Okay. Okay. I know that some of you are readers of other blogs that are high in cooking content right now and the last thing you really care about is another recipe. I get it. The thing is, I had this post all set to go up this morning, and since we’re trying to roll out a lot of new changes in a short period of time around here, I thought, “what the hell, we don’t share that many readers.” I could be wrong, it’s happened once before.
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We have a few friends out there in the cyberspace who are interested in what our kitchen is like. I don’t mean what our cabinets look like or what kind of counter top we have, but what we eat and how we shop, store food, and prepare meals. I’m a little baffled by this since it all seems pretty normal to me, but there have been requests and I am woman for the people. In response we’ve created this corner of our blog to share some of our methods, recipes, ideas, inspiration, and complete failures (of which there are many). Each kitchen post will be categorized under “Cook” to make them easy to find if you’re looking for something specific, or easy to browse if you aren’t.
A few points that might head off some confusion:
1. Our kitchen is vegan. Which means that we eat plants and things that come from plants and that’s about it. I don’t buy milk, cheese, butter, eggs, or meat. It’s a choice that we make for health reasons, to avoid putting all the nasty that comes along with animals and their products into our bodies, and not for animal rights or environmental reasons. So, don’t ask me if we still wear leather. (we do)
2. When I say “vegan” what I really mean is “mostly vegan”. Mostly because we still use some non-vegan things, like honey, and occasionally I find that a box of Annie’s Cheddar Bunnies has made it’s way into the cabinet. But, I love Cheddar Bunnies and the kid would eat nothing but Cheddar Bunnies if he were allowed, so sometimes we compromise. Our compromises never include meat, however.
3. I generally make our meals from scratch. There are, of course, exceptions to this too. While we don’t buy packaged meals I do use some frozen veggies and frozen out of season fruits, as well as canned beans. We also buy our breads instead of making them, and had you ever seem my attempts at bread making you’d know why. Cooking the way we do takes time, but it’s worth it. Our non-traditional diet means that the drive-thru window and the freezer aisle aren’t exactly options for us, but what we lose in convenience we make up for in health.
4. Almost none of the normal products used for cooking are vegan, so there will be an occasional “plug” for a vegan version or option. These will always be things that I use and like.
5. I’m an obsessive label reader. Grocery shopping with me takes FOREVER. Don’t be surprised if you read something about how we all went to the grocery store and Cody and Cheeks had to go to the car for a nap while I was in the cracker aisle.
Now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, I think I can continue.
This recipe for spaghetti sauce is the first vegan recipe that made our favorites list. It’s a combination of my old spaghetti sauce recipe (that had ground beef in it) and one that I found in Quick Fix Vegetarian. It’s easy, filling, and delicious and we love it with steamed or sauteed veggies and some bread. I reduce (or eliminate) the red pepper flakes because Cheeks won’t eat it if it’s too spicy, but it’s great even without the kick.
Easy-Pleasy Lentil Spaghetti
Ingredients:
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 medium onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 15oz can lentils, drained and rinsed (or 1 1/2 to 2 cups cooked dried lentils if you don’t like canned lentils)
1 15oz can tomato sauce
1 15 oz can diced tomato or 1 or 2 fresh tomatoes, diced (optional)
1/2 teaspoon dried basil
1/4 teaspoon dried oregano
1/4 teaspoon red pepper flakes (optional)
Directions:
Heat the oil in a saucepan over medium heat. Add the onion and garlic, cooking until onion is translucent. Stir in the lentils, tomato sauce, diced tomatoes, basil, oregano, and red pepper flakes, heat through and simmer for up to 1 hour.
While you’re whipping up that simpleness put a pot of water on to boil, add a splash of olive oil, and boil up some spaghetti noodles. You can mix it all up in a bowl to serve family style or dish it out individually, either way sprinkle some minced parsley on top. Yum.
After I informed the world that I’m going to use the month of February to replace my traditional household cleaning agents with homemade, (hopefully) safe cleaners, I was feeling motivated. So, I went to the bookcase for my book on do-it-yourself home cleaning and read through the “recipes” for household cleaning. I made a list of things to shop for and headed to the store. I only found one item that was on my list: lemon oil. The other things I was hoping to find were almost exclusively for laundry recipes and they didn’t have them at my trusty neighborhood store (though they did have an entire aisle dedicated to “green” cleaning products, 2/3 of which were laundry related, all astronomically priced). I’ll have to keep my list and look elsewhere.
In the meantime, lemon oil is exactly what I needed to make my dish soap. The recipe for dish soap is so simple it should be illegal. 20 oz Liquid castile soap + 30 drops lemon oil = Done. I put it in the bottle that we’ve always used for dish soap and it’s sitting by the sink right now! I’ve used it a time or two already and I really like it. I haven’t had to tackle any seriously greasy messes yet, just a slightly greasy cookie sheet which my soap whipped into shape with no trouble. I also haven’t had to fill the sink with soapy water yet. This I’m thinking could prove disappointing since castile soap doesn’t have a foaming agent added to it and won’t build up into that giant sink-o-suds that normal dish soap produces, it just sort of makes the water milky instead.
