted to share. I know this might seem like a lot of work, but you never take more than a couple steps on any given day. It's mostly just about patience. I guarantee you'll never buy vinegar from the store again.
White Wine Vinegar: This isn't exactly a sandwich condiment, but some people use a ton of vinegar in their cooking. I am one of those individuals. Store bought white wine vinegar is in fact mostly distilled. It's for lack of a better description over priced crap. You can make your own with some mason jars, a little cheesecloth, a bunch of cheap white wine, and a little starter (a small bottle of unfiltered, unpasteurized apple cider vinegar in our case).
So first a word about cheesecloth. This product is crazy expensive in the grocery store. I suggest buying it in bulk. It might seem like a big investment, but if you're going to start doing things on your own in the kitchen more regularly you'll find it very worth it. I use cheesecloth ALL THE TIME. If I had to buy it in the store I'd have filed for bankruptcy by now.
Next on choosing white wine. The huge jugs, or the boxed wine will do. When I first looked up how to do this all the guides said "pick a wine you would drink, because the better the wine the better the vinegar". This is true, but not true enough. The vinegar I've made from cheap boxed wine is excellent. As in some of the best vinegar I've ever had, because we're all used to the mostly distilled waste passed off as wine vinegar in the grocery. As this blog is about being self sufficient and doing for yourself I am NOT going to recommend that you go out and get snooty wine to intentionally spoil. That's just silly.
Now to make the vinegar. Start by running your mason jars and rings through the dishwasher with a hot dry. Then take them out while they are still hot and fill them 80% of the way with your wine. Between the alcohol in the wine, and the acid in the vinegar it will become this is all the sterilization I've ever needed. Now put enough apple cider vinegar in each jar to leave about an inch of air space. Now take a few layers of cheesecloth and lay it over the top of the jar and put your rings on. There, the work is done. Put the jars in the back of a cabinet somewhere and forget about them for . . . oh say 3 months. (Hey it's easy, I didn't say it was fast) Take the vinegar out and test it by tasting a little. If it doesn't taste and smell enough like vinegar put it back and check once a month for flavor. When it's how you want it replace the cheesecloth with mason jar lids. Technically at this point it's a living breathing thing. So if you blast through vinegar at a rapid rate then you are in fact done. It will be good for probably 6 months this way, give or take depending on conditions. (I won't lie that's me being conservative and not wanting to give bad advice. I've kept this type of vinegar longer than 6 months, but I don't know for sure how long it will last. So be careful if you try to go longer) If you use it in raw applications like salad dressings then the live culture is quite good for you. It will be cloudy, and will never settle if you leave it alive. If you want to keep the vinegar for more than a year then you want to give the sealed mason jars a 10 minute boiling water bath, make sure the water doesn't reach the rings. If you really want it to keep there is a process for adding sulfides to the vinegar to extend it's shelf life, but I've never done that and used my vinegar for up to a year or so past when it finished brewing. So I don't recommend it, the sulfides aren't really good for you anyway.
If you boil the vinegar then the particulate will start to settle and you'll eventually be able to "decant" the clear vinegar off the sediment. There is nothing bad about the sediment, but the clear vinegar does have a cleaner taste, and is more attractive if you care about such things.
So some background on why you take some of the steps you take. The vinegar requires oxygen to brew. So the cheesecloth let's oxygen in, while keeping dust and other nasties out of the liquid. I tried a few other approaches and I found that the brewing just took way too long. Using the cheesecloth approach I was able to brew the vinegar much faster than trying to keep it in bottles.
Second a word on pickling. If you follow specific pickling recipes I do not recommend using this vinegar. Pickle recipes are carefully calibrated around a specific acidity, and that acidity is necessary to make the preservation safe. That said if you are willing to go out and buy some ph test strips you can play the chemistry game of getting your vinegar to the exact same acidity as distilled from the store and going from there. Because I don't use specific pickling recipes when I pickle I just make sure that my vinegar is more acidic than distilled (which I keep around for cleaning purposes) and go from there. I test this by weighing out a set amount of baking soda on my scale and then using a dropper I put drops of distilled vinegar on the pile of baking soda till I get a drop that does not react. I then do the same thing with my home made vinegar, and if the reaction doesn't stop happening faster with my home made vinegar then I let my acid keep brewing. It's not precise, but as long as my vinegar is more acidic than distilled then I know I'm in safe territory. Also, because it's brewed and not distilled even at higher acidity it has a more delicate flavor. So I don't have to worry about overpowering myself. If you want to use your vinegar for pickling you MUST take the pasteurizing step of running your vinegar through a water bath. The live culture will do all sorts of strange things to the pickling process.
I know this was a long post, but a lot of people love my vinegar, and I wanted to share. I know this might seem like a lot of work, but you never take more than a couple steps on any given day. It's mostly just about patience. I guarantee you'll never buy vinegar from the store again.
