Category: mindful living

Sustainable or frugal?

August 13, 2015

Living on roughly half of our previous income, even though we are not by any stretch of the imagination impoverished, still presents some challenges. In the months previous to retiring, I analyzed our spending each month down to the penny, to ensure that we would continue to have a decent quality of life.  For us, quality of life includes being true to our belief in buying local, ethical, and sustainable food whenever possible.

But such food is not inexpensive.  I can buy a dozen factory-farmed eggs for just about half what I pay for eggs from traceable, ethically housed, local free-run chickens.  California greens, even with their drought , are still currently cheaper than the ones from the organic farm up the road.  Food is our biggest single monthly expense, and were I to further change my buying habits, I probably could reduce it by about thirty percent.

I’m not going to, though.  The value of buying the food we do goes well beyond satisfying our own tastes.  A much larger percentage of the money I spend goes directly to the local economy, into the pockets of my neighbours, than if I bought the equivalent products at grocery store.  Animal welfare is improved.  Farming remains viable, which means land remaining productive, and supporting, in the field margins and fence-lines, a healthier bird and wildlife population than would exist if the same land became a housing development.  I can ask the producers of my eggs and meat what they feed their animals, which matters not just in terms of general health for both the animals and us, but because of BD’s allergies.

I am fortunate to be able to afford to buy food like this.  I am fortunate to live in a place that supports, within a ten-mile radius, five seasonal farmers’ markets and one year-round, and innumerable farm stands.  Local food maps are published yearly.  Later today I will go out to buy sweet corn and tomatoes for tonight’s dinner from a farm stand up the road, which sits among the fields where the corn and tomatoes grow.

Frugality has a different meaning for us, when it comes to food.  It means ensuring food is not wasted – broth is made from chicken bones, older fruits and vegetables go into baking (I’ll write about my ‘garbage loaf’ at another time), portion sizes of meats are small.  Vegetarian meals make up half our dinners.  We buy almost nothing prepared; we have the luxury of time, and the skills, to cook from scratch (for which I perpetually thank my parents, who, living through both the depression and the rationing of WWII in Britain, were both frugal and creative with food).

And that sweet corn, tonight, lightly steamed and brushed with olive oil, then sprinkled with salt and pepper, will taste like the essence of earth, water, and summer sunshine in every bite.

Pickles, Salsa, Coffee and Community

August 12, 2015

pickles

The tiny crossroads hamlet in which we live boasts two retail outlets – the feed store, where we buy birdseed in the winter, and a bakery.  More than a bakery, the shop – I’ll call it Rose’s – supplies not just bread, pies, tarts and the best cider donuts for miles, but pickles, salsa and jams.  And coffee. Rose works harder than anyone I know – the bakery opens at 6 a.m. to provide coffee and breakfast fare and closes at 6 p.m., and it’s Rose who is baking, pickling, and providing counter service for all those hours, six days a week.

I used to stop every morning for coffee before I drove to work, and Rose’s donuts and butter tarts were the highlight of many a department meeting.  Over the years, Rose and I became friends, although she has a reputation for being irascible. She’s also the hub for village news – when BD found a grey-and-white kitten in our garage early one summer’s morning five years ago, it was to Rose’s we went to see if anyone had reported her lost.  (They hadn’t, and Pye, all grown up now, is currently sitting on my desk watching me type.)  We tell her when we’re going away, so she’ll keep an eye on the house.  When I was buying coffee at seven a.m. weekday mornings, we’d talk about the fox cubs being reared in the old graveyard; the coyote family Rose saw every morning at five a.m. when she walked her dogs; the sandhill cranes which have returned to the area.  She’s told me who to hire to plough the snow, fix our furnace, pump the septic tank.

