I'm sort of joking here. Sort of. A little. OK, maybe not joking, but showing range, YEAH, that's it, I'm showing range ;)

humor-site-deadspin-ranks-preppiest sports

Feeling under-represented here with only 5 mentions, where is Tennis and Womens Water Polo and Pheasant Hunting, not to mention cycling?

Only 5? Bah, Humbug.

I will now return you to your regularly scheduled penny pinching adventures ;)

I'm not dead yet... I feel HAPPY - and thoughts on food storage quantities :) with judicious use of the phrase A. LOT.

It's inspired by this post over at Lehman's:

I've been (and still am to some extend) finishing up the last (HAH!) of the harvest and stock up for Winter putting up chores and have consequently been buried in the kitchen and basement.

Our simply overwhelming apple harvest. Yup, that's all of it. It's a 3 year old tree, so We're actually quite thrilled.

One of the things that goes into preserving the harvest/ shopping frugally/ not running to the store every 5 seconds (or every week, which to me seems like every 5 seconds) is planning what you are going to have on hand.

I have tried doing the meal plan thing before and I failed miserably, because no matter how thick the writing on the meal plan saying it's bean casserole night is underlined, what we both really want tonight is pizza. And that's just for the two of us, I can't imagine what that sort of thing is like when there are more people involved in the 'but I'm really in the mood for X' discussion. And let's face it, just because we eat frugally doesn't mean that we want to (or should) feel deprived in any way. Feeling deprived (as opposed to depraved, which is the norm around here) is what leads to bingeing, which leads to feelings of guilt, which leads to austerity, which leads to bingeing and so on and so forth, ad nauseam.

Self-defeating is the word I was looking for there.

One of the pitfalls of starting to eat frugally is that one might be tempted to buy cheaply and in bulk, only to learn that what one (me, alright, it was me) has stocked up on a bunch of stuff noone wants to eat. That's known as 'Not a Bargain for Us'.

Two things: Buying in bulk requires an initial outlay of funds for the larger quantities one buys, so there is usually a 'saving up for it' period involved. Use that time to figure out not only what you actually consume (toilet paper is a relatively safe bet here) and, and this is kind of important, how much of it you consume over a given period of time.

I just accepted a delivery of 100lbs of flour, 50 lbs of whole wheat stone ground and 50 lbs of white all purpose, so I'll just go ahead and use that as an example.

I bake A LOT in the colder months. Think at least four loaves of bread, two loaves of banana nut bread*, at least one batch of cookies (it's the season, don't you know), a batch of garlic cheddar biscuits and pigs in a blanket, usually an apple coffee cake and sometimes a batch of English Muffins or tortillas if I am feeling adventurous. That's every week. Now some of that goes into the freezer for the summer months, when I not only don't want to heat up the house by baking, but also don't have the time to do anything other than deal with the garden, but on average, I go through about 8 lbs of flour a week during baking season.

So those 100lbs are going to last us until Early February or a little more than 3 months.

We may have some kind of carb addiction going on here...

I no longer know what non-bulk, non-bromated flour costs, but I got this stuff for $0.56 per lb including the shipping, which is slightly more than I could spend for bromated flour at GFS in the 50lb bag, but I'll go with the non-pesticide option for as long as the extra ~$0.005 per pound and the shipping can be absorbed into the budget.

Now, if you are not baking all of your own bread and cookies and cakes then buying 100lbs of flour might not be for you. Here's why: That stuff doesn't last forever. Actually, it'll last about 3 months in my constant temp and relatively stable humidity basement or 6 months in the freezer before it goes stale and/or rancid. And would you look at that, that's about as long as it'll take me to use that all up. How fortuitous. It's almost like I planned it that way...

Another good example for us is tomatoes. We use a lot of them. A. LOT.

Before I started growing and preserving my own we went through about four #10 cans of whole peeled tomatoes a month. In order to replace that level of consumption with organic, home grown, non-BPA canned tomatoes I would have to can roughly 200 quarts of tomatoes. That's not happening for several reasons:

1. I'm lazy (remember this, it's sort of a theme here)
2. That's 200 quart jars I have to buy just for the tomatoes, and while I probably will get there eventually, it's not an investment we are able to make up front.
3. If I suggested to the hubbin that we need to can 200 quarts of tomatoes he would either have a coronary right then and there or seed the garden plot with grass seed, or both.
4. That's a lot of room to dedicate in the pantry. More room than we can allow for it, in fact.
5. Canning 200 quart jars would be 29 canner loads for me. I could probably pull it off during tomato season, but see #1 (told you to remember that one) and there are other things to take care of at that point in time. 

