the Waste-Not Blog

White, all-purpose flour.  It's inexpensive, readily available, and foundational to a whole host of delicious foods. It's far from deeply nourishing, even with the trace amounts of nutrition the factory adds, but can a case be made for using more of it? I believe so, and I intend to make it. Think of the foods that you buy most frequently. Not raw ingredients, mind, but finished foods. What comes to mind? For many, item one on that list would have to be bread. This includes sliced bread, hotdog and hamburger rolls, and Italian bread for spaghetti nights. Speaking of spaghetti nights, pasta is easily a close second to bread as far as regularly purchased staples of Americans. Including macaroni and cheese, egg noodles for soup, and of course spaghetti, pasta is a crucial part of even the most frugal of American diets (not to mention special occasion stuffed pastas like ravioli, pierogies and tortellini). We can't forget biscuits or their close relatives, scones and American...

In "The Waste-Not Plan: level 1" I outlined concepts like the grocery snowball and other ways to spend less on food and necessities, in order to be able to build a higher level of financial independence and resilience. Important concepts included budgeting, taking advantage of economy of scale, and reducing debt, in addition to helpful tips about reducing impulse spending. Titled "Spend Less," level 1 is all about reducing how much money you need to spend each week and turning more of your income into disposable income. Level 1 consists almost exclusively of steps that anyone can take, right where they are, even if they live in an apartment without an inch of ground to call their own. Level 2: Depend Less. It's all about finding gaps in your self-reliance and closing them any way you can. While Level 1 works wherever you are, even a studio apartment in the Bronx, level 2 may require a move or at least a creative solution like using a community garden or lan...

For us, the Waste-Not Plan is a blueprint to arrive at our ultimate goal of total independence in terms of food (for us and our animals), energy (at least in terms of heat and cooking, and using the grid only for luxuries that can easily be dispensed with) and money (we want to be able to have both me and Ben at home or at least working very minimally, so what land we have needs to at least pay for its own taxes and hopefully a bit extra). For others it might just be a matter of becoming progressively more self reliant: having enough food to know that a couple weeks without buying groceries won't reduce you to eating expired spaghetti-Os from the back of the cupboard, being able to pay down debt and add to a nest egg, reducing your carbon footprint and plugging your particular holes in the waste stream. That's why I call these "levels" instead of "steps," because even if you never get past "level one" or "level two," you're here. You...

What a summer we've had. Because the last dairy farm in the town of Manlius finally succumbed to low milk prices and high land taxes we had to move into our Fixer-Upper investment house before it was done being properly renovated. All the main living areas had electricity before we moved in or immediately thereafter (I put a light fixture in the kitchen ceiling and hooked up a couple of wall outlets within the first week or so), but we've spent the summer with no water save that provided by the garden hose--which is often suspiciously black , unfortunately. So potable water is obtained from WalMart's kiosk at a rate of $.35/gallon or sometimes from the church's taps if our supply happens to be low on Sunday. For most of the summer the hose produced water when the well's breaker was switched to "on," since the system hadn't been tested under pressure yet, so we tried to fill as many buckets as we could at a given time--which translated to being as spar...

It's an age old question among home gardeners: how many tomato plants does an individual or family need? Clearly there are multiple factors at work in the search for an answer, including the number of people said tomatoes are intended to feed, chosen preservation and usage methods, and available space. Still, one family of four who intends to can tomatoes might plant eighteen plants, and another family of the same size with similar goals might plant sixty or more. Why the broad range of answers to a seemingly simple question? The Combatants On one side of the debate stand the restrained growers, with plants often numbering in multiples of six because that's how stores sell tomato plants. The vines are carefully spaced in their gardens, almost always caged if not staked. Virtually no tomatoes touch the ground, barring some awful accident like a freak windstorm or the neighbor's blundering dog; as a result their rodent problems and unnoticed rot problems are practically...

15 grams of protein. 6-12 grams of insoluble fiber. 4-5 g of soluble fiber. Plus vitamins and minerals, particularly potassium. These all come from a one cup serving of cooked dry beans. The amounts of different nutrients vary based on the type of beans under discussion: black beans and kidney beans are very rich in iron, while lentils are a very good source of molybdenum and folate. But we all knew this, right? Beans are healthy, beans are cheap, we should all eat more beans. Clearly nobody needs to hear any of this information again. Remind me why I thought this post was a good idea? Oh. This is why. On average, a given American eats less than six pounds of beans in a year . That's about forty cups of beans annually, significantly less than a cup per week. We're all concerned about the burgeoning problems with cardiovascular disease, obesity, living wage, you name it--and we eat maybe a cup of beans in a week? Nonsense, I say! Balderdash, I proclaim! We can all do bet...

