down to earth

This candle, made of beeswax, was sent to me over the ocean by the lovely Niki at rural writings. Hi Niki!

We have a public holiday here next Monday so yesterday I brought home my work laptop and the new standards manual and I'm not going back to work till next Wednesday. At work I am interrupted with phone calls, meetings and people coming in to talk, so I'll get this project started at home, then go back.

I feel like I'm on a tiny holiday.

But today I'll get reacquainted with my home. I haven't seen the chooks since last week, nor been into the garden, so that will be my first priority this morning. There are also clothes to be washed, bread to be baked and the bed linen needs changing. House keeping is a great leveller. It doesn't matter how many people line up to see me at work, at home here I am the one who puts things to rights, I pick up, wash, clean and sweep, and get renewed in the process.

Generally I do my everyday chores when it is their time but if there is something unusual that I don't like doing, I try to do it as soon as I can. That gives me the satisfaction of completing an unwanted task early on and I don't have to work through the day thinking about doing something I don't want to do. It squares the unwanted out of the way and leaves ample room for enjoyment.

Hanno is still fast asleep now but when he wakes, we'll have breakfast and talk about what we'll do over the coming days. We may well go out! I have an idea forming about him taking me to lunch and me taking him to the movies afterwards. We haven't been out together since we picked up the chickens so it will be nice to take a day off and just float around.

On the crafting front, I'm still knitting dishcloths, I have a lot of work to do (still) on Shane's birthday quilt and I haven't yet started a winter knitting project. I have some lovely yarn to use so I'll have to get onto that soon. My thoughts are wandering to a cosy shawl. Does anyone know of a nice pattern? This afternoon I'll be drawing stitchery patterns for Liz A, Lightening and Ann so I'll check out their blogs first to see what I can find to include in their patterns.

As usual I'm behind in answering emails. I apologise if you're waiting for a reply, I hope to do some tomorrow morning. I also want to get back to the comments that I haven't answered. I read them all every day but often I don't have the time to reply. Again I apologise. I love the comments and I build up pictures in my mind of the people who comment regularly and each new comment adds another piece of the puzzle. So thank you for your contributions to this blog. The comments here really add a lot to the big picture of simple living.

This is the kind of recipe that should be in everyone's meal rotation. It's cheap, healthy, easy to make, delicious and can be eaten hot or cold. I am hungry just looking at this first photo because I remember so well the taste of it. This is our meal last Sunday night, we had leftovers on Monday night.

SPINACH OR SILVERBEET PIE

You'll need:

freshly picked silverbeet or spinach - maybe 20 leaves of silverbeet. If you use frozen spinach, and that is absolutely fine to use, you'll need two of those small boxes.
1 onion, chopped.
1 clove garlic, crushed.
1 tablespoon olive oil x 2 (one for frying, one for brushing the pastry).
5 eggs.
cheese - if you can use a few different varieties you'll get a better taste. I used 250 grams (½ lb) ricotta and about a cup of mixed cheddar and parmesan - grated. The ricotta is necessary, the others aren't, but add a lot of taste.
salt and pepper.
4 sheets filo pastry. If you don't know what this is, it's a low fat pastry that you'll find in the refrigerated or frozen section of your supermarket.

HOW TO... Chop up the silverbeet/spinach, onion and garlic and add to a frying pan with the oil. Cook on medium until everything is soft.

While that is happening. mix your eggs and ricotta together. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Grate the other cheese and mix in.

Add the cooked silverbeet/spinach mix to the eggs and combine well.

With a pastry brush and some olive oil, take each sheet of filo pastry and brush the oil over it. Double it up and place it in a pie dish. Each sheet of pastry should have a light brushing of oil over it. Cover the base of your pie plate with all the sheets. You might like to fold the edges under or you can leave then out like I do. Work quickly when you work with filo as it dries out fast. If you need to leave your work station, cover the pastry with a clean moist tea towel.