Dehydrating to the rescue :D

I can some tomatoes, because you just can't beat that taste and texture for some things.

I throw some of them into the freezer, because it's easy and we have a lot of them.

I dehydrate A. LOT. of them. Because when I make a sauce, stew or soup, having some dehydrated tomatoes to throw in there is wonderful. And a pint of dehydrated tomatoes is about equivalent to two #10 cans :) Look at all that room I am not using for tomatoes :D

I didn't one day decide that I would need 50 quarts of canned tomatoes and 100lbs of flour every three months, it took some watching what we actually eat, some math, some looking at grocery receipts and figuring out when we use what. And it took me a few years to figure out that that 50lb bag of flour I bought in December went a lot faster than the one I bought in August. It's a journey, and you have to pay attention to things you may not usually even think about.

Beans are a prime example of this for us. I used to not cook with beans that much, because I bought them dry and they are sort of a pain to deal with that way, but SOOOO much cheaper. Then I heard about a trick where you soak a whole bunch and then freeze them in portion sizes, so you just have to defrost them to have pre-soaked beans ready to go. Only that's a pain in the rear, too, because thawing that lump-o-frozen-beans takes forever without application of some heat, and you may recall that I am what is colloquially known as way too cheap to do that.

Then I started canning them without pre-soaking them (here) and suddenly we are eating more beans than you can shake a stick at. And I started running out of beans, so I started buying them whenever I saw them for my stock-up price (under $1.00/lb) anywhere...We have a lot of beans right now. Dried, and canned. 

A. LOT. 

There's actually more in the basement and I took this pic after I canned a bunch. I may have a problem.

It's OK, because they are not going to go bad before we use them up. But I will have to figure out how much we actually consume, so that I can then adjust my purchases to meet our actual demand without having a years worth of beans sitting around. Because having a few hundred bucks tied up in food that might go bad before we eat it is not frugal or smart. And it sort of ticks me off when I do it.

Quick aside: Rotate your food and your tires. In shuffling a bunch of jars in the basement I found some dried bell peppers from 2010. They are still good (Thank YOU) and are now actually ground into a fine powder and in the spice cabinet for use as paprika (YUMM). I just hate finding stuff like that because it means I didn't do due diligence. First in, first out and stock from the back, B. you know this :)

You know how when you were in school and you asked when you would ever need all this math stuff? My mall rat, colour guard, designer clothes wearing, snobby self would have laughed if someone had used this as an example.

That's all I got for now,

Happy Pinching

*I buy bananas when they go on sale in the summer and prep them for banana nut bread by putting 6 of them in a bag, adding cinnamon and freezing them as flat mush

Last of the summer harvest (frost advisory for tonight)

Clockwise and spiralwise (is that a word?), starting with the pile of three, upper left:
Green, ripening to a deep oxblood red sweet pepper, that has such a rich, flavour that it's simply indescribable. I keep opening the dehydrator and popping some chunks into my mouth. There's a reason you are not seeing a pile of them, I had to beat the hubbin off with a stick to be able to let them get ripe enough to seed save them. They are called Sweet Chocolate and it's kind of true.
Next up Ancho Pablomas, these babies are HOT HOT HOT and have a smoky flavour without having seen a smoker, which is a good thing, because I don't have one :( ...yet.
Black Hungarians, medium hot, with a sweet lead in that slowly builds up to a nice, warm crescendo with practically no burn. Probably my favourite hot pepper and not just because they are black, ripening to a deep, rich red :) on nice, compact plants and look lovely.
Black Hungarians, last years open pollination, it worked :).
Sweet little pepperlings, don't know what they are called, but they are really, really sweet, the candy of peppers, and simply adorable on the plant. Upright habit, and you can't really see it here, they go from a creamy white to purple to orange to deep red and are probably the most ornamental peppers I've ever planted.
I call the next set jalapeno looking sweet peppers, they are very flavourful, sweet and mild with no heat at all, very nice, they are from seeds I saved from a pack of sweet peppers from Sams Club if you would believe it. Experiment: successful, so far, let's see what happens next year :D
Then we have White Bullnose, they ripen from a creamy white through purple streaks to a deep red and the flavour changes from buttery to this very rich paprika flavour I've never experienced in a fresh pepper.
Purple peppers that are white on the inside, want to say they are purple beauty, but could be wrong, open pollination from last year, seed from one lone survivor of the drought, and the taste is completely worth the effort of nursing that one through :)
Basic green pepper, except these are a heirloom variety (Emerald Giant, didn't quite make it to red) as well, and I can tell the difference. The pepper flavour is complex, there is a sweetness to these that I have never tasted in a commercial pepper and they are more fragrant than anything I could buy at the store.
Then black jalapenos, they pack a punch and again, the complex flavour is worth dealing with the heirloom for this one, it was a new one for us this year and we'll be planting it again along with all of the varieties you see here. I will be trying a few other ones next year, just to add a bit more variety to the pepper game, but ultimately I want there to be 10 to 12 varieties.

