Several years ago, I started ditching kitchen plastic.  I slowly began acquiring glass storage containers, and these days pretty much all of our leftovers are stored in lidded pyrex dishes.  For dry goods, I have a huge assortment of glass jars, most of which would otherwise have been destined for the recycle bin.  Any time I use up a jar of coconut butter or olives or salsa or whatever, I soak the jar to get the label off, run it through the dishwasher, and then let it dry thoroughly.  After that, it finds itself in my pantry, ready for its second life.  Ever since we started buying food in bulk at the co-op, we’ve been using a lot of glass jars.  I bought five pounds of dried gogi berries, and they filled about a dozen odd-sized jars.  I’ve gradually been filling jars with rice, beans, and lentils, although my 25 pound bags end up filling a lot of jars!

I always keep an eye out at thrift stores for glass storage containers.  Last week, for $1.50, I found a great sun tea jar (the kind without a pour spout at the bottom).  I brought it home, ran it through the dishwasher, and now I have a gallon-size glass jar for holding rice.  Perfect!  I will definitely keep watching for more used sun tea jars – they have nice wide mouths, and hold a large amount of bulk food.   I also recently found a set of pyrex storage jars with screw-on lids a the same thrift store, and paid six dollars for a set of three jars, the largest of which holds nearly a gallon.  So I’m slowly adding to my glass storage container collection.  I’m not quite to this point yet, but I’m getting there.  Hopefully we’ll have lots of food from our garden to preserve this summer, so I keep saving jars.

We eat salads just about every day.  That means we go through a lot of salad dressing.  I’ve found that salad dressing is usually either really expensive or a dietary nightmare.  The organic stuff made of good ingredients without a bunch of preservatives and crud mixed in, is usually at least four dollars for a little bottle.  The cheaper stuff is usually a complex mixture of high fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated oils, and a whole bunch of synthetic junk.  I stopped buying the latter years ago, but I had continued to buy (grudgingly) the really expensive stuff until recently.

A few months ago, I started making my own salad dressing.  I had always done the vinegar and oil thing, but my husband prefers creamy dressings, and I like to mix it up a bit too.  I got this book as a gift, and my favorite thing about it has been the salad dressings.  My favorite is made of nutritional yeast, celery, hemp seeds, herbs, miso, lemon juice, and some flaxseed oil, and I always add some apple cider vinegar.  It’s so tasty that I usually eat the leftovers with a spoon, straight from the blender.  It’s nutritious, made entirely of ingredients that I have on hand in my kitchen (no mystery stuff), and so much less expensive than the dressings I used to buy.  I can change the flavor by switching the herbs (cilantro instead of basil, for example), and I can make just enough for one or two meals so that it’s always fresh.  It usually takes about five minutes to make a great dressing.

I’ve started experimenting, and have had lots of luck with adding and subtracting ingredients – most of my dressing attempts have been successful, even though I’m usually winging it, just using whatever I have on hand and tossing it in the blender, using lemon juice and/or apple cider vinegar as a base.  An added bonus is that there’s no salad dressing jars to recycle or reuse afterwards – just a blender to clean.

Do any of you make your own salad dressings?  Any favorite recipes or secret ingredients to share?

Ever since I discovered Green And Crunchy, I’ve been envious of Sheri’s bulk food club.  It’s not available in our area though, so I just kept shopping at the health food store.  If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you know I don’t compromise when it comes to food.  We don’t buy anything with mystery ingredients, we make pretty much everything from scratch, and our diet is mostly vegan.  We try to buy local and organic (both if possible) whenever we can.

Sheri’s recent posts detailing her bulk food purchases inspired me to try again to see if I could find something similar.  I started with hemp seeds.  I had been buying them from our local store in 8 ounce bags.  We would go through a bag every week, and they were about $8 each.  Expensive, plus all of the wasted packaging was a bummer.  So last week I went to the source (I buy Manitoba Harvest hemp seeds) and ordered two 5 pound buckets of seeds.  They came to a total of $100 ($10/lb as opposed to the $16/lb I was paying when I bought them in little packages each week).  Shipping was free, and the buckets arrived today.  My bulk food buying has begun!