Pour the egg and spinach mixture into the pie dish and bake in a medium hot over - around 180C (350F) until the top is golden. Don't overcook as it will make the eggs rubbery.

Serve with a salad or vegetables. You can eat it hot or cold.

We had ours with a salad just picked from the backyard and with another leftover birthday beer. We're living high on the hog this week, my friends. ;- )

Once you’ve mastered a good everyday loaf of bread, it’s time to branch out and push your own boundaries. You could do that by either experimenting with new recipes or making the bread look great. Either way you'll probably get around to both at some point, the aim here is to add to your basic skills and be creative.

Let me first say that you aren’t at this stage yet if you haven’t mastered basic bread baking. You can read about baking here and here in some previous posts I’ve written. Both these recipes are easy, but you need time when baking, it’s slow food. Don’t try this when you’re ready to rush out the door to pick up the kids, or 15 minutes before your guests arrive. Put these things on your lists for alone time, slow yourself down, concentrate and think about what it is you’re doing. Hopefully what you will be doing it to develop a simple skill that will stand you in good stead for years to come, hopefully you will give it the time and attention it deserves, and hopefully this skill will be passed down to your children and grandchildren. It needs time but it will stand the test of time.

So let’s assume you’ve got your bread to something you really enjoy eating. It’s a good healthy basic loaf that your family loves and lines up for when they smell that distinctive aroma of fresh bread. But it looks a bit boring, or it looks the same every day. What is the next step in expanding your repertoire before moving on to more advanced recipes? It’s shaping and decorating the loaf.

The reason bakers get those wonderfully crusty loaves is that they often have wood fired or steam ovens. A little bit of moisture in the oven will work its charm by making a good crust. While you can’t really duplicate the baker's crustiness in a domestic oven, you can get almost as good as a baker’s crust by brushing the loaf with cold water just before it goes in the oven.

Once you have moistened the loaf, you have also created a kind of glue on which to stick all manner of seeds and grains. The traditional seeds for white bread are poppy seeds and sesame seeds. Caraway seeds are used on rye bread (see loaf below). Adding seeds will add extra nutrition to the bread; here is some nutritional info about various seeds. But you can also add things like rolled oats, polenta, crushed wheat (burghal), pumpkin and sunflower seeds. When you add anything to your loaf, sprinkle it on for a light covering and then press it in lightly. For a heavy coating, like the loaf above, place your seeds/oats on the bench and roll the loaf over the seeds.

If you want a soft crust, brush the top of the bread with melted butter or olive oil just before it goes into the oven for baking. You can also do this after baking to give the loaf a very shiny appearance.

I have also seen bread with a sprinkling of rock salt on the top, as well as a floured top. If you decide to go for the old fashioned floured top, pat off the excess flour. You can also get a good effect for the kids by having a floured top and then painting their name or a smiley face on the bread with a wet brush. As the bread bakes, the face or name will show up in the space where the flour has been brushed off.

Decorate your loaf after the first rise and punch down. Reform the dough into the shape you want, add your seeds/decoration, then slash it if you want to and leave it to rise for the second time. Slashing will allow the dough to rise to it's full potential.

Don't forget that most bread doughs can be formed into plaits/braids, bread rolls, or rounds if you don't want a traditional loaf. Experiment with the dough and see what happens. You may go back to your traditional loaf, but you may discover something you really like that will make the bread you bake distinctive.

One thing is certain, once you know how to make good bread, it's wise to try new recipes, add things to your favourites and play with the shape. As with all things in this simple life, you push your boundaries and see where it will take you.

Never stand still.

EXCELLENT RESOURCES

Baking 911

Home baked bread

With the rain and cold weather yesterday I started thinking of a good old fashioned baked dinner. My fellow Australians would know this as a meal that featured either roast lamb, chicken or beef which an assortment of vegetables and gravy. My vegetarian version of a baked dinner is pictured here. This is what we ate last night.

