Category Archives: My Life

Wood and wheat

Every time I look at other apartments, our wood floors lure me back.  Today, I dug in and gave them a much-needed cleaning.  We sweep them pretty regularly, but cleaning the floor is one of those things, like making the bed and showering, that give me pause, because as soon as I clean it, it’s just going to get dirty again.  (I definitely recommend that you NOT clean the floors before company comes, because large numbers of people tramping in are a surefire way to dirty the floor quickly.)

I started with a thorough sweeping, supplemented with a bit of vacuuming for the hard to reach spots.  No carpet means easy, usually electricity free, cleaning.  I even swept the stairs — no sense leaving them with dirt to track onto the clean floors.

Next came a bucket with a bit of cleaner and water.  I used Biokleen All Purpose Cleaner.  (I’m sure there are some great homemade green cleaner recipes out there — anyone want to share?)  The trick is to make a pretty dilute solution.  You don’t want it soapy, or you’ll have to go back over the floors with water.  I prefer a single pass.

While I was on my hands and knees washing the floor, my bread sat on the sidelines, rising.  Two 100% whole wheat plus* loaves that don’t look like doorstops = success.

Clean enough to eat off of, if you like that sort of thing 😉

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*I started with this basic 100% whole wheat bread recipe that makes two loaves.  I experimented by adding wheat berries, millet, steel cut oats, sunflower seeds, coarse corn meal, sesame seeds, and poppy seeds.  These additions totaled no more than a combined 3/4 of a cup for the two-loaf recipe.  The trick with the seeds and grains is using a presoak.  I soaked the millet and wheat berries overnight.  I soaked all of the other goodies for about an hour, starting with boiling water.

The coffee bean sack saga

The coffee bean sack saga started innocently enough.  Our friend Dani witnessed first hand our losing battle against the weeds in our commuter garden, and asked, “Have you ever thought about using cardboard or coffee sacks to keep weeds down in the paths?”

Why no, we had not, but it sounded like a wonderful idea.  I emailed a few local coffee roasting companies,  and received three invitations to stop by and pick up some coffee sacks.  Two of the three said to stop by anytime; the third (a much larger operation that shall remain nameless) asked me to let them know when I was coming.

Due to some weekend and evening work hours, I had last Tuesday off.  I started the day by running a bike errand in the vicinity of the coffee roasters.  I had not heard back from the third roaster with a specific time, but since I was right there, I decided to stop by anyway.  BAD IDEA.

Continue reading “The coffee bean sack saga”

Reluctant dairy queen

Shortly after I stopped eating meat five-and-a-half years ago, I also eliminated almost all animal products from my diet.  I traded in cow’s milk for soy milk, and stopped buying eggs, cheese, and other dairy products.  To make this manageable, I never set a hard and fast, “Thou shalt not eat any animal products” rule, so if you offered me a nice homemade baked good, I enjoyed it, knowing full well that it had eggs in it.

I was a bit more stringent with the dairy, especially avoiding cheese and other fatty dairy products. My dairy avoidance was due, in part, to some anti-dairy explanation of milk as, “Filtered cow’s blood.”  Scientifically, that may be true, in a sense, but stating it as such shows some definite anti-milk bias.  Though if you want to talk about bias in the dairy industry, the pro-milk studies funded by dairy associations would be a better starting point.  I digress.  (I have other issues with/questions about milk, both on the environmental and health fronts, but I’ll save those for another day.)

Time passed, and my not-so-hard-and-fast rule turned into a less-hard-and-fast rule, and next thing you know, I’m writing posts like this one.  Since writing that post, we continue to purchase raw milk, though we switched to another local dairy, Greenwood Farms, because they sell certified raw milk, meaning they test their milk regularly and comply with stringent standards.  For all I know, Lavy Dairy’s milk MAY meet those same standards, but I do kind of like having the assurance.  Greenwood Farms milk does have a couple of downsides: 1) It costs more than 3 times (!) as much as the certified organic milk from Lavy Dairy and 2) Greenwood Farms uses standard plastic (read: non-reusable) milk jugs.  On the upside, they offer pick-ups at Tower Grove Farmers’ Market, which, compared to driving to Silex, MO, is almost as good as home delivery.

Although freezing milk, which we did with our large Lavy Dairy purchase, does not ruin it, it does change it a bit, and we prefer to avoid that with our premium-price product.  However, for two people who don’t actually drink milk, consuming a gallon of the stuff before it goes bad presents a bit of a challenge (it seems to stay good for about 10 days, which is similar to the point when pasteurized milk goes bad).  We plan to experiment with cheese making, but we don’t have the cultures and vegetable rennet.  In the meantime, we’ve been making yogurt and ice cream.