Then this morning we went to check out the food co-op in the nearby town.  The health food store where we normally shop is local to our state, but the co-op is even more local.  Right away I liked the bulk bins (mostly organic) that allow customers to reuse their own containers rather than prepackaging stuff in little plastic bags.  The store was small and quaint, but well-stocked.  And the best part is their bulk buying program.  They can order anything that their distributer carries (which is a lot more than what is available in the store), and members get all bulk orders for 20% above wholesale (as opposed to 40% – 50% above wholesale for non-members).  To become members, we had to buy a share in the co-op, which cost $160.  If we ever move or decide we don’t want to be members (both highly unlikely!) we can sell our share back to them.  So we bought a share, and are now proud co-op members.  I love the fact that we’re supporting a local business that is fully focused on healthy living and local, organic food.  I am also SO FREAKIN EXCITED to place my first bulk order!  I’ve been making a list of all the things I use a lot of, and I’ll place my order sometime in the next week or so.

As an added bonus, co-op members get dividends each year, based on the profitability of the store.  Here’s hoping they do well!

We’ve started our seedlings for the garden, and are very excited about all the food we’re hoping to grow here this summer.  It will be great to have our own vegetables straight from the back yard.  We’re going to let a few of the new trees bear fruit this summer, but we’re planning to pluck the buds off most of them so that they can focus on their roots this year.  So this summer our own crops will be mostly veggies… but one of these days, most of our food will (hopefully!) be as local as can be – grown within 50 yards of our back door.

Anybody else having luck with buying food in bulk?  Growing your own?  Tips for storing food that you grow or purchase in bulk?

I love grocery shopping.  I have no interest at all in going to the mall, but I can happily spend an hour or so wandering around a grocery store.   We almost never eat out, and I cook just about all of our food from scratch, which helps to keep our total food costs reasonable.  According to our credit card spending report, we’ve average just under $600/month for the last 12 months at grocery stores.  In addition, we usually spend about $150/month at Costco, most of which is for food.  After housing, food is definitely our largest expense.

I usually go into town and do my grocery shopping once a week.  But it’s been 11 days now since I went shopping, and we’re still going strong.  I decided to see how long I could go without shopping, and it’s working great.  We have a pantry and freezer full of food, but I tend to focus on the fresh produce first, forget about the stored food, and then go back to the grocery store when I run out of fresh produce.  This time, I’m focusing on using up what we have before I go shopping again.  We have lots of dried legumes in the pantry, so we had lentil soup yesterday and we’re having black bean chili this evening.  I have been using greens from our cold frames for green smoothies, and combining them with dried greens that I have on hand (spirulina, several kinds of seaweed, wheat grass powder, and dried mint leaves).  I’m using up frozen veggies and bulk dried items.  We eat oats for breakfast every day, and since we buy our oats in 50 pound bags, we rarely have to replenish our supply.

Since we live in a small town now, we spend almost no money unless we go into the big town 10 miles from here.  That’s where the grocery store and thrift stores are, as well as most of the other places where we buy things; we try to combine trips, and schedule all of our errands to coincide with a grocery run.  So if we aren’t grocery shopping, we pretty much aren’t spending money at all.  We’re more than half way through our current credit card billing cycle, and we’ve had a total of 12 transactions so far.

I’m loving this challenge of making nutritious meals for my family just using what I already have on hand.  I’m finding that a little creativity goes a long way, and I’m hoping to make it to the weekend before I have to shop again.

Hello all, and Happy Sunday!  I wanted to share a couple of links with you, to sites that I’ve been using a lot lately.

I’ve mentioned that we’ve been transitioning to a mostly vegan diet, and I’m focusing a lot on raw food.  It makes sense, given that the vast majority of what we eat is veggies, fruits, and seeds.  When I shop, just about everything in my cart is from the produce department (which makes me really excited for the summer, when we will hopefully be growing most of it ourselves), and recipes for simple raw foods fit very well into our lives.  The Sunny Raw Kitchen has become a standby for me.  I love that there are so many recipes available on the site, for free, and categorized nicely in an index.  I also love that so many of them don’t require a dehydrator.  We are planning to get a dehydrator  in the summer, once we are ready to start preserving our produce, but for now, we don’t have one and I love that so many of the recipes on The Sunny Raw Kitchen don’t need one.  The “where’s the beef?” carrot mixture quickly became a staple around here, and I’ve been making it every few days for the last month or so.  It’s much more interesting than plain carrots, very inexpensive to make, and a great addition to salads and tacos.  Both my husband and my son love it, and it only takes about 3 minutes to make using a food processor.