I'm saving the seeds out of all of these, and for peppers that's easy to do: cut open the pepper, take out the seeds and dry them until a seed breaks when bent, then store them away, I keep my hoard in jars in the freezer :D. Make sure you lable your seeds well throughout the entire process, or you might wind up like me, calling your seed packs 'pretty little pepperlings' ;)

We've gone from this

 to this. Fall is well and truly here.

That's all I got for now,
Happy Pinching

Quickie update, gratuitous dinner pic and an announcement

First things first: I have reactivated my Etsy store, as of this writing I have a grand total of three items listed (impressive, no?), the link is here, in case you want to check out my handiwork. I'm still working on the picture taking thing, so I'm not real happy with that. Moving on.

That's what I have been working on, mostly.

I also boiled some potatoes, let them cool enough to peel them (this counts as a break around here because I do it while watching TV), then shredded them, mixed in some seasonings (chili powder and powdered onion, FANCY!) and some cheese sauce (about a cup of milk to three cups of shredded cheese, heated until pour-able), cut up some hot dogs (don't judge) and threw that concoction into the oven at 350 for a half hour.

There was a third pan...

I think that the whole shebang is giving us 24 portions for less than $10 ($3 for the potatoes, $1 for the hotdogs and $4 for the cheese, give or take a few), and it's my favourite kind of dish, the one dish meal :D

Here's what happened in my kitchen yesterday: Potatoes were cut up, blanched and then set to dehydrate for fries later, I'll finish that post when they come out of the dehydrator.
And I made this:

That's 6 lbs of ground beef, two quarts of beans, homecanned of course, about a half gallon of cut up onions, a bit of home baked bread turned breadcrumbs, and about 18 eggs. With the application of 350 degrees and about 30 minutes we are left with this, much more appetizing looking result:

There's actually 4 more pans of this. 72 servings. I'll take it for under $20 and about 2 hours of actual work, if I consider the cutting of the onions and the mixing of the meat and other ingredients. Pack that up with a side of salad of some sort and both the hubbin and I are quite happy for lunch. That reminds me, time to put the last lettuce seeds in the ground. Never done. ;)

The other non-homesteading thing I have been working on is my facebook page for this blog (is that circular reasoning?) and the Etsy store, It only took me 5 months to hit that button, so no procrastination here...

https://www.facebook.com/PinchingLincoln

That's all I got for now,
Happy Pinching

Braindump post that is only marginally related to homesteading

I love to be creative. 

I sew, I experiment with how I cook (no, really?), I make things from scratch, I try to build things out of what I have on hand, rather than buy something (I always feel like I am taking the easy way out when I do that), I sometimes work with training my cats to do stupid cat tricks, in short, my inner science geek comes out to play and I do physics and math and psychology and physiology and geometry in my kitchen and sewing room and the back yard. And that's before I start to pull the ceiling panels out of the RV (ask me about how much I love the rain we've been having) and try to figure out what kind of engine is in that beast so I can fiddle with it and keep it running. 

But I digress.

I have been incredibly slackful about something that I really want to do for a while now. And every time I gear up for it something shiny comes along and I let it fall by the wayside and skip off into the newest and most improved sunset.

That thing is my etsy store. I have one. I have listed items in the past, I have made sales there. I have stuff ready to go. So why isn't it up and being maintained? Because I get sidetracked like a fruitfly with ADHD, that's why. Well, no more.

I will have inventory listed and items in the works by October 18, 2013. That is my pledge to myself. 

Pressure canning dry beans - My no-soak, no-pre-cook method

This is what a lot of my recipes look like. Thorough, no?

OK, it's that time of year, where I still refuse to turn on the furnace, still have the windows open all day and night and the thermostat reads in the low 60s for most of the day. I've taken out the sweaters and there's two comforters on the bed.