Monday, November 7, 2011
What does the Everyday Radical Stuff Really Accomplish Anyway?
So every time that I go to post one of my little "Radical Anarchist Martha Steward" pieces of advice something in me wonders if what I'm trying to say really comes across. So I figured I'd write a little bit about the very layperson economics of what I'm trying to accomplish, and a little bit about my feelings on the subject in terms of what's happened to us over the last couple generations and how to fix it.
First the economics of the whole thing. So when you buy something, anything really you can think of yourself as paying 4 different prices. 1st you're paying the lateral price. This is the part of the money that goes to someone at more or less your level of the food chain and mostly in your community. In a corporate store like a Target that is the portion of the money that goes to the store staff, and the local delivery men who deliver the goods to the store, and the part of the overhead that pays local bills like electricity and waste removal for the store's trash etc. You get the idea. It's the portion of the money you're spending that stays in your community.
The second part of the cost is what I'll call the elevator cost. This is the portion of the money you spend that goes up and out of your community. So at a corporate store like Target or Wal Mart this is the hunk of cash that goes up to the corporation. It doesn't stay in your town. Now this doesn't all go to the "1%" as it were. Some of it goes to secretaries in corporate offices, and some of it goes to janitors in those offices, and national delivery drivers etc. Still this is the portion of your purchase that goes away from your local community. Even in a small local co-op some of your purchases are going to be products that shipped from another state or country. So some portion of almost any purchase is going somewhere else.
First the economics of the whole thing. So when you buy something, anything really you can think of yourself as paying 4 different prices. 1st you're paying the lateral price. This is the part of the money that goes to someone at more or less your level of the food chain and mostly in your community. In a corporate store like a Target that is the portion of the money that goes to the store staff, and the local delivery men who deliver the goods to the store, and the part of the overhead that pays local bills like electricity and waste removal for the store's trash etc. You get the idea. It's the portion of the money you're spending that stays in your community.
The second part of the cost is what I'll call the elevator cost. This is the portion of the money you spend that goes up and out of your community. So at a corporate store like Target or Wal Mart this is the hunk of cash that goes up to the corporation. It doesn't stay in your town. Now this doesn't all go to the "1%" as it were. Some of it goes to secretaries in corporate offices, and some of it goes to janitors in those offices, and national delivery drivers etc. Still this is the portion of your purchase that goes away from your local community. Even in a small local co-op some of your purchases are going to be products that shipped from another state or country. So some portion of almost any purchase is going somewhere else.
Next are the taxes. The first are government taxes. Really in the US this is state and in some cases city or county sales tax. There isn't much to say about these taxes. Really all fairly straight forward.
The final portion is the corporate tax rate. This is the portion of the price of your purchase that goes to credit card fees. Even if you only shop with cash there is still a corporate tax because early experiments with charging people who use credit cards more for the portion of the transaction that the banks take off the top failed. So stores include the credit card charges in their overall prices and average it out across all their sales.
No one of these expenses is necessarily good or bad. Money flowing between markets in general is healthy because of the lifestyle it allows. The convenience of credit cards is certainly worth some price, and responsible use of credit can facilitate a standard of life that living without credit does not allow. The same is true of government tax and the money that stays local. They each have their place and can be both good and bad for the economy.
What becomes a problem is when these four cash flows go out of balance. We now live in a world where entirely too much money goes to the top. The portion of commerce that goes to credit card expenses goes almost exclusively to corporate profits, and the corporate portion of our general commerce (McDonald's products, Wal-Mart's infrastructure, etc.) also syphon money away from us. This is something the Occupy movement has put a lot of effort into illuminating.
The imbalance in the system is facilitated by a pronounced and unhealthy dependence on the supply chain. There was a quote I saw about how we have become a species where no one knows how to create anything. The example that was used is that no one knows how to create a computer mouse. That might seem impossible, because obviously they are created every day, but no one person has the knowledge necessary to produce the mouse. Petroleum must be drawn from the earth, then refined, then processed into plastic, then manufactured into the case of the mouse. Metal must be extracted from the earth, then refined, then turned into the wiring for the mouse. Silicon must be refined to create the micro circuitry. The protocols and standards of the USB specification must be followed, and then there are drivers and other software involved in the system. No one person has the knowledge necessary to take all the steps I have listed above and those are only the ones I can think of in 30 seconds off the top of my head. I'm sure that the production of a basic $15 PC mouse is much more involved than what I have just detailed. That same concept can be applied to just about anything we do. This supply chain was a huge innovation and allowed for separation of labor and a standard of living that could have never been imagined in the pre-historic days before trade really took off, or even 100 years ago before we expanded it to the monolith it is today.