But in retirement, I have the leisure to make my own coffee in the morning, and I also needed to consider the money I spent – the coffee was all too frequently combined with a muffin, or a breakfast sandwich – depleting my purse and expanding my waistline.  But I miss going.  I miss our chats, I miss being greeted by her two Labradors, and her coffee is better than mine. Frankly, I miss seeing my friend, and finding out what’s happening in the village.  Dropping in every couple of weeks when we’ve run out of salsa or pickles or cranberry chutney isn’t enough.

So I will return to buying a morning coffee two or three times a week, but now I’ll walk or bike down, or stop in on my way to town for groceries.  It  will cost me a few dollars, but can you put a price on community?

Baking bread, part two.

August 11, 2015

I debated whether or not to continue writing about baking bread – and decided that I would tell the story about my most recent bread disaster, and, about why it happened.

Picture the kitchen – it’s a galley kitchen, a bit wider than some, and big enough for my husband, BD, and me together if we choreograph it correctly.  It’s the end of the day, and I’m a bit tired; we’re doing some house renovations, I’ve been food shopping and I’ve been biking, and spent a chunk  of the day gardening.

We’re having pizza for dinner (cheeseless, due to BD’s allergies), and I’ve made a double bread recipe and will use part of the dough as the pizza crust, and part for bread.  BD is making oatmeal cookies at one end of a counter – well, he’s using two-thirds of the counter, really – and I’m grilling veggies and chicken for the pizza.  I separate off a third of the dough, add herbs and grilled onions to it, and roll it out.  While it’s rising slightly, I divide the rest of the dough between the two bread pans, and put them on top of the stove, to benefit from the warmth as BD’s cookies bake.

We’re doing all this at the same time so that the oven is on for the shortest period of time possible.  Here in Ontario, where we have time-of-use pricing for electricity, the hours between 5 and 7 pm are mid-peak in the summer – the second most expensive per-unit charge.  We’re sensitive to our electricity use, both for budgeting reasons and for environmental concerns.

BD’s cookies are done, and while the oven changes temperature from the 375 degrees the cookies bake at to the 425 the pizza needs, I throw together a salad while BD cleans up the kitchen.  The pizza only takes 15 minutes.  As I take it out of the oven, I look at the bread – it still needs at least half-an-hour to rise.

“Should I turn the oven down to 350 and leave it, ” I ask BD, “or turn it off completely and then reheat it to 425 in half-an-hour?  Which will use more electricity?”  He considers.

“Turn it off,”  he says.  So I do, and put a timer on to remind me to look at the bread in thirty minutes.

We eat dinner, clean up; the bread still needs a bit more time.  It’s 7:30 p.m., time for Jeopardy!, which we watch every night.  Ten minutes into the show, the buzzer goes off to tell me the bread is ready to go in the oven. With at least half my mind on the show, I go to the kitchen, open the oven – yes, it’s warm – and put the bread in, set the timer for fifty minutes, and go back to Jeopardy!.

You can see where this is going, can’t you?  Fifty minutes later, the timer goes off, and I open the oven to find the bread dough has continued to rise, overflowed the pans, and dripped down the sides and through the racks and onto the bottom of the oven.  Because, of course, I didn’t turn the oven back on.

I could make lots of excuses  – I was tired, I was distracted by the quiz show – but the real reason is that I was not being mindful.  The bread did not have my attention.  The human brain really isn’t meant to multitask – for a good discussion of this, see Leo Widrich’s blog here.

I’m not one to beat myself up about this.  I said a few choice words, wiped up the worst of the dough, and baked the bread anyway.  Then I couldn’t get it out of the pans in one piece, so it ended up on the bird feeder, in chunks.  The squirrels were happy.  I made bread again the next day, with my mind on the work.  And when we found ourselves in the same situation a week or so later, we didn’t turn the oven off between cooking dinner and baking the bread.

Baking Bread

August 10, 2015

Several years ago, my husband developed an unusual food allergy: he is allergic to one specific fatty acid.  When he eats anything containing lauric acid (dodecanoic acid, a saturated fatty acid with a 12-carbon atom chain, if you really want to know), he breaks out in severe hives.  This limits what he can eat, and makes buying many commercial products impossible.  We’ve adapted to this, and as a result probably eat a much healthier diet, as it has eliminated red meat, dairy products, and most fats (with the exception of olive, sunflower and safflower oils) from our meals.