CHILI WEATHER.

Only problem is, I went down to the basement and lo, there were no more canned beans. Only dry. A lot of dry. I hate cooking with dry beans, it takes forever and it's really rather tedious.

So while I was down there I grabbed a few jars of dry beans (I don't leave them in the bag they come in) and the pressure canner. OK, it actually took three trips, it's how I get my exercise.

WARNING: This is not the USDA recommended method, it is how *I* can dry beans. I find it to be easy, simple and effective. I can see no way in which it would be bad or not work if you follow these instructions, it produces what is to me a firmer and better end product than the recommended version of soak, cook, then can, which makes for (again, to me) soggy, mushy beans. If you do not feel comfortable canning beans this way or if you prefer your beans softer than this, please refer to the USDA guidelines, even with soaking, cooking and then canning beans you will save money and time and have a product that is healthier than commercial canned goods with additives you don't want or BPA in the can.

Here's the procedure:

Assemble: Beans (any kind of dry beans will work, in this instance I am using navy beans and chick peas), clean jars and lids and rings, pressure canner (you must not water bath can this, beans are a low acid food and will not be safe to eat if water bath canned), water, seasonings if you are so inclined, lid lifter, jar lifter, a few towels and a clean cloth.

Check your canner for functionality (nothing lodged in the vents, seal is supple, it's clean), this is different for every canner, so please follow manufacturers recommendations.

Put your jars into the dishwasher and run the drying cycle (I have mentioned that I am lazy, right?) or, if you don't have a dishwasher, put them into a sink of hot water. This is just to warm up your already clean jars.

Set your lids in a pot of water on the stove to simmer.

Sort and rinse beans (however many you are going to can,). I measure them before I rinse them and then again as I put them in the jars. Use a bit of vinegar in the rinse water if you are so inclined, I do to make sure they are clean.

BEANS!

sorting and rinsing the pre-measured beans

Let the beans drip dry while you line up however many jars you are planning on canning. Make sure jars are clean. It doesn't matter if you use wide mouth or regular mouth, I tend to use wide mouth because they are easier to get the beans out of when we use them, but as you can see, either works. Make sure to check your jars for cracks and chips, especially around the rim.

My canner takes 7 quart jars

Put about 3 inches of room temperature water into your pressure canner and set the bottom into it. Do not turn on the heat yet.

Fill each jar with either a half cup (for pints) or just slightly less than a cup (for quarts, seriously, like 3 beans less than a full cup) of rinsed beans. Add your seasonings (salt, onions, garlic, pepper, chili powder, up to you, I add a bit of salt, usually)

One tsp of salt per quart is all I add

Top off with room temperature water (I use filtered for this, because it will be what we eat) until there is an inch of headspace left.

Needs a bit more water (actually, the bottom of the ridge on the jar is an inch, but to make sure it's right I measure with the blue thingy that has a name I cannot recall right now)

Dip your clean cloth into the water you are simmering the lids in (careful, this is really hot) and wipe the rims of the jars clean with it.

It's a lid...uhm...magnet

Using your lid lifter, set your lids on the jars and finger tighten the rings. Finger tight means nicely tight, but not so tight that you are straining.

Place the jars in your pressure canner.

Once the canner is filled to capacity, close the lid and turn on the heat.

When you have vented steam for a solid ten minutes, put the weight on the vent and let the pressure build up.

This might be the best $10 I ever spent. It's an adjustable weight 5, 10 and 15lbs

When the pressure reads 10lbs*, start the timer (75 min for pints, 90 min for quarts)  and then keep the pressure at that level.

With the 10lb weight rocking and the pressure gauge reading at a solid 10lbs it's time to start the timer. 90 minutes for the quarts I'm doing 

Any adjustments you make to the temperature must be gradual, large drops in pressure will affect your product, you may lose moisture and the jars might not seal or even break.

When your timer goes off, turn off the heat and let the pressure normalize on its own. While that is going on,

Notice how the pop up button on the right is down, the pressure is down and the black safety valve is flat, that's what you wait for before taking the weight off and opening the canner. And be careful of the hot steam that is still in there.

Arrange a towel on your counter away from drafts, so that you can

set your jars on the towel when you lift them out of the canner to cool for about 24 hours.

The rings only look like they are on there sideways :) Also, I underfilled the jars a bit, not a big deal.

Wait for the ping.

In case you are wondering, YES, I'm a dork.