But, wait! There’s more!
Today was cleaning day so I thought to myself, “Self, you should see what new thing you can cook up to clean with!” After much consideration I decided on toilet bowl cleaner…Because I don’t have any commercial cleaner, but I do have all of the ingredients to make my own. So, into the toilet bowl went 1/4 cup of vinegar, 10 drops of tea tree oil, and 1/2 cup of baking soda. Reward: Awesome fizzing action, nice non-toxic scent, and (after a little scrubbing action) one sparkling toilet bowl. Also, I felt a little like a scientist. A janitor scientist. Like Will in Good Will Hunting except my genius thing would be science instead of math. You know.
If there’s one question I’ve asked myself a lot lately it’s, “Am I prepared?” No seems to be the answer, more often than not. So recently I’ve been reading a lot about preparedness (you know beans, bullets, and band-aids, as some folks say) to learn just how to begin preparation. What do I need? Where do I store it and how long will it keep? What skills should I have? Should I have plans for emergency situations and what would they be?
I couldn’t tell you where this new found obsession interest came from really, probably from becoming a parent. First it was the zombies attack!, then it was the desire to not have an energy bill, then it became pretty much random, but the more I read the more I realize we are unprepared for just about any bad happening. There is not enough stored food in the house if there were a flu pandemic, not enough winter clothes in the car if it were to break down, no way to heat the house if the power went out, we’re just straight-up not prepared.
So with our blog face-lift and quasi-change in life style, I’ve been setting out to be more prepared. This ranges from having a good set of tools around the house for casual repairs (e.g. partially remodeling the basement just for something to do when we’re under siege by less prepared marauders) or enough .308 rounds to keep the next civil war (or little fluffy bunnies) off my soon to be well maintained garden. In short, I’ll be around adding some content from time-to-time about my preparedness experiments. While I can’t stage a “28 Days Later”-esqe zombie attack to test my theories, I’ll explain my rational, give some good references (totally non-scientific of course), and offer my opinions on how it all went. Most of the experiments will be in keeping with our new household theme of not buying new, making our own for things that make sense and overall being a little more self reliable. So I leave you with a preparedness nugget from a book I recently read:
For many guys buying “survival” stuff is the equivalent of buying shoes and purses for women: They never seem to have enough and there’s always just one more thing they just have to get. –Fernando Aguirre
So in a nutshell, easy on the debit card, heavy on the learning, and I’ll see if I can find (and share) a smart way of getting prepared.
I’ve mentioned before that the three of us are taking part in a challenge of sorts to change the way we do one thing in our daily lives to save money and improve our lives. In reality what we’re doing is making a monthly change to simplify our lives, lessen our dependence on others and money, reduce our debt, and improve our home environment.
In January we committed to not buying anything new that could be purchased used. I am happy to report that it worked wonderfully! The new things that we purchased were gifts for the children of friends, a toilet seat for Cheeks (ew), a sweater for Cheeks’ 18 month (!) photos, and a few glass bottles (3 + one used that was free) for some of the concoctions I’ve been brewing up (more on this later!). That’s it. We’ve been so happy with this that we’ve decided to keep it going.
But now we’re moving into February and it’s time for a new change. I’ve started a list of possibilities so that as the months wear on we’ll be able to look at the list and choose one rather than try to come up with something at the 11th hour, and I’m surprised by how long the list is getting. I thought that it would be hard to come up with changes for us…because we’re cheap and unwilling to change. So, I started a list just in case but now the problem is choosing one since they all seem so fun and easy (and like something different to break up the monotony of the longest shortest month of the year) and we want to do them all at once.
For February we’ve taken a long, hard look at our list and decided that this is the month we’re going to work to replace our household cleaners with those that I can make at home. Last month we had a little foresight and purchased a very large bag of baking soda and a very large bottle of vinegar to facilitate our change. Now we just need to get a couple of recipes together, do some mixing and bottling, and we’ll be ready to start cleaning.
I got a fantastic book for Christmas last year (this year? how does that work?) in which there is an entire chapter dedicated to simple homemade cleaners and I plan to use the crap out of it. In fact, it’s only the first of February but the pages are already starting to look like I’ve had the thing for years just from my reading it over and over. Cody, I suppose, will be a little less involved in this month’s challenge than he was in January, but he doesn’t seem to mind so much (that is until I remind him about the bonus).
So, there you have it! For February we’re making friends with the baking soda and vinegar. Wish us luck.
(Bonus! You might recall from elementary school that baking soda + vinegar = one awesome volcanic explosion!)
UPDATE: I’ve been informed that this post is boring and that I should post some of the things that I make (because toilet bowl scrub is so exciting), which of course I plan to do but first I have to make those things. Duh. So, as the month grinds on (as February does) I’ll be letting you all know just what I’ve made and how I like it or don’t. Fair? I think so. Awesome? Probably not.