I often get requests to write posts about frugal vegetarian meals so I thought this might be a good time to do one. Let me say first that I don't consider myself to be vegetarian. I take emu oil capsules every day that require the death of the bird to produce, I wear leather shoes and sit on a leather sofa. I have disqualified myself from using the vegetarian term, but having said that, I don't eat meat.

My version of a baked dinner cost about two dollars for two portions. The meal is made up of potato, pumpkin, and onion - all peeled and baked in the oven with a little olive oil; steamed silverbeet and a portion of cauliflower bake.

A cauliflower bake is simply cauliflower washed and cut into flower heads and placed in a dish - microwave on high to half cook the cauliflower. Drain the water from it. Make a cheese sauce from scratch, pour that over the cauliflower and bake in the oven at the same time you're baking the vegetables.

CHEESE SAUCE
Place a tablespoon of butter in a small saucepan and melt over medium heat. Add a tablespoon of cornflour or plain (all purpose) flour and mix together. When the butter is melted and the flour combined, add about a cup of milk and mix. Make sure your heat is low now as you don't want it to come together too fast - that will create lumps. Add a cup of shredded cheese and mix in. Add salt and pepper to taste and a pinch of nutmeg. Keep stirring until the sauce is thickened and smooth.

I bought this cauliflower for $2 at my local market. The cheese sauce would cost about $1 to make. There is enough in this to last Hanno and I for three meals. Tonight it will be reheated to have with mashed potato with onion and parsley, carrots, cabbage and button squash. Tomorrow night I'll mash the last of it up to make bubble and squeak.

I always aim to make five different vegetables per evening meal. My version of the baked dinner gives you the baked vegetables that are crispy and caramelised, the protein part of the meal is the cheese sauce on the cauliflower. We followed this with simple fruit salad from the back yard of fresh oranges, bananas and passionfruit all cut up and combined. Oh, and we each had a bottle of Corona beer left over from my birthday party. ;- )

And just for good measure here is the bread baked yesterday. It's a corn and barley loaf with poppyseeds, made in a cake tin. I had mine hot with butter and vegemite and a cup of tea.

I have often thought that modern society has divided into two camps – adults and children. This might seem quite obvious to you but I don’t mean it the way it sounds. I mean that governments, corporations, media and the advertising industry are the adults and all of us are children. They tell us, we listen. We are expected to be dependent and compliant, we are told constantly that we will be made happy with ‘stuff’, that part of modern life is to carry a large amount of debt and if we work hard, we’ll be able to pay off our life as we live it and retire at 65 to enjoy what we have. We have these messages coming at us every day about what’s right for us and how we should live, and we are encouraged to be dependent and work in the system so that big business remains healthy, the country prospers and we skill ourselves in how to earn a living rather than how to make a life.

Now let me be the first to say that I love being an Australian with all the advantages that offers. I’m grateful that our country has a sound financial base, a thriving business community and a compassionate welfare system. I don’t want that to change. I want us to. I want us to stop believing the messages that one size fits all, and to see for ourselves the value of stepping outside what is considered normal. I want us to grow up.

We need to stop listening to outside advice about what makes us happy and fulfilled and find out for ourselves. For me happiness was found in being at home and working everyday to give my family and myself a quieter, safer, healthier and more independent life. I grew up the day I discovered that work at home is satisfying and significant. That is when I stopped believing that more money and more possessions would make me happy. As I worked more in my home, I realised that for me, happiness was found in being independent of the shops, being able to make do from scratch and in leading my life away from buying convenience.

That is what worked for me. I want you to find your own happiness. I can’t tell you what will make you happy, only you know that. I can tell you that happiness isn’t one thing. It’s a whole lot of tiny fragments that you find every day that add up to a deep feeling of contentment and knowing you’re doing the right thing. And I know that you won’t find true and enduring happiness in any shopping mall, I can only encourage you to look in places unexpected, and to show you through my blog that it is easy to live well outside the modern perception of what makes a good life.