After a few hours you can check if the jars have sealed, tapping on the top is my preferred method, a sealed jar will sound a nice, high note, an unsealed jar will sound dull. Final test is trying to lift the jar by the lid if it sounded dull. And I tend to err on the side of caution and put the ones I am not sure about in the fridge for immediate consumption or the freezer for later (another reason to use wide mouth jars, they can be frozen).

Quick before they all seal:

Sound test of a different kind

Take the rings off for storage! Always take the ring off for storage of canned goods.
Crud accumulated under the ring can cause mold and rusting and if the ring is on and the jar didn't seal right it can hold the lid in place while the contents ferment and then re-seal, and that's the kind of thing that can (will and has) kill people. Don't eat canned goods that have the rings still on. Not worth it.

Voila, canned beans. With ingredients you can pronounce. And really quite easy to do.

Quick bit of math:

One pound of beans runs anywhere between $0.89 and $2.49 around here, I don't buy them at more than about a dollar on principle, but in the interest of fairness, let's say one pound costs $1.50.

That pound will fill 3 quart jars (plus a half pint), so that's less than $0.50 in beans

Throw in the $0.06 for the two gallons of water I will use to process and fill the jars and the $0.11 for the stove usage and we have a total of $1.67 for three quart jars of beans for a whopping $0.56 for a large can of beans. If you can beat that price, do it. Stock up. Bring me some.

Realistically, because I buy beans for less than a dollar a pound I don't spend more than $0.31 per quart jar or $0.15 per pint of home canned beans. It's completely worth it for us, especially if I consider that I mostly can in the colder months, so there is a marginal gain in frugality because I am heating up the house while doing it. More math than I care to do, but the thought sure makes me feel all virtuous ;) <snicker>

One last thought: This method lets me throw in a quart or a pint of beans at the last minute when I am processing something else and have room in the canner. That doesn't lower the price of the beans any, but it does mean I am not running a partial load, so to speak. An hour and a half of the gas stove running costs me about $0.11 whether there is something in the pot or not.

That's all I got for now.
Happy Pinching

*At sea level, if you live at a higher elevation, please adjust your pressure accordingly

Conserving Water for fun and profit

This is a more in depth follow up to this post.

I mentioned that we spent about $100 on a low flow toilet and shower head.

The toilet was because the original one installed in our house was a custom made item, that after over 50 years of absolutely no maintenance whatsoever gave up the ghost and leaked. From everywhere. And getting custom seals to fix the pink abomination* would have been more expensive than buying the basic model at local home improvement warehouse for all of $80 plus taxes and installing it, which we did ourselves and it was EASY.

The new toilet is a low flow model that uses 1.4 gallons per flush. Our old model used 9 gallons per flush. We pay $0.02969 (that's 3 cent) per gallon of water, so that's a total savings of $0.225644 or 22cent per flush.

The new toilet saves us more than a dollar a day in water.

We are actually really upset that we didn't change it out years ago. (staves off descend into the shouldacouldawouldas by focusing on the fact that we have now done it and it's over)

The low flow showerhead (which I actually bought with points from the credit card, but I'll count the cost for this exercise) took us from 2.8 gallons per minute of shower to 1.5 gallons per minute of shower. That's a savings of $0.038597 per minute of shower time, which at Pinch Manor pretty much adds up to at least $1.16 a day. Hey, we drink cheap coffee, we get to take looooong showers.** Your luxury allowances may vary :D

So with those $100 we are saving probably to the tune of $2.25 on an average day, which means that that investment will amortize in 44.44 days, or in a little more than a month.

I'll take it.

The point of this little exercise? Those pennies add up. And up and up. An average savings of $2 a day means that we are at this point (it's been over a month since we installed these) saving about $60 dollars a month or about $720 a year, give or take a few dollars. That is something that will show itself over the next few months in our water/gas bill which I have already adjusted down a bit (we were at $115 for those two, $85 now).

And the new showerhead, while having a lower flow, means that neither hubbin nor I have run out of hot water (40 gallons last a lot longer now) while contemplating life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in the shower. This is a win for us.

Next water related projects we are saving up for: On demand water heater so we can pinch a few pennies out of the gas bill and a reverse osmosis water filtration system for our drinking water (not a savings in money, but in health)

That's all I got for now,
Happy Pinching



*our bathroom is the kind of pink that always puts me in mind of someone who has kidney failure and a really bad sunburn, not a pretty colour.

**at least until we can afford a hot tub, which you will know, because there will be water stains on this page