After several edible but imperfect yogurt attempts (flavor not quite right, too thin, strange consistency), I remembered that we had a yogurt maker growing up.  A quick call to my mom confirmed that said yogurt maker still existed, plus two others that my parents acquired at garage sales over the years, all sitting in the basement, quite neglected.  While I certainly was not about to go out and buy a yogurt maker, I happily adopted one of my parents’ trio.

I greeted the new appliance with some suspicion, since it just barely felt warm when I plugged it in to preheat it.  After about seven hours, I very skeptically opened one of the yogurt containers to find . . .  perfect yogurt!

What with the milk, homemade yogurt and ice cream, and local cheese purchases, I somehow find myself eating dairy (often a relatively small amount that wouldn’t count as an official “serving”) at least once a day, if not more.  I’m not sure how I feel about that.

Carpool — new and improved

My carpool ended abruptly a couple of months ago, with the departure of my carpool buddy.  Toward the end, our carpool days dwindled, due to different schedules, leaving me discouraged about the whole carpool thing.

Fast forward to now, and my new carpool.  I almost don’t want to write about this, because I’m afraid it will disappear.  A couple of weeks ago, I discovered that a new coworker drove almost my exact route on the way home.  Toward the end, our paths diverged, but she couldn’t be that far away.

Like a good, patient stalker, I waited a few days before broaching the carpool idea with my coworker.  She was not only interested in carpooling, but also open to the idea of me biking to her house and paying gas money.  Who’s excited now?

It just so happens that she lives less than two miles from me, with a nice, easily bikeable route between our dwellings.  I’m not thrilled with the lack of indoor bike storage accommodations for my precious, so I’m working on equipping the old bike with a rear rack and crate.  I found a used rack at Bicycle Works and, for now, I’ll just use the crate I have on my other bike.  While I was happy to get a used rack, the price tag was barely lower than new — annoying!  Also annoying — the fact that the design of my old bike is such that attaching the rack presents a bit of a challenge.

Those little bumps in the road can’t dilute my overall excitement about the new arrangement.  Although my commute is far from car-free, bicycling is back in the picture, and I’m one happy girl!

When the relatives came

I played tourist in my own city over the weekend, hosting relatives from Iowa and Texas. I did not host them in the sense of “all seven people stayed in our one bedroom apartment” (clearly, that would have been a bad idea) but rather as a tour guide and minivan driver extraordinaire. We started the weekend whirlwind on Friday with lunch at Bixby’s inside the Missouri History Museum in Forest Park.

Bixby’s is the relatively new face of the history museum restaurant (the previous incarnation, whatever it was called, left me less than impressed).  With the focus on using local ingredients, Bixby’s hit the spot.  I ordered the vegetable and sausage panini with sausage on the side (for my grandpa).  My uncle ordered the vegetable and sausage panini “all together.”

The day continued with the grand garden tour, complete with samples of sun gold tomatoes. Later, we gathered around the hotel pool and feasted on Pi.  Thanks to my mom’s picnic set, our poolside dinner was largely trash free!

After dinner, fun and games ensued, with the kind of hilarity unique to large family gatherings, when we played an improvised version of the game Balderdash with obscure words from the internet.  We discovered many classic words over the course of the game:

  • dasypygal (def. Having hairy buttocks — yes, that was the real definition) which someone defined as, “What you say when you see a woman win a pie-eating contest — ‘Das a pie gal!'”
  • de aequitate: what happens when you really have to go to the bathroom but don’t make it there on time (not the real definition)
  • and many others that I’m sad to say I can’t remember right now

Saturday, we hit up the Soulard Zoo (AKA Soulard Farmers’ Market), which was every bit the seething mass of humanity I remembered (cringe).  Don’t get me wrong, the produce bargains I found there during grad school provided plenty of fruit and vegetable servings on a tight budget, but my tastes have changed a bit, or perhaps a lot more than a bit, in the direction of local, organically raised foods.

With so many farmers’ markets with just that focus, Soulard no longer does it for me.  Farmers’ markets should have FARMERS, not vendors who scour Produce Row for bargains on food from “49 states and 74 countries” (as stated in this RFT article); Soulard’s few local farmers are vastly outnumbered by such vendors.

We left Soulard and headed to Tower Grove Farmers’ Market, which revived my spirits greatly — a literal AND figurative breath of fresh air.  We returned to the apartment, where we lunched on sandwiches featuring many local ingredients.  The rest of the day included a trip to Home Eco and a lovely dinner at Local Harvest, where my uncle requested the vegan enchiladas “with ground beef in them, please.”  I can’t take him anywhere 😉  My thanks to both establishments for graciously accommodating our boisterous invasion.

Thanks everyone for making the trip!