Tag: frugal

Chickpeas and Couscous

July 21, 2016

It’s hot today, and humid: a good day for a quick, vegan salad supper. My deck garden is starting to supply some of the ingredients, and the others are pretty much pantry staples for us. Here’s how I throw together a Chickpea-Couscous salad for two:

2/3 c couscous

1/2 c cooked (canned) chickpeas

1 c cherry tomatoes, halved

1 c broccoli florets, divided into very small pieces

1 small red pepper, diced into 1/4” squares

a handful of chives, finely chopped

a handful of mint leaves, finely chopped

a handful of oregano leaves, finely chopped

1/4 c olive oil

1/4 c lemon juice

salt and pepper to taste

Put the couscous in a 2 cup measuring cup and add 2/3 c boiling water. Cover and let sit for 5 minutes.

Drain the chickpeas and rinse well: I use half a standard tin, so I freeze the other half for next time.

Mix the olive oil and lemon juice together.

Mix the chickpeas, cooked couscous, all the veggies and the herbs, pour in the dressing, mix some more, add salt and pepper to taste, and refrigerate for an hour or more.

That’s it. You can serve it over lettuce, or not. You can add garlic, or not. Or harissa spice. Or raisins. It has veggies, protein, carbohydrates, and a bit of good oil. And it takes less than ten minutes to make. What could be better on a hot and humid day?

Eating (semi)well on the road.

April 9, 2016

We’ve just returned from a two-week road trip through California and southern Arizona, a trip booked long before the idea of buying a new house entered our minds. Nothing was going to happen with the house purchase in those weeks anyway, so there was no reason not to go.

Since the days of our six-and-seven week road trips, where we mostly camped, took a cooler with us, and bought groceries, several things have changed. One, of course, is that we were flying and renting a car. Secondly – and most importantly – are the food allergies/sensitivities BD has developed. It’s really difficult to find food he can eat, and even more difficult to find restaurants he can eat at. His allergy is to a specific fatty acid – lauric acid – which is found in red meats, most fats, coconut and palm products, all dairy, and some spices. It makes him break out in hives, big nasty hives which even extra-strength Benadryl only somewhat controls. So we need to be very careful about what he eats.

We could have bought a cooler in California, shopped for groceries, and eaten at parks and picnic stops. But there were a couple of strikes against this: one is that, for the most part, it was too cold to do this comfortably – we had snow in the foothills in Arizona! – and the second strike was just that we wanted more ease. We’ve done our share – more than our share – of eating in wind, rain, cold, searing heat and annoying insects, or perched on the side of the bed in a hotel room. Frankly, I’ve had enough of that.

Subway is one chain we know is safe for BD, if he sticks to chicken or turkey, but a constant diet of Subway grows old quickly, plus the sodium content is pretty high. We decided to try Denny’s, the classic diner chain: their available nutrition information is good, and they have something extremely difficult to find in US restaurant chains: reasonably sized meals, if you order carefully.

For dinners, we mostly stuck to the 55+ meals, eating a salad (with no cheese or dressing for BD), fish or chicken with broccoli and another vegetable – corn for me, squash for BD – every night. With unsweetened iced tea, the calorie count was around 650, the sodium, fat, and sugar content low for restaurant food, and there was nothing in the spices or preparation that triggered BD’s allergies. Breakfasts were fairly easy too: ordering a la carte, BD ate poached eggs on dry toast, oatmeal, and fresh fruit every morning; I had the same, or sometimes yogurt instead of the oatmeal. Again, the meals ran in the 650 calorie range, and it was easy to avoid the dairy and oil that would have been a problem. And we both appreciated comfortable booths and table service, especially after a long day, and in the morning when I’m not human before that first coffee.

It was also quite a bit of food. Neither of us were terribly hungry at lunch time, even after hikes of several hours most days. We’d found an energy bar by KIND that BD could eat without problems, so lunches tended to be an energy bar and an apple. BD would add a handful or almonds or peanuts; I’d add a latte if there was one to be had. If we walked a lot, sometimes we had a second energy bar, or more nuts.