I’m also loving Debra’s List, which is an amazing resource of eco-friendliness.  Debra has been green since long before it was cool, and her site is a wealth of information.  I especially like the section where she explains a lot of the things that she does around her own home.  It inspired me to spend a lot of today deep cleaning our house.  We can’t afford to spend thousands of dollars on mattresses and furniture without toxic chemicals in them, but I can spend a few hours vacuuming all the nooks and crannies of our house (including the mattresses, an idea I got from Debra’s site) and washing our rugs and bedding.  In general, everything I’ve done to rid our house of toxins has been inexpensive or free.  The cupboard under our sink is full of bags of baking soda and jugs of vinegar that I use to clean pretty much everything, but I’m not going to spend $5000 on a new couch made of organic hemp.  I love that Debra’s site has ideas you can put into practice regardless of how much money you have.

I hope you can find something useful on one or both of these sites – they’ve both been fantastic resources for me, and I thought I’d share.

I’ve mentioned before that we use one credit card for pretty much all of our spending.  We get 1% cash back on the card, and it’s an easy way to keep track of our spending, since it’s all listed in one place on the statement.  Our billing cycle starts and ends around the 10th of each month.  This morning, I noticed that we’ve spent a total of $835 so far in this cycle, and we’re already 2/3 of the way through it.  And that includes plane tickets to go visit my husband’s parents in the spring ($280 for two tickets – our son will still be under two, and flying for free at that point), and $110 to have all of our locks and deadbolts changed (something we had been meaning to do ever since we moved in, but only got around to doing a few weeks ago).  That means we’ve only spent $445 on everything else so far, and we only have about another eleven days in this billing period.

Most of that money was for food and home repair stuff, with a few other random things here and there.  Basically, we’re living well below our means, and loving it.

Last night, after dinner, we sat around the living room and my husband made funny noises at the cat.  Every time he did, she would open her eyes very wide, and stick her ears straight up.  I was laughing so hard that it hurt, and our son couldn’t stop laughing either.  And it hit me – this is what it’s all about.  Having fun, laughing, enjoying my family… we really don’t need anything else.  There is nothing that I could have bought that would have given me more pleasure than just laughing with my two favorite guys.  (Ok, so I guess we did buy the cat – the adoption fee was $85 at the animal shelter, and we do have to feed her.  But she’s obviously worth it.)

Lately, I’ve been noticing more and more that I am really happy, nearly all of the time.  I don’t think it’s a coincidence that my happiness seems to have increased as we’ve been actively trying to simplify our life.  I have mentioned before that I don’t particularly like to clean.  As a result, our house was often chaotic and messy, but I brushed it off by telling myself that I was just a creative cook, or too busy to clean.  A couple months ago, I decided to change this aspect of myself.  I started by making the bed every morning.  For two months now, I’ve been making the bed as soon as we get up, every morning.  At this point, I can’t imagine not making the bed – even though I only used to make it once or twice a week.  After I got in the habit of making the bed, I decided to tackle the kitchen.  First, I decluttered in a big way.  Then I committed to cleaning up the kitchen after every meal.  I cook from scratch pretty much all the time, and used to only clean the kitchen after it got really messy.  But for the last month, I’ve been cleaning as I cook, and cleaning thoroughly after each meal.  I cannot even describe the difference this had made in the state of our kitchen, and in my own mental wellbeing.  I love walking through our house now, and seeing lots of wide open spaces and clean counters.  Just as with making the bed, I now cannot imagine leaving a mess in the kitchen after a meal.  Frugal Trenches, one of my favorite bloggers, keeps her house 5 minutes from ready.  We have a toddler, so I’m shooting for 15 minutes from ready – still a big improvement over what it used to be.

I know this post seems a bit disjointed, but I’m hoping to convey the feeling of peace and calm that I have nearly all of the time now.  We don’t even have to try to not spend money anymore, because we’ve just gotten in the habit of doing things that don’t cost money.  We don’t know what the future holds as far as our income, and by not spending the money we’re earning now, we’re giving ourselves a cushion against future lulls in our income.  And if that doesn’t happen?  Well, early retirement sounds good to me.  Living simply and frugally, combined with decluttering, organizing, and keeping our living space clean and simple has all contributed to greatly reducing the stress and worry that I used to carry around with me.

Remember last year, when we built a little greenhouse to go in our side yard? 

When we moved, we had to cut it in half, and we just got it put back together this week.  Here it is in our new yard, protecting one of our garden beds:

See why we had to move?