However, like anything the supply chain can be abused. You can become so dependent on it that dysfunction grows out of that dependence. Leveraging the supply chain to produce something like a computer mouse is an incredibly positive example of using this structure. However, when you can't buy raw ingredients and make your own food, or pull out some thread and fix a small hole in a pair of shorts then the supply chain becomes a source of oppression, not human potential. That is what we are seeing in our culture more and more. Once upon a time the poor did not have servants of any kind. Service wasn't something the poor could afford. The poor had something the rich did not have though. The poor had expertise. They knew how to do for themselves. There was an independent streak to the culture of poverty until very recently. If you doubt that, or want me to cite sources then I cite our grandparents. Go out and talk to your grandparents, especially the ones who lived through the great depression as children. I know there are very few survivors of the great depression left, but they knew how to do for themselves.
When we move to a "service based economy" as so many people like to talk about, everyone just pays someone else to do for them. You know how to do the one thing that you "do for everyone else" but is that one thing really a complete thing? What if you work in a McDonald's, perhaps as management, maybe even making a decent living? So you know how to handle frozen foods pretty well, but do you know how to properly bread a piece of raw chicken? Do you know how to handle ground meat without overworking it? Can you control heat on a stove at home? The answer to these questions is very possibly not. So then something really interesting happens. As the people setting the prices realize that everyone HAS to pay for service, because it's no longer a luxury, it's a necessity caused by their lack of knowledge they can begin to charge as if it's a necessity. If you're paying to not have to do dishes one night because you're tired you'll pay one price. If you're paying to . . . well . . . . get food that's edible because you can't make a dish for yourself at home you'll pay a very different price, because you HAVE to eat. That is the world we have found ourselves in.
So what does this everyday radical stuff accomplish? It accomplishes breaking that relationship. It's about taking back our ability to get by without services. I have seen so many people complain that the "poor" aren't really poor because they have cable, and eat out, and buy trendy cleaning contraptions, etc. when they should be paying their rent. The cable bit I'll agree with, I think most people should just ditch cable altogether but the rest of it is a matter of generational conditioning, and the atrophy of life skills in our society. So let's work that muscle out again. It gives us more say in how our money shapes the economy we live in, and takes a little bit of power back from the big guys.
In closing I will just say the little ideas that I pose on this blog and on the facebook page aren't really meant to be ends in and of themselves. They're starting off points. Ok, so I can make cleaning liquid out of white vinegar and water, what all can I do with it? What other cleaning materials can I make? How hard is it to make soap? My thought it less about just giving out occasional home and garden (and little ways to screw the banks) tips and more to get people thinking about the things they could do for themselves and taking that control back.
Ideally I'd love to see some other people start to post how they do things for themselves on the page, and I hope that people are using some of the ideas I'm throwing out there. I'm sure there are better ones, but it's what I had to start with.
The imbalance in the system is facilitated by a pronounced and unhealthy dependence on the supply chain. There was a quote I saw about how we have become a species where no one knows how to create anything. The example that was used is that no one knows how to create a computer mouse. That might seem impossible, because obviously they are created every day, but no one person has the knowledge necessary to produce the mouse. Petroleum must be drawn from the earth, then refined, then processed into plastic, then manufactured into the case of the mouse. Metal must be extracted from the earth, then refined, then turned into the wiring for the mouse. Silicon must be refined to create the micro circuitry. The protocols and standards of the USB specification must be followed, and then there are drivers and other software involved in the system. No one person has the knowledge necessary to take all the steps I have listed above and those are only the ones I can think of in 30 seconds off the top of my head. I'm sure that the production of a basic $15 PC mouse is much more involved than what I have just detailed. That same concept can be applied to just about anything we do. This supply chain was a huge innovation and allowed for separation of labor and a standard of living that could have never been imagined in the pre-historic days before trade really took off, or even 100 years ago before we expanded it to the monolith it is today.
However, like anything the supply chain can be abused. You can become so dependent on it that dysfunction grows out of that dependence. Leveraging the supply chain to produce something like a computer mouse is an incredibly positive example of using this structure. However, when you can't buy raw ingredients and make your own food, or pull out some thread and fix a small hole in a pair of shorts then the supply chain becomes a source of oppression, not human potential. That is what we are seeing in our culture more and more. Once upon a time the poor did not have servants of any kind. Service wasn't something the poor could afford. The poor had something the rich did not have though. The poor had expertise. They knew how to do for themselves. There was an independent streak to the culture of poverty until very recently. If you doubt that, or want me to cite sources then I cite our grandparents. Go out and talk to your grandparents, especially the ones who lived through the great depression as children. I know there are very few survivors of the great depression left, but they knew how to do for themselves.
