Progress? maybe. Prayers? Yes.

Well here I am posting again because I have all this nervous energy.

You see, today my husband had a second interview as a design engineer for a company out by our property. This is overwhelmingly great for a few reasons:

1. we weren't expecting his first job out of school to be up there.
2. he would make quite a bit more money than anticipated for a cad drafter, nearly doubling my current income.
3. The money he would potentially make plus the decrease in cost of living in the area would mean we could realistically put significant amounts of money aside and build a home without a mortgage. Yes, WITHOUT A MORTGAGE.
4. I could stay home. Yes, I COULD STAY HOME :)

It's interesting, I've been working towards this goal of being able to stay home with my family for so many years and it's as if the reality is potentially going to finally happen! Part of me is waiting for a shoe to drop, and for someone to jump out and say "AHHHH You thought it would be this easy, but you are going to have to work for another three years to get to stay home!!!"

I guess it's almost being afraid of success. But I am also feeling very excited at the same time. Excited at the idea of not dealing with the junk I deal with at work. Excited at the thought of being able to homeschool my kids and make macaroni necklaces with them. Excited at the thought of being able to have another baby someday and NOT have to take them to daycare, to be able to breastfeed them without losing my supply from pumping, and to be able to use my stash of cloth diapers. Thrilled at the idea of being able to teach my daughters how to grow things and why worms are one of the most incredible creatures that God created. I am ecstatic at the potential to me able to have a pleasant and happy home with a hot meal waiting for my husband when he comes home from work, and actually to have time every once in a while to fold and put away laundry after it's been washed instead of just leaving it in a pile in the basement to pick through once a day for everyone's clothes.

This may seem like simple things to you, but for someone like me who thrives in the stay-home environment to have to go out and earn a living to support the family it is a tough thing. Some people are the type that would get bored being at home... I am the type who gets bored and burned out being at work because I wish I was at home doing things I consider productive. With that said, I am forever blessed to have a husband who has worked very hard in school (even made the dean's list!) and is now working hard on finishing school up and also looking for work. It is as important to him as it is to me that I am able to stay home, and in that small little thing I have a great asset - a partner in life that has the same goal as I do in many different ways. That's a lot more uncommon than you might think.

And really, the only fears I have are the fears that all this will somehow be taken away from me. That for some reason, somehow, I will be doomed to never be able to fulfill that basic need that is for me to raise my children as a stay home mom. it seems like a simple thing, but when you have spent so much time going past so many obstacles it almost seems like it would be natural for things to "not work out."

but really, if I had to just work forever, I would probably become clinically depressed. So I don't even want to think about it. Maybe I just need to refocus and remember that SOMEDAY it will happen and I need to just keep walking along because if you keep walking, you will get there, right?

The financial state of the USA and preparing

Something that I wanted to share and maybe it's just me wanting to put thoughts to paper. I work at a credit union as a lead, which means if there are any big problems with people's accounts I get to muddle it all out. Given that, and also the fact that I also trade currency on the foreign exchange market, I get a pretty good glimpse of what's happening financially. And I will tell you - the last few years have been scary. Our credit union has been repossessing a lot of BMWs and Mercedes. People have saddled themselves into $700-$1000/month car payments and are suddenly out of a job. Can you imagine? a $1000/month car payment!

I say this to say - we are in a depression. But I think about the Great Depression and it kind of scares me. Why? Because back in the Great Depression, people knew how to take a chicken and cook it. People knew how to grow food, and how to prepare meals from raw food materials like untrimmed veggies & meat. Nowdays, people don't know how to do that. You go to the supermarket, buy a box of food, and nuke it.

So what happens if that isn't there anymore? In our economy today, all grocery stores practice what is called "JIT" (Just-In-Time) warehousing. This means there are no big warehouses, and if the supply chain of trucks is interrupted for just a day or two you can see how quickly the store shelves empty. This is no big deal to those of us with pantries but there are people who never keep more than a day or two worth of food in their house... for them, what? Can you see with me how quickly this could degrade into violence?