Spring has forgotten us, but the hens have not forgotten spring. We're getting between fourteen and twenty eggs every day, and even though we sell four dozen a week to our neighbors I just can't keep up. We're in the middle of moving (long story) so I'm not looking for new egg customers... what's a girl to do? Enter the ancient practices of egg preservation. There are many practices that have been used over the centuries to make the spring abundance last into the less generous times of year. early Americans packed eggs in salt (allegedly made them taste "salty") or sand (low rate of success, basically just helped shield them from temperature extremes) or isinglass (aka fish gelatin, obtained by boiling the swim bladders--if you try it let me know, but I'm not going to). In the Edwardian era of England they preserved them in a mixture of slaked lime and water (My main takeaway from the series "Edwardian Farm" is that the English of that er...

We don't buy a lot of food in jars these days. I can enough tomatoes that I can cook down a marinara sauce as often as I need it, and with butter, cream and cheese aplenty from our cow alfredo sauce doesn't need to come out of a jar either. If I buy jelly or jam it's in a large jar, so I don't have to do it often, and before long I hope to be weaned of that habit too. Applesauce is home made. One food I do buy in jars is pickles. I buy Mt. Olive dill pickles by the gallon; at $5 per gallon I get a gallon jar for $5 and a whole bunch of dill pickles for free! If I want relish I chop them up, add pickle juice and stir in some mustard. If I want dill chips for hamburgers I slice them thin, and if I want dill spears to go alongside sandwiches I cut them lengthwise into quarters. The empty jars are perfect for storing milk, incubating yogurt, or for lactofermenting more pickles. One such jar is currently the home of my kombucha scoby. The problem with buying so little of...

Ah, fat. Is there any sort of food surrounded by more controversy? Any that inspires such loyalty in its adherents, such dismal doggedness in its detractors, such cognitive dissonance in those who believe it to be unhealthy and regularly overindulge anyway? Is there any food around which so much conflicting science has arisen? Being a Nourishing Traditions kind of gal myself, I tend to view fats with much more friendliness than the general populations might--though the kind of fat matters very much. Unsaturated fats oxidize far too easily--in fact, they often come from the store pre-oxidized for your convenience--and as such border on poison in my mind. Butter is, of course, a superfood, and delicious in all the best ways, and needs to be consumed daily for physical and mental health. I make my own from our cow's raw milk, and it is absolutely heavenly.... but also a lot of work, and while not awfully perishable it isn't shelf stable. So what I'm getting around to here...

When Ben and I got married, we registered for and received some truly lovely gifts. Bath towels, plastic storage drawers, hot plate and slow cooker-- these have all been used and appreciated very much in the years since our wedding. There are a few gifts, however, whose function have become absolutely indispensable to the way our family functions. One was my marble rolling pin, whose weight makes it much easier to roll out dough for cookies, cinnamon rolls and homemade pasta; the other is the Lehman's Own Hand Cranked Grain Mill. With it we turn wheat (which we buy inexpensively at the feed mill, less than $15 for a fifty pound bag) into delicious whole wheat flour, and also turn our home grown Mandan Bride flour corn into incredibly tasty corn meal. With these great ingredients we can make all manner of wholesome, delicious food. The wheat flour gets soaked overnight (often with a splash of whey to help it along) and added to my doughs for various breads, like sourdough loaves, ...

Why do you eat vegetables? A few of us will say it's because we like them, love them, can't get enough of them. And there are days when we even mean it! But what about the rest of the time, the rest of us? When there are so many delicious, easy foods to be had in the world, what gives vegetables the pride of place as the food everyone feels they ought to eat more of? Of course it's because they're healthy, right? Because they have fiber to help us digest. Because they have vitamins and minerals to supply our bodies' daily needs. Because for many of us, a meal of straight protein, fat and starch doesn't feel right--we instinctively know that while all those things are great and delicious, they need a little help along the way--an oar, as it were, to help them row their boat to Valhalla. A Charon to steer their ferry across the river Styx. I could go on. I won't. Instead, I'm here to tell you that while these vegetables you're eating do perform...