Not every meal was eaten at Denny’s or Subway. We ate a couple of breakfasts at little cafes at Morro Bay and Cayucas. We drove to Oxnard (twice) specifically for fish and chips at Sea Fresh, which fries in peanut oil (BD had a double order of chips, it was such a treat.) Only something at Olive Garden triggered any reaction in BD, and it was mild, so a trace of oil or spice, most likely.

I celebrated my 58th birthday while on this trip. We debated a special dinner, but I didn’t particularly want that: what I did want was ice cream, as it was an unseasonably hot day (the only one of the trip) at Point Reyes National Seashore north of San Francisco. I usually avoid eating ice cream in front of BD – it seems cruel, when he can’t eat it any more – but I made an exception for my birthday. And in the little general store in Inverness, California, not only did I find my favourite Haagen-Daas chocolate-coffee-almond bar, but a lime gelato bar with no dairy that BD could eat (and he loves lime). We sat at a picnic table overlooking the bay and ate our treats, enjoying every frozen bite.

We were pleased with the trip – not only did we find the two birds we went to see around San Francisco, ones that have been eluding us for thirty years (because they are found by call, and they only call during breeding season, and that was always while we were working) – but we ate fairly nutritious food and didn’t trigger BD’s allergies. We went for long walks, watched dolphins and sea otters and seals along Highway 1, heard coyotes singing in the dusk at Yuma and watched the sun rise over the mountains. A good holiday. Now back to the realities of packing up this house for the move. Stay tuned!

String and Paper

January 12, 2016

Well, we’ve been here almost a week, long enough to know what I miss from the Canadian house; what I should have brought or need to buy here.

This is a very well equipped holiday cottage, and as we’ve lived here many times before I was fairly sure I knew what to bring (an apron, my Aeropress coffee-maker, a thermos for coffee to take on our day trips) and what I would choose to buy here (a slow-cooker, bread pans, a small birdfeeder for the garden.) I was right about all that, except this time there was an apron hanging in the kitchen. The bread pans are heavy-duty disposables: they’ll go into the recycling when we leave at the end of February; the inexpensive slow-cooker will go to a charity shop, as will the bird feeder. Here’s what I didn’t foresee.

Twist-ties or bag clips, for the bags of lentils and peas, pasta and rice. There are a few bag clips here, some of which I bought in the spring, but not enough. String or skewers, for holding together stuffed chicken thighs. Or perhaps I can just buy a ball of food-quality string, and use it for both purposes…that would be the simplest solution. So far, that’s it. Except, perhaps, paper.

At home we both have printers, and printers generate paper that’s usually good on one side. We use it for printing again, anything that doesn’t need to be pristine, or for writing lists and notes. Here there is no printer (that in itself will be an interesting experiment, for someone whose work revolves around the written word) and therefore no paper generated. So paper – for grocery lists, freezer inventories, schedules and menus – is in short supply. I could, of course, go out and buy an inexpensive pad of paper. But we’re going to try to manage with what we have, just to see if we can.

There is no comparison between our two months here and the six-to-eight week camping road trips we made in the past, where everything had to fit in the back of a compact car. But it’s still an opportunity to see what we really use, versus what we use because we have it – or even more importantly, what we have and don’t use.

So what do I miss from the Canadian house? (Other than the cats?) Nothing. So far, nothing at all. My guess is the lack of a printer will eventually be an issue…but we’ll see.

Just How Connected do I Need to Be?

December 17, 2015

We live 70 km (40 miles) from downtown Toronto, but there are times it feels like 700 km. Not only do we have a well, and a septic tank, and until not-very-long ago no garbage or recycling pickup, we are – shall we say – underserviced in the wireless communications department.

Until very recently the only place I could get a cell phone signal was outside. That’s improved, which is good, because the cell phone system is how we access the internet. It’s the only signal that reaches our house effectively, surrounded as we are by very tall trees. We have what is called a ‘turbo-hub’, basically a wireless router that uses the cell phone signal instead of other options. The problem is, it’s expensive.