He’s a tall, lean, very physically active man, and needs a lot of calories to maintain a healthy body weight.  (I’m jealous, yes.)  As a result, he eats a lot of bread, but it can’t be just any bread, because many or most commercial breads are made with at least one of the fats he can’t eat.  Luckily, however, there is one artisan-bakery bread widely available here which he can eat, and that’s what we’ve bought for many years.  But…it’s at least $4.00 a loaf, sometimes more, depending on what type we buy, and he goes through the best part of a loaf a day.  When I was preparing for retirement, analyzing our grocery budget, looking for places to reduce spending, this one stood out.

I learned to bake bread as a teenager, and I’ve made it on and off for years, but it’s a time commitment, needing at least three hours and usually more from start to finish.  But we’re home all day now.  I did the math:  I can make two loaves of multi-grain bread, made with nothing else but olive oil, water, and a bit of salt, for about a dollar a loaf.  Plus the electricity. So now, every couple of days, I make bread.  And I love it.

The process begins with the yeast dividing in a half-cup of warm water, scenting the kitchen with promise.  While it’s dividing, which takes about ten minutes, I get out the flour – olive oil and salt sit permanently on our kitchen counter – and the large pizza pan I use to knead the dough on. (It’s easier to clean than the counter-top.) After ten minutes I add a glug of olive oil, a grind or two of sea salt, another 2 cups of water, and three cups of flour.  Then I mix it, with a heavy dinner fork.  At this point, it’s a sticky paste.

Half a cup of flour goes on the pizza pan, and another cup or so into the bowl so that I can start to mix the dough with my hands.  (Before this starts, I put music on – a good reggae song from Max Romeo is ideal.) Then I dump it all out onto the pan, and begin kneading.

The dough feels good under my hands: elastic and alive.  It’s my hands that tell me if I need more flour in the mix, from the feel, silky and resilient, but not stiff.  Usually I end up using between five and six cups of flour to reach the perfect consistency.  I knead for five minutes, hard, pushing the heels of my hands deep into the dough.  When I started doing this, my arms and hands would ache afterwards, but now the muscles have grown stronger.  I dance a little to the music.

After five minutes of kneading I give the dough a last shape into a ball and put the pan either on top of the stove (in the summer) or inside it with the light on (in the winter, when the house is a bit colder) to rise, set the timer for an hour, and leave it to double.  If I’ve got the dough just right, an hour is exactly what it needs; if it’s a touch too stiff, it may need a little longer.

I bake the dough in metal bread tins, well-oiled with safflower oil.  Once the dough has doubled, I give it two or three quick kneads, roll and stretch it out into one long loaf, cut it in half, and put the halves into the tins.  Another hour or so to rise, three shallow cuts on each loaf top, and they go into a 350 degree oven for 50 minutes.  The house smells wonderful.

Of all the cooking I do, there is something elementally satisfying about baking bread, taking a few ingredients to make something so good, whether it’s eaten still warm, dipped in olive oil, or toasted to golden brown and dripping with blueberry jam or honey, knowing that you are participating in an activity that goes back through so many generations.  Sometimes I experiment, adding dried apricots and figs for breakfast bread, or herbs and sauteed onions for a savoury loaf. Occasionally, I have a disaster…and perhaps I’ll tell a story or two about that in another post.

Habitual Behaviours

August 8, 2015

Relearning spending patterns, like creating any new behaviour, doesn’t happen overnight.  There are triggers to our spending, especially on things that aren’t necessities. In the downtown of the university town north of us, where I shop, and where we go for films and bookstores, are a few streets of cafes, small interesting shops, a couple of local/organic food stores, two bookshops and an art-house cinema. And the library and an eclectic video rental shop, and the Saturday market. It’s been the cultural and epicurean hub of our lives for the last thirty-five years.  It’s also a spending trigger for me.

