the Waste-Not Blog

In case you haven't noticed, I am very phytic acid aware. If I'm going to be feeding a whole grain or a legume to my family, you can bet it's going to be soaked for a minimum of eight hours before I start cooking or baking. This is because I want my family to receive the full benefit of the good food I'm cooking, and phytic acid is an antinutrient that latches onto minerals in your diet and carries them right out the back door. It doesn't matter how much magnesium you eat if it all ends up in the toilet, and that's exactly what happens when you consume whole seeds, grains or legumes that haven't been soaked. So when I look at the bags of pelleted grain or ground, dry "mash" that people feed to their animals, I have to wonder: why would I feed uncooked, unsoaked, unaltered grain to my animals when I wouldn't feed them to my family? Beyond my desire to take good care of my animals, I'm paying for their feed, and if they aren't absorbing...

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...