I've been really making a commitment to myself to learn about how to store food and to learn more about putting it "by" just as a hedge against this. Yes, I know how to garden and that is a great skill because I also save my own seed and with this I will always have the ability to grow veggies but what use is that to me if we starve over the winter? I think about the earthquake in Haiti - those people were completely unprepared. Besides having a no suitable building codes and being as poverty-stricken as they were - there is NO REASON that people living in a country like that need to be unprepared. I think in their case, a helpful government as opposed to one intent on keeping it's people "under the thumb" would have made all the difference in the world. But then we think about all the other terrible disasters that can befall us and I really don't think there is any reason to be "Pollyanna" and think nothing bad will ever happen.

A lot of the people affected by Hurricane Katrina were not actually the ones with their homes destroyed. There were quite a lot of people forced to leave because there was 1. no clean water and 2. no food available. Can you imagine how much EASIER their life would have been if they had prepared for something? Even a 3 month supply of food & water would have made all the difference. Big huge snowstorms can shut off power for days. Are you prepared? I'm not. I have no effective way to heat my home without electricity. No good, huh. This year we lucked out. We had one short power outage that lasted a day and a night. The funny part is that I had some kerosene lamps I inherited from my granddad "Uncle Dutch" and I had actually bought kerosene for them. My husband and I spent the evening in relative comfort and our kids (Eleora is afraid of the dark until she falls asleep) were able to fall asleep to the soft glow of the lamps. I have some co-workers affected by the same outage and the night did not go so well for them.

So I guess this is my long rambling and all of it to say - I think we as a society need to be more prepared and to learn more skills. Who are we to be so arrogant and think that we won't need to be self-reliant?

A nice sunny weekend part 2

So as far as the rest of the weekend, this is mainly the part that I wish I had pics for. Both Saturday and Sunday were absolutely beautiful, no jacket needed sunny days. You know, it's funny, I think Eleora remembers gardening with me last year because she just jumped right in helping me.

The garden beds had shrunk quite a bit (of course) and I had put a bunch of leaves on them but needed to top them with compost in the spots I was going to plant garlic and onions. Planting garlic in the spring? Yes, I know, you are supposed to plant it in the fall, but I never got around to it and I have been SO burned out from work in the last 9 months or so that I had had zero energy after I get home or on the weekends to do ANYTHING besides try and stay caught up on dishes and laundry (and even that didn't get done).

So anyway, I was shoveling compost from the pile onto the garden spot where I was going to plant my garlic and of course Eleora immediately came over and got her little mint green trowel and started helping me... it was so cute! She loved watching the "warms" wiggle around in the compost and did a great job helping me plant the garlic cloves. I'd saved a couple of the biggest and fattest bulbs from last year so hopefully we'll do OK. Some of them were already starting to sprout in the bag. I do have a few volunteers from last year, must have been some that didn't quite make it up past the compacted leaf mulch. We'll see how those go!

The compost pile itself was pretty meager... I had stopped composting last year (sniff) because the neighbor's dog just loved to dig around in it (jumping the fence, same dog that left a dead SOMETHING - I think it was a mole - in my garden bed). Said neighbor has now moved out and so I am now free to compost again!

Sunday morning I dug out my box of seeds and the girls immediately zoned in on me. Sophia just had fun shaking the packets of peas to hear them rattle, but Eleora was a pretty intent student. Then we went out afterwards and I spread some potting soil for the onion bed (had run out of compost) and she helped me by carefully placing a seed into each hole. She is a very careful gardener... it's funny because last year she wasn't too much older than Sophia but Fia is just too busy running around and climbing on stuff outside to pay attention to what I am doing :) And that is OK, it's nice for them to be independent so that Tommy and I can do our work outside in the yard.

Last year I followed the instructions for onions which say to start them 6 weeks early indoors. Unfortunately, somehow I went wrong and those starts ended up so spindly. I did NOT do well with onions last year so this year I figured, we've been having amazing weather and a very mild winter overall (only an inch or two of snow!) and so I'll plant some seeds to see what happens. If all else fails, I can just get some sets to plant out in early May.

Then of course I completed my garden plan. This year's garden is more of an experiment than anything. I have a couple different kinds of pumpkin that I want to try out, some Litchi tomatoes, and lots of other fun things. I actually did not technically complete it because I don't know which varieties I'll be planting in all but I have it mostly done. I do have a schedule I made out (I even got a planner specifically for my garden this year) and so I can already tell you that next weekend is when I get to start my tomatoes & peppers! I got a soil blocker set this year so hopefully it won't be too hard for me to master it. I hated using the cups I did last year.