We pay in usage increments, up to 15 GB of data, which maxes out at $105, and then per MB after that. Yep, per MB. This hadn’t actually been a problem until very recently, when a combination of three things brought us up short. The first was automatic updates to Windows and to our virus protection, which for our two laptops was suddenly eating up about 2GB every month….and that’s without the potential Windows 10 download. And then there are automatic app updates on our two iPADs and our two iPhones. The second was a period of rapid growth in my freelance writing & editing business, which suddenly took off – but as it’s all done electronically, it was using a lot of data, especially when there are pictures involved. And the third was my on-line university course, which suddenly had a lot of on-line interactive map manipulations in the assignments. When last month’s overage charges were one and half times our 15GB rate, we knew something had to change.

Now my business actually does something, the obvious solution is for me to get a separate turbo-hub for my laptop, so I can charge the costs back to the business. Which I will do, in the new year. But until then, we took a hard look at our internet use, and more importantly, our habits.

How often a day do I actually need to check Facebook, Twitter, Google+, my blog pages, and e-mail? Once? Twice? The business e-mail more often, yes, and I use social media to advertise and promote, but I still don’t need to be on them constantly. And why were all our devices constantly connected to the internet? How long does it actually take to make that connection? So things have been turned to airplane mode when not actively in use, the phones are off wi-fi completely (we have a decent amount of data in our plan) and I’m disciplining myself about social media. The personal e-mail gets checked once a day – if something’s really important, my siblings or friends will text me…or, heaven forfend, actually call me. But in our instantly connected world, this is taking conscious work to break these habits.

Almost equally hard to break was the immediate up-or-downloading of files. The next chapters have arrived from one of my editorial customers? Download them right now. Finished the edits? Send them back right now, regardless of the fact the customer is several time zones away. Until the business turbo-hub is in place, ‘right now’ has been replaced by ‘when I’m in town, and can access the secure network at the university’. Has anyone complained? Nope…..

The result of all this is not only will we not get hit with another bill of $250 for a month of internet, I actually get more work done, more efficiently. Does that surprise anyone? No? Not even me…so now I’m wondering how I let myself spend my time (and my money) so inefficiently, for the sake of the reassurance (or disappointment ) we get from those instant connections. But I have to say, playing with the maps in my landscape archaeology course may have used a lot of data, but it was a lot of fun.

The One-Stop Holiday Shop

December 11, 2015

We don’t, as an extended family-and-friends group, give anything but small, consumable holiday presents. We’re all adults, all well-enough off and we all own too much stuff. The money we would have spent goes to a cause of the donor’s choice, and we celebrate with food, wine, winter walks and conversation.

But there is still that small consumable present to buy. In keeping with our belief in shopping locally, I consider my options. There is a lavender farm just north of us that has lots of lovely little products. There is a bee-keeper who makes beautiful candles with the beeswax. There is local maple syrup. Or there is Rose’s, our bakery-preserves shop right here in the village. Rose’s jams and chutneys and pickles and salsa are scrumptious, made mostly from locally-grown produce, providing employment and revenue right in our village. Rose’s wins.

I stop on my way to town: I can walk there, but not with nearly two dozen jars of preserves in my bag. I’ve chosen late morning on a mid-week day, when she isn’t so busy. The shelves are lined with jars, their contents gleaming red and purple and green. I buy blueberry jam and hot salsa, crabapple jelly and cranberry-apple chutney, spicy red pepper jelly and bread-and-butter pickles, while inhaling the scent of bread baking. Probably I buy more than I need, but we’ll eat anything that’s left over.

I could, in theory, preserve my own jams and pickles now; retirement should give me the time. But my days are too full already, and with such a supply just down the road, I’m happy to buy them from Rose. A little bit of our local food will make its way around the province in the next few weeks, our local farm and rural economy will benefit, and my holiday shopping stress is nil. Now I can start the holiday baking!

The New Coffee Maker

December 3, 2015

Buying anything new in our house is not just a question of going shopping. All purchases of any substance need discussion. If it’s a replacement item, what is wrong with the old one – can it be fixed? Do we actually need it? Can one be found second-hand? If it’s something new to the house, why? What purpose does it serve, and what need does it fill that currently isn’t met? We don’t need more things, and we’re trying to reduce what we have.