When we move to a "service based economy" as so many people like to talk about, everyone just pays someone else to do for them. You know how to do the one thing that you "do for everyone else" but is that one thing really a complete thing? What if you work in a McDonald's, perhaps as management, maybe even making a decent living? So you know how to handle frozen foods pretty well, but do you know how to properly bread a piece of raw chicken? Do you know how to handle ground meat without overworking it? Can you control heat on a stove at home? The answer to these questions is very possibly not. So then something really interesting happens. As the people setting the prices realize that everyone HAS to pay for service, because it's no longer a luxury, it's a necessity caused by their lack of knowledge they can begin to charge as if it's a necessity. If you're paying to not have to do dishes one night because you're tired you'll pay one price. If you're paying to . . . well . . . . get food that's edible because you can't make a dish for yourself at home you'll pay a very different price, because you HAVE to eat. That is the world we have found ourselves in.
So what does this everyday radical stuff accomplish? It accomplishes breaking that relationship. It's about taking back our ability to get by without services. I have seen so many people complain that the "poor" aren't really poor because they have cable, and eat out, and buy trendy cleaning contraptions, etc. when they should be paying their rent. The cable bit I'll agree with, I think most people should just ditch cable altogether but the rest of it is a matter of generational conditioning, and the atrophy of life skills in our society. So let's work that muscle out again. It gives us more say in how our money shapes the economy we live in, and takes a little bit of power back from the big guys.
In closing I will just say the little ideas that I pose on this blog and on the facebook page aren't really meant to be ends in and of themselves. They're starting off points. Ok, so I can make cleaning liquid out of white vinegar and water, what all can I do with it? What other cleaning materials can I make? How hard is it to make soap? My thought it less about just giving out occasional home and garden (and little ways to screw the banks) tips and more to get people thinking about the things they could do for themselves and taking that control back.
Ideally I'd love to see some other people start to post how they do things for themselves on the page, and I hope that people are using some of the ideas I'm throwing out there. I'm sure there are better ones, but it's what I had to start with.
Wednesday, November 2, 2011
Daily Tip: Move to using Good Search
If you haven't, give Good Search a try. It's based on a model where you use it as your search engine, and the ad revenue is donated to the charity of your choice. There are all sorts of charities, but you can easily give to organizations that promote democracy without ever really having to do much more than lift a finger. One thing after another does really start to add up.
Daily Tip: Package Individual Portions of Leftovers
Growing up when there were leftovers it usually meant either 1 huge piece of tupperware in the fridge, or the pot everything was cooked in just thrown into the icebox. Take a little bit of extra time when you're packaging up your food to put it into individually portioned microwave safe containers. It makes it way easier to grab and run on your way to work, or to throw into the microwave when the tradeoff is leftovers or the fast food joint down the street. Anything to help avoiding spending money on other people processing your food is helpful.
Daily Tip: Click on Financial Ads
Whenever you see an online advertisement for a financial company click on it. In many instances these companies pay per click, or at least pay more per click. This is a very quick, very easy way to impact the banks bottom line without really inconveniencing yourself at all. It also has the delightful side effect of making the profit to expense tradeoff for online ads less attractive.
Daily Tip: Start using Mint
So this one might seem a little counter intuitive, but it's worth it. I started using http://www.mint.com about a year ago and it made me aware of fees that I far too easily missed on my bank statement. Because of mint I discovered that my bank Old National at the time had started to charge a fee if I didn't keep a minimum balance in my account. Mint screams at you at the top of the screen when you login whenever you have additional fees. It helped me curtail my spending by highlighting exactly how much interest I was pulling on my credit card, etc. In general it just made me a more disciplined customer, which means I save money and give less to the banks. A good approach for all concerned. Even if it is a somewhat corporate product it helps make you a less profitable customer for the banks and minimizes the impact of their fee structure. Anything that prevents the stealth that they design into their fee structure is pretty awesome.
Tuesday, November 1, 2011
Daily Tip: Weekend Cooking Parties
Have friends over for get togethers on the weekend where you cook together. Make big batches of things that you will split up and share with each other. If one person is an awesome baker they can make a huge batch of some fun snacky sweet, and another person make an amazing stew they can be on the stove top, and a third person makes an amazing hummus then you've got an array of options. It's a fun way to try new amazing foods without the overhead of paying someone else to make them, and maybe you can learn a thing or two sharing kitchen space while your friends make their specialties.
At the end of the cooking break out the tupperware/aluminum foil and split the spoils of your labor. This is an amazing way to avoid having cooking time cut into your social time, and expand your skills while your at it. Anything that expands your skills and knowledge without requiring a sacrifice on your part makes it not just easier to take the time to cook, but easier to stay independent and pay only for what you need to pay for in the future.
At the end of the cooking break out the tupperware/aluminum foil and split the spoils of your labor. This is an amazing way to avoid having cooking time cut into your social time, and expand your skills while your at it. Anything that expands your skills and knowledge without requiring a sacrifice on your part makes it not just easier to take the time to cook, but easier to stay independent and pay only for what you need to pay for in the future.
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