I already made my seed order a few months ago but some of those seeds were for "seed bank storage" and I lost the master inventory list that I made so now I get to go through them AGAIN and then I'll know which varieties I can grow. I think we'll have fun this year though! Probably in September I'll be done working so that will give us harvest time.

I'm also currently rooting some grape starts, Concord and Thompson Seedless. Those will be planted up on our family farm up north in a few months, along with a full complement of fruit trees this fall. I've also got some hardy kiwi seeds that I'll be starting so we'll see what will come of that! OH, and I'm also trying my hand at growing pineapples. One thing I would just LOVE is to have a big greenhouse full of tropicals.

When Tommy and I finalize the design for our home up at the property one of the "musts" is an attached greenhouse/sun room where I can grow small tropicals in pots. Did you know you can grow dwarf mango and avocado trees? I must admit working in the finance industry there are certain things that make me feel we have a not-so-firm footing. Specifically, the financial state of this country makes me concerned about the potential of bringing in food from other places. Sometimes that's good (eat local!) but sometimes that might not be fun, since I absolutely love bananas, mangos, avocados, and lots of other tropicals.

So my answer to that is to grow my own! We'll see :) Really, if I had a small greenhouse I could probably do it... we just need to find a good house plan to modify. And of course to pray that Tommy gets a job up north pretty quick when he's done with school.

And so I guess that's it for this post! Haha... Just wait. I sure can't!

A nice sunny weekend! Part 1

Hi everyone!

Well this last weekend was great! Sorry about the long absence... no promises that it won't happen again, either :) I just don't have time while I'm still working but the good news is we probably only have another 6-9 months to go before I can officially be a STAY HOME MOM and won't that be great! I'm pretending that I'm one today... my little sister got married early last week and I took the entire week off last week and also today.

I've gotten a lot of project-y things done... mostly a lot of canning and we did some gardening in the beautiful weather. Sorry, no pics - my camera is officially kaput so I'll have to wait till I get a new one. I brought home the pressure canner from my brother's house (and alas, had to give him his excalibur dehydrator... sniff) and so I got lots canned. I canned up a bunch of ground beef, chicken, seasoned pinto beans and yellow potatoes.

So far we've tried the beef and the beans and they are both winners. I never thought I'd like canned meat and I don't know how well it would go over in tacos or something but put into a casserole it was quite good. And the beans were very good, lightly seasoned with salt, pepper and a shake of cumin but the flavor was light enough you could easily flavor them in any way you choose. I just wish I had some photos to share!

I also had gotten a new wheat grinder and so I tried that out, of course. The bread rose like it was no one's business! I didn't grind the flour quite fine enough for my taste so I used about 60% whole wheat and then 40% bread flour and it was great. I made just a standard honey wheat bread although I've been doing a lot of the "artisan bread in 5 minutes a day" breads and those have been delicious as well. I think I'll have a lot of fun with this tool once I get to stay home :)

Making Sunflower Oil and Pumpkin Seed Oil

I got myself a nice new Piteba oil expeller and this post will show me using to to make hand pressed pumpkin seed and sunflower oil. Here's the machine. It's imported from Holland... oddly enough this sort of tool is not easy to get a hold of here in the States. It is, though, quite reasonably priced even to pay for it to come from Holland.

Update 1/26/11 - Click here - the Piteba is now available on Amazon.com! (Opens in a new window)


Basically it consists of several different parts. the first thing you will notice is my handy cottage cheese container. That's to catch the "press cake" of leftover solids that are pressed dry of oil. The blue thing underneath is actually an oil candle with blue lamp oil. It has a neat little guide on top (which is why you can't see the flame).

This actually heats up the whole entire unit to help press out the oil, which becomes more readily available when heated up a bit. It doesn't heat a whole lot, though, which is good because I would imagine too much heat might affect the shelf life of the oil.

Then, to the right you have the collection cup, on top is my funnel for the seed, and then all the way to the right is the crank. Bored yet? OK here we move on to the fun stuff! OK actually one more boring part. This is actually more for the owner of Piteba just so he can see how I have this set up, since I'll show him this link :)

The Piteba oil expeller is actually designed to be permanently bolted onto something. The amount of power that's required to turn the crank for some seeds (with shells on, etc) would need for it to be VERY secure. Unfortunately, I have nothing at my home that I could do that with, and I don't have space for a special table just for that purpose.