I drink coffee. I love coffee. BD hates the stuff. I’ve had a little 4-cup drip coffee maker for years and years…and it was slowly dying, not heating the water to a sufficient temperature. I tried cleaning it. No better. Reluctantly, I decided it really had to be replaced. I need my coffee. Equally reluctantly, BD agreed. ‘Can you get something that doesn’t make the whole house smell like coffee?’ he asked (after the initial ‘Why don’t you give the stuff up?’ followed by ‘Can’t you just drink instant?’ )

Hmmmm. I used to have a French press, many years ago, but cleaning it was a pain, even though it made good coffee. I did some research, and found the AeroPress. Basically a modified French press, the AeroPress sits on top of a mug. You add a filter and coffee to the detachable filter basket, screw it onto the body, add water just a bit below boiling, and press down on the plunger. The on-line reviews were fabulous.

I was fairly sure that my local roast-their-own beans coffee shop would carry it, and I was right. The barrista there raved about it. It was about thirty dollars, twice what a replacement 4-cup drip maker would cost, but it won’t make the house smell like coffee from the pot sitting on the warmer, and will use less water -I almost always made more coffee than I drank, because I could never get small amounts to taste right. (Water use matters – we buy our drinking water, because our well, while safe from a bacterial count viewpoint, has a high manganese and iron content, and tastes unpleasant. So every couple of weeks, BD drives to town with the big reusable bottles and refills them and that’s what we and the cats drink.)

I’ve had it for four days. The verdict? It makes great coffee. It took me a day or two to work out exactly how much coffee and how much water I needed to make it taste just right, not too strong, not too weak. It’s a cinch to clean, the filter and used coffee pop out directly into the compost bin, and it doesn’t take up counter space.

It also means I’m not drinking coffee mindlessly, because it’s in the pot. Already my coffee consumption has dropped because I have to think about whether or not I want to take the three or four minutes it takes to make a cup. I always meant to only drink two cups a day, one in the morning, one after lunch – but it was there on the counter, calling to me. I’m sleeping better, and my stomach is happier. What’s not to like?

The Monthly Menu

November 27, 2015

In the first months of retirement, it felt good to be able to shop every day or so, especially with the farmer’s markets in full swing. It was a luxury I hadn’t had in my working days.

But over this autumn, as my days of leisure become fuller with the work of my third, chosen, career, it’s becoming a nuisance. The markets are closed, except for the Saturday ones, and the roads are becoming icy, so last month we went back to the monthly menu.

Once a month, we sit down and plan meals. I create a four-column chart: Date, Meal, Prep on Day, Need to Buy. This goes on the fridge, and can be modified as needed – if I only use half a tin of chopped tomatoes in the curry, then a note is made on the next meal that needs them that they’re in the freezer. I use this chart to determine monthly and weekly shopping lists; I tend to buy meat monthly and freeze it, and everything else weekly, with a quick top-up shop half-way to buy milk or yoghurt or eggs, as our fridge isn’t big enough to keep large supplies of these on hand. It also reminds me what to thaw and what other prep is needed on the day.

This works because there are only two of us, and our lives are fairly predictable. If we decide to go out to a movie and dinner with friends, that’s ok -that meal either doesn’t get made, or, it gets moved to the next day, and that meal cancelled, whichever is easier. Meals can be moved around without too much difficulty, and left-overs always have a meal to be included in.

The other advantage is that in six weeks, when we leave for an extended vacation, we’re not leaving behind a freezer and fridge half-full of food. We left once for a two-week holiday over Christmas, only to have our area hit by a vicious ice-storm that meant our house was without power for eight days. All the freezer foods, all the fridge perishables, had to be discarded (luckily our cat sitter is very flexible on what tasks she’ll take on – oh, and the cats went to live with a friend for that time) as we kept in touch by text from England. I’d like not to put her in that situation again, so both fridge and freezer will be empty of anything that could go bad.