I’m not telling you to give up your job if you work outside the home, I’m not telling you to live as we do. I am saying that whatever you do, fashion it to suit yourself so that it gives you a life worth living. If you are working hard at an outside job make sure you give yourself time to enjoy what you’re working for. If you’re working at home, be mindful of happiness and what’s around you, not just getting the job done.

Many people are stressed in their day-to-day lives and worried about their future. I think that is sometimes because they don’t feel in control of their own lives. Prices are rising, the climate is changing and often it all seems too much. But don't let that stop you, don't be scared into standing still, because that is the very time you need to do something. If you can gain independence by changing in some way, do it. I felt a growing independence when I started learning how to look after myself and I realised I did not need to shop to provide all I needed to live. When I knew that I could step away from what I was expected to do and instead do what I wanted, I started to build my own unique life. I moved away from the life prescribed for me by outsiders, I took my life by the throat and gave it a good shaking. In a sense, I grew up. I stopped listening to what I was being told, I identified how I wanted to live and then worked towards it, and that, my friends, has made all the difference.

It's easy to get caught up in posts about producing food when we're trying to live a frugal and sustainable life but the truth of it is that there are other things we can be doing in our own homes that will help us move towards a simple life. Food and groceries are the easy ones because they are products we use everyday but other things can help up live well and remain green, and be doing it quietly in the background.

Above is a photo of part of our roof. Further down, unseen in this photo, is an unused satellite dish that we used to use for our pay TV, but what I have photographed is far more exciting than that - in this photo are our solar hot water unit, some skylights and a whirlybird. Australia has been making solar hot water systems for at least 30 years that I can remember. We have had solar hot water for 25 of those years. It's fairly cheap to install and free to run. Ours can be plugged into an electrical socket in case of a few days of cloudy weather, we rarely use that. When we know bad weather is coming, Hanno and I are very conservative with our water usage until the sun shines again. That way we have enough water for showering and we don't have to rely on electrical or gas to heat it. I think we've plugged into the grid with our system maybe twice since this unit was installed, which was about five or six years ago. This unit and our previous ones have all been Solarharts and we have never had a problem with any of them.

There are two skylights in the photo but we have three installed, they are in the kitchen, the spare bathroom and laundry room. We installed them because we needed more light in the house and I didn't want to have lights on all the time. Shortly after we came to live in our home we built verandahs front and back. We needed sheltered areas for drying clothes, storing bits and pieces and an area for the dogs to sit out of the sun and rain. But our main reason for adding the verandahs was to create cool air around the house. In the style of the old colonial houses, we wanted to create cross ventilation of cool air through our home and for this reason, our house is comfortable in all but the hottest summer weather. The air is cooled just outside the windows and doors, and by opening the windows and doors the cool air flows in one side of the house and out the other. There is more information about passive design here.

There is a price that is paid for that cooled air, the rooms are darker because of the verandahs. No sunlight reaches the windows and while that is fine, it makes the rooms inside darker. Enter the skylights. They give us good natural light every day and have paid for themselves over the 11 years they've been providing that light.

Whirlybirds are a great idea in any hot climate. We have two and they've made a big difference to the heat retained in the house during summer. True, there are days when nothing like this helps, but there are many days when it's hot outside but okay inside because the hot air is constantly escaping from the roof.

I've blogged about our rain collection tanks before. We have two tanks that hold a total of 15000 litres and that is the water we use to keep our vegetable garden going. The tanks silently collect rain water, with no help from us, and that water is stored until it's needed on the garden. If you can harvest some of your rain water it will be a great help in maintaining a sustainable vegetable garden.