That green patch around the patio is a lawn that my husband planted from seed a month ago.  He rented a tiller ($36) and spent about $20 on grass seed.  The rest of the yard is really nasty weeds, and he wanted a little area off of the patio where our son could play without getting poked by gnarly weeds.  So now we have a little patch of lawn.  It’s only taking up a small area of our yard – it looks bigger in the picture than it really is.  Most of our yard is devoted to fruit trees and berry bushes, but the area that you can see beyond the grass in the picture will eventually be filled in with garden beds.  For now, there are only three, but there are many more to come!

I promised a long time ago that I’d post a picture of the orchard we planted.  Here it is, under a rainbow:

It’s hard to see all of the trees, because they are still pretty small.  Check back in a few years and it should be a more impressive sight!  In all, we have 14 fruit trees in our orchard.  We’re expecting a bit of trial and error with this process.  We’re only going to let about half the trees fruit next year, leaving the other half to focus on growing strong roots.  The following year we’ll switch it up, and let the ones that already fruited work on their roots.  Getting fruit will depend on when we get our last frost too, so I expect that some years will be better than others.  But we’re really excited about having fruit trees – it’s something we’ve wanted to do for a long time.

I also wanted to share a picture of the pepper plants we’re growing on our patio in a container my husband built:

And, better late than never… check out the Festival of Frugality that Green Panda Treehouse hosted last week.  I had an article in the FOF, and enjoyed many of the other articles too. 

Since my foray into baking bread has worked out well, I thought I’d try tortillas.  I don’t know why I never thought of this before.  Seriously, they are about as easy as baking powder biscuits, which I’ve been making for years.  I stopped buying big name-brand tortillas years ago, because of the large number of ingredients on the label.  We don’t eat tortillas all that often, but when we do, I always buy organic, preservative-free tortillas at the health food store.  They are not cheap.

Yesterday, I found this recipe online, and decided to give it a try.  You know me – I can’t ever follow a recipe without tweaking it a bit.  So I swapped out some of the white flour for whole wheat flour, and used Smart Balance instead of lard.  It took about five minutes to get everything mixed up and 12 little dough balls made.  I let them sit for a while and then rolled them out with my rolling pin (first time I ever used my rolling pin!  Guess my son can’t have it as a toy afterall).  I cooked them for about 10 – 15 seconds per side in a hot frying pan (no oil needed), and that was all it took.  They were fabulous.  We may or may not have eaten all twelve of them already.

So not only will I not be buying bread anymore, I also won’t be buying tortillas.  I don’t remember the exact price of the tortillas that I used to buy, but I’m thinking it was around $4 for a dozen.  I’m estimating that the ingredients I used yesterday cost less than a dollar (including organic flour).  The tortillas took very little time to make, and required almost no cooking skills.  I can definitely do that again.

Yesterday I baked a loaf of whole wheat bread in our sun oven.  Then I decided to make eggplant sandwiches.  I had a fresh farmers market eggplant, which I sliced up and drizzled with fresh garlic, olive oil, salt, and pepper.  Then I put the eggplant slices in the sun oven and left them there for about an hour.  Halfway through their cooking, I added a bell pepper from our garden to the sun oven, and roasted it along with the eggplant.

I assembled the sandwiches with tomatoes (from the farmers market – ours aren’t ready yet), lettuce from our garden, mustard, and vegan mayo, along with the eggplant and roasted pepper.  They were amazingly tasty, and I love that all the cooking was done for free.  As a bonus, it was done without heating up my already warm kitchen, and while I was able to get other stuff done in the house.  Here’s a picture (I’m not a food photographer by any stretch, so please ignore the glare):

We also installed a clothesline yesterday, which I’m very excited about.  Actually we just installed the poles – we still have to add the lines, which we’re going to do tomorrow.  My husband found the poles at a scrap metal place he’s been frequenting lately.  They had been cut off at ground level, so they’re a bit shorter than normal.  Once we got them embedded in concrete they’re only about four and a half feet high.  But they will work perfectly… after all, I’ve been using folding clothes racks that are about four feet high for the last two years.  The best part about the poles was that they were scrap metal, sold for 25 cents a pound.  He bought a bunch of other stuff with them; we don’t know exactly how much they cost, but we’re guessing it was probably around ten bucks.  One of the T-bars was broken, so my husband snagged another piece of pole scrap and welded on a new T-bar.

We commented on the fact that our new clothesline area takes up as much space as we had in our entire backyard at our old house.  Here, it’s only taking up a tiny little area of yard to the side of our house.  Reason number 742 that we’re glad we moved!