Will I keep this up in the summer, when the markets are open again and fresh local food abounds? Probably not….or I’ll modify it a bit…but for the winter months, it works for us.

The Quiet Joy of Enough

November 24, 2015

Walking today on the snowy trails at our local conservation area, BD expressed once again his sense of disbelief that we are actually retired. Like many – if not most – of our generation, he’d expected to work to 65. ‘But,’ I gently pointed out, ‘many people just wouldn’t be prepared to take the pay cut we did, to retire early.’

‘Enough’ played its role in determining it was time to retire.  Both in it’s negative sense: ‘I’ve had enough of this job.’ and in its positive: ‘We have enough money to retire.’  The latter statement was true only if we kept the positive concept of ‘enough’ in our minds.  ‘What isn’t need is greed’: I don’t know who said that, and I’m not sure I entirely agree with it – but that depends on how you define need. If you acknowledge that the soul has needs as well as the body, then it’s not a bad quote.

‘Enough’ sometimes is difficult.  My health issues have meant I have had to learn what ‘enough’ is with regard to certain foods; that one glass of wine is plenty; that I have physical limitations that must be considered. BD has had similar lessons to learn.  But ‘enough’ is also marvelous: there is enough time now for me to write, to read and review books, to edit for others, to walk every day: all the things that the demands of the salaried job took away from me.  And even better, there is enough money that I can do these things as a true amateur, for the love of them, and not for profit, and so I have only myself to answer to. But this is true because I can say this of so many things: clothes, furnishings, possessions of all sorts –  ‘I have enough’.

I will honestly admit to greed in the past. I had too many clothes; I liked food and wine all too well, and no-one needs the travel experiences we have had, although how can you regret the sight of a tiger hunting along an Indian river, or an Adele penguin standing at your feet, peering up at you? I can’t.  But I can also say, even about that, ‘enough’.  We have the memories.

Our world is smaller now, but our time is…ours.  I wake every morning with quiet joy, knowing I have enough.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Savoury Oat Cakes

November 11, 2015

BD is of Scottish stock, and oatcakes are a good Scottish biscuit.  Commercial ones contain oils he can’t eat, so out came the recipes and the baking paraphernalia for another kitchen experiment.

Now, true Scottish oatcakes aren’t to everyone’s taste. Made without sugar, they can resemble cardboard, I agree…but we all know (even if we’re not admitting it) that sugar isn’t good for us, so I was determined to make these traditionally, without sugar.  I prefer to save my recommended daily allowance of sugar for my tea and for my four squares of dark chocolate. But add spices  – pepper, chili peppers, rosemary – and they become something special.

I went recipe hunting on the internet, focusing on British sources because, after all, they are a British biscuit. Between two of my favourite cooks, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall of River Cottage fame, and Nigella Lawson, I found two slightly different recipes, combined them, and here’s the result.  You can play with this recipe a lot, as far as the spices go.

Savoury Oatcakes

1 cup scots oats/porridge oats.  (These are not rolled oats.  They are more finely ground, but not oat flour either – somewhere in between.  I found them at my local bulk food store, but you could make them in a good blender or food processor from rolled oats.)

1 tsp salt

1 Tbsp olive oil

1/8 – 3/4 c  just-stopped-boiling water (explanation below)

Any or all of these spices: (or others).

1 tsp coarsely ground black pepper

1 tsp hot pepper flakes

1 -2 tsp rosemary

Pre-heat the oven to 375 F.  Combine the oats and salt and spices in a bowl and make a well in the middle. Add the olive oil – and now is the tricky part – the very hot water.  You want just enough to mix the oats into a cohesive but not sticky ball, and you need to do this quickly.  The amount of water you use will vary with the texture of your oats. (I found with commercial Scots oats I needed about 1/3 c or just a bit more. You can always add a few more oats or oat flour if the mix is too wet, so err in that direction).

Roll out your oat mixture between two strips of parchment paper until it is very thin – about 1/8 inch if you can – and cut out rounds with a cookie cutter or a glass.  Place on silicon baking sheets or parchment and bake for 10 minutes; flip them over, and bake for