So that is some of the hardware we're using here but how could I leave a post about home production of simple needs without mentioning sewing and knitting. The ability to sew and knit will help you keep your family clothed. Mending will help you look after the clothes you have and will keep them wearable for a much longer period. I think of the days I used to throw away clothes that needed mending as the 'dark ages'. That was when I had more money than sense and before I realised that by teaching myself a few simple skills I would be a much better custodian of my belongings, and in doing that would cut down dramatically on what I need to buy.

Simple living isn't all about cooking from scratch and stockpiling, it's a holistic approach to life that relies as much on your silent partners working away in the background, and your ability to reskill, to look after what you have and to produce as much as you can at home. Sometimes there is a price to pay to have the hardware installed, but often our lives are made easier and greener by just learning how to do something we couldn't do before.

I would be really interested in hearing about what you have at your home that helps you live simply. Do you have water tanks, knitting needles, a sewing machine, solar panels or a solar oven? How have you reksilled yourself? What do you know now that you didn't know last year? If I walked down your street today, what would make me know that yours was that one house where people were getting back to basics and living a simple life?

According to our local news, grocery prices will continue to rise along with the fuel price in the coming months. Almost everything we consume is reliant on oil – either when it is made or when it is delivered, or both. With this in mind, Hanno and I decided to do two month's shopping instead of the normal one month when we went to Aldi last week. Our trip to Aldi takes us about 30 kms from our home so we squeezed every drop of value from the fuel we used by also buying bulk supplies of baker’s flour, nuts, seeds, yeast, dried fruit, lentils and beans, as well as biscuits for the dogs and grain for the chooks.

Apart from buying milk, cream and cheese from the local dairy – where it is cheaper, and maybe potatoes, we won’t have to restock for at least two months. We will live off our stockpile, our garden and fresh eggs from the backyard. The stockpile is full now and we will be saving money, time and fuel because of it.

I have written about setting up a stockpile here and here. If you're new to this concept, please read the previous entries before you carry on with this post.

Our shopping trip took about five hours and the last thing I wanted to do when we got home was to pack everything away. I was tired and all I wanted was a cuppa and a sit down but I soldiered on and before we knew it the stockpile cupboard was full, the fridge packed and the freezer filled to the top.

I have several places to store food and supplies – items that are currently being used go in the pantry, which is in the kitchen; extra (unopened) food items are stored in the stockpile cupboard at the side of the kitchen; cleaning goods and soap-making supplies are stored in the laundry; toilet paper and tissues in the spare bathroom.

We have a chest freezer to store all our flour and dried goods like nuts, seeds, beans etc. We usually don’t eat meat but we have a stockpile of minced beef for the homemade dog food in the small freezer, when we buy fresh fish that is also stored in the small freezer on top of our fridge. There are a couple of large bags of bread flour and oats that were being stored in the freezer, we replaced them with the new supplies and the older bags are now being stored in the spare bathroom and will be used next.

The main thing to remember when you’re restocking is to rotate your stock. This is a simple matter of moving what is already there to the front and placing the newly bought goods behind. I make sure all my items are grouped with similar items so when I go looking for baked beans they’re all together, just like the canned tomatoes and the honey. However, having written that, I have not done it. I've rotated the stock but everything now needs to be grouped and I haven't had time to do it yet.

It’s a good idea to check your cupboards before restocking. If they need a clean out, do it before your new supplies arrive. Check for dust, pantry moths and bugs. If you're going to store food at home, your storage areas must be kept as clean as possible.

If you’re driving to the shops a few times a week to buy a few items, you’re not only wasting your time, you’re using more fuel than you need to. Now is a good time to rethink how you buy your food. If you would love to have a little shop close by, where you could find all those things you forgot to buy and where items are always on sale, create that store for yourself in your own home. Because, my friends, that is what a stockpile is - it's your own open-all-hours convenience store offering the best prices.

Now that we see prices rising so frequently, don't just accept it as a sign of the times, do something positive. Start a stockpile, or stock up your stockpile as much as you can, because as sure as eggs, the more you can buy right now at a good price and store at home, the more money you'll save.