So I took a piece of 2x6 lumber left over from my parents building their house and bolted it quite securely to the lumber and left space on each side. Then, I got 2 extra strong c-clamps and used them to clamp the wood-mounted press to my countertop. It actually works really well... the clamps are able to be angled so they don't interfere with the turning of the crank, and the footprint is relatively small. When I am finished and all the pieces are cleaned and oiled, I can put everything in a box and stow it away in a room in my basement. Pretty tidy!

OK anyway, now as promised, on to the fun stuff.

 

 

 

 

Here we are in action! The funnel is filled with shelled raw sunflower seeds. I actually did try this with the black oil sunflower seeds (shell-on) but I realized it was a bad idea. The black oil sunflower seeds I could get were actually intended for birdseed and so they were dirty.

 

 

 

 

Only about 25% more in cost I could get the shelled seeds for human consumption.

 

 

 

 

 

Pound by pound, I get more oil from the shelled seeds so it actually isn't more expensive this way. You turn the crank, which causes the seeds to press in and at the end, the press cake extrudes and the oil drips out into the catching cup at the bottom.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here's the leftover press cake. It's pretty dry and crumbly. Since this was made with shelled seeds intended for human consumption, I could have easily made it into granola, baked it into some delicious bread, etc.

Unfortunately, I don't really have a lot of time for that so it ended up being thrown into the garden. It will either compost nicely or be some protein-rich food for the birds and squirrels. When I have chickens someday this will make excellent chicken feed. Actually, I bet the press cake from flax seeds would be great to feed laying hens for some omega-fatty-acid-enriched farm fresh eggs!

Apparently, even when you have press cake from seeds/nuts with the shells on, you can still feed them to the chickens/hogs/wildlife. At worst, you can compost it. What a great deal, huh!

Here's a bowl of the sunflower oil. It does contain some sediment and so I'll let it settle out for about 24 hours before I bottle it up.

 

 

 

Here you can see the oil I've been pressing from pumpkin seeds. I bought raw shelled seeds in the bulk section. They don't quite produce as much oil, as indicated by the high price, but it's one of my favorite skincare oils and so I definitely wanted to make it.

 

 

 

 

It comes out pretty cloudy... here's a pic of it after 24 hours of settling.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cool, huh! it almost looks like it's a deep red color... but it's a trick of the light. In the bottle it looks red, but if you look at it in the pipette I used to decant it into it's final bottle, you can see it's definitely a green color with a slight reddish tinge.

 

 

 

 

And of course because we all like pics, here's a picture of the sunflower seed oil after settling. The sunflower oil didn't have quite as much sediment to settle, and also since I do plan on using it mostly in cooking I certainly didn't mind the sunflower "goop." I did this all yesterday and last night I pan-roasted some fresh asparagus and drizzled it with a few tablespoons of this fresh pressed oil. I could definitely taste the sunflower flavor... it was wonderful. I did put too much salt on the stuff but the flavor itself was tremendous, HEADS above the commercial stuff that's been sitting on the shelf for 12 months.

 

And here we have the final product! An ounce or so of hand pressed pumpkin seed oil for a facial oil, and about 8 ounces of sunflower oil that I can use for either skincare or cooking. A lot of people actually do use pumpkin seed oil for cooking, but I don't care for the flavor myself. Although i do like roasted seeds, so maybe if I roasted them first and then pressed them, it might taste pretty good :)

Next on my project list for my oil press - flax seed oil, and maybe even pine nut oil. YUM YUM.

Hope you enjoyed my little photo journal. I guess my summary is that hand pressed oils are definitely a lot of physical work (it was about 30 minutes of cranking to produce these oils). After some trial and error I have become more efficient and also as my oil expeller becomes more "seasoned." It definitely gives one an appreciation for the ease of which we can buy oils at the grocery store, but also an appreciation for the fresh flavors of this fresh pressed oil.

 

This fall I will also have a new experiment - I am growing oilseed sunflowers and naked-seeded pumpkins and so I will be pressing oils from seeds that I grew myself. Something like that gives me the warm fuzzies - a completely sustainable cycle that produces a unique product that most people can't produce themselves. :)

And thusly, I complete my review and photo blog of the Piteba oil expeller. Once again, click here to see the Piteba on Amazon.com (Opens in a new window). Have a great day!