On Wednesday this week we were going to see Mr. Holmes at the art-house cinema, along with two friends.  So already there was a ‘treat’, something that didn’t happen every day, waiting for me.  I was making dinner for after the film, and as it’s summer, and warm, I chose to do two salads and cold, sliced chicken breast, along with good bread and olive oil.  I had bought the vegetables for the salads on Tuesday, and I was making the bread, but one of the locally-sourced foodshops downtown does exceptional free-run store-roasted chicken breasts.  So I went to buy them, along with  a few other items needed for later in the week.

I had several other errands to run, and one appointment to keep, and by bad planning it was nearly 1 pm by the time I got to the foodshop, and I hadn’t eaten lunch.  Now, remember, I’ve already said in an earlier post we’d basically blown our entertainment budget for the month by going out for an expensive dinner, plus we were going to a movie the same evening.  But this foodshop also has a little cafe, and makes healthy sandwiches and very good coffee.  So along with my chicken breasts, I bought lunch.  It was a good lunch:  a roasted veggie sandwich with cheese on a store-made wholegrain bun with a cup of coffee.  No guilt about junk food.  But it was $10 I shouldn’t have spent.  Not this month.

It’s not going to send us into debt, of course.  I’m not agonizing over it, but I am analyzing why I did it.  And mostly, it’s the associations of that location.  Yes, I was hungry, but I could (and should) have had a cup of coffee and biscotti – which would have been $3 or so – and eaten when I got home.  It was my last stop.  But this part of downtown is where I went to treat myself when I was working – Saturday morning coffee-and-bagels after the farmers’ market;  pizza and wine after a movie; books browsed and bought.  A good chunk of my novel was written in these coffee shops.  A place of refuge and relaxation from work, and through all my medical treatments last fall and winter.  The sane centre of my world.

So what am I going to do about it?  Three things.  First off, recognize and expect the trigger.  Secondly, plan to not be there at lunchtime on an empty stomach.  And thirdly – keep going!  I don’t need to deny myself the special relationship I have with this neighbourhood, but I do need to go there mindfully.

Choosing Wisely

August 5, 2015

A few nights ago, we had dinner with two couples at a fairly expensive restaurant.  At first glance, this seemed both unwise – the meal would cost most of our entertainment budget for the month – and contrary to our desire to live simply.  But let’s examine this more closely.

Both of us enjoy and appreciate very good food, and this particular restaurant is very good, consistently featured in Where to Eat in Canada.  It also serves locally sourced foods, which is important to us.  The night was perfect for our patio table, and the company and conversation of our friends delightful.  We had a memorable meal – I ate caesar salad, a quail appetizer, and frites, followed by coffee and a whiskey; my husband had quail and pickerel- and the meal and tip came to about $120.00, as we expected.

As we left the restaurant, our friends asked to join us there again in about three weeks.  And – this is the important part – I declined, explaining honestly that we can’t afford it that often, which they understood.

But as I have reflected on that meal this week, I realized I declined not just because of the cost, but because I really don’t want to eat like that too often.  Not because it was expensive, or we overate (we didn’t), but because it was an experience I want to savour and remember as something exceptional.  Treats are not treats if they happen too often.  Good food is important, something we take seriously in our meal planning, preparation and shopping, but there is a difference between everyday good food and a very special meal.

Adjustments will be made to this month’s spending to accommodate this meal, money cut from both the entertainment and grocery budgets.  We’ve traded a couple of movies at our local art-house cinema and some more-expensive foods and beverages for those few hours on the patio.

But, for us, this meal was a wise choice, because of the quality of time shared with our friends, the immediate appreciation of the food, and the on-going pleasure of the memories engendered.  It was also a considered choice, discussed and planned for, the costs, not just financial but in our quality of life for the rest of the month, analyzed.  Did we choose wisely?  We believe we did.