Making cold-pressed vegetable oil with a hand-cranked expeller

Hi everyone! Long time no see, eh? OK well the truth of the matter is that my job basically sucks the life out of me these days, leaving me listless at the end of the day and no energy to do anything creative usually, especially not blogging. The light, however, has appeared at the end of the tunnel - Tommy is done with school in about 5 months. Woohoo!

Anyway, I got a brand new toy and been using it a bit over the last couple weeks. I've had so many people ask about it because it is sort of a unique item so I decided to go finally buy a stupid card reader for my digital camera so I could blog it, so here I am :)

As many of you know, I am on a mission to rid my life of as much dependency on society and whatnot as I can. In my case, this means getting the tools and especially acquiring the skills I would need to in order to live completely off-grid. Maybe by the time I'm 90 I'll know enough, but I doubt it. So my latest toy is the Piteba oil press. It's a hand-cranked expeller that can make vegetable oil from basically any nut or seed that has at least 25% oil. This means technically I could use it to make oil from walnuts, sunflowers, all the way to hemp seed and even cacao beans (making cocoat butter).

I'll photo blog it on my next post, but I have used it a few times and let me say that I have a new appreciation for the fact I can go to the store and buy a liter of vegetable oil for $2. I also have an especially great new appreciation for the flavor and quality of a freshly pressed oil... incredible.

Dehydrating

Sorry about the long absence, all my faithful fans :) There was a small IE problem at work and when it was "fixed" for some reason I can't get blogger to come up, and since that was where I did most of my posting... well.

Anyway, this week I picked up an Excalibur dehydrator off craigslist. It will actually end up going to my brother but since he can't get it for a while, I'm testing it out :) I just peeled and sliced 2 lbs of carrots and stuck them in. When I was doing that, I noticed that not only is this a dehydrator but it also has a setting for rising bread AND making yogurt. What a fabulously useful tool! Someday I will get myself one as well. In the meantime, I'll use his :) He's using the canner and so in the meantime I can dry what I need to put up.

I guess I should do a garden report. I'm about ready to dig all my potatoes. So far they have been pretty prolific and quite delicious. I can't wait to try the fingerlings, which I haven't yet. I'll dig them tomorrow with Eleora. Like I thought, I didn't have much time to keep things up so I have lots of peas, beans and cucumbers going to seed. Those Richland Green Apple cukes were FABULOUS though. I will definitely be replanting them next year.

The tomatillos and tomatoes have been doing well. We had our first orange tomato (Dad's Sunset) yesterday and it was very very delicious. The first ripe tomato was one of the paste tomatoes, though (it was about a month ago). I've got tons of those guys now, and I will definitely be replanting those too (Principe Borghese). Those are the italian tomato that they usually use for sundrying so I think I could dehydrate those too, at least the ones I have on hand. Our weather this summer has been cooler - we had a really hot stretch in July for a couple weeks but since then it's mostly been in the 70s and 80s. So I'm not sure how well things will continue to perform. Our "early" tomatoes (Siletz) haven't been too early, still haven't ripened yet. I will give them another chance because that particular plant was situated in a spot that got a lot less sun than I thought it would. There's a few of those on the vine that are almost ripe.

I have one small pumpkin that I know of... I'm glad about that, one should do me just fine for the winter. I don't think I'll get any melon, only one plant survived and it doesn't seem to have set any fruit.

I harvested all my garlic aboout a month ago and it did really really well. Some of the bulbs were pretty good size, and the smallness of the rest I could definitely see when you consider how LATE I planted them last year. I saved back the best of the heads to replant this fall.

In other news, the neighbor's dog paid a visit to my garden yesterday, tore up a spot in one of my beds. I caught him in the act and then he ran away, jumped the fence. I went over to assess the damage... and there is a dead GROUNDHOG in my garden. Yuck. It's still there, I was hoping to see the neighbor but I think I'll just take Tommy's advice and just pitch it back over the fence and let him deal with it. Seems a bit, oh, snarky to me, but then again I shouldn't be responsible for disposing of an animal carcass that his dog tried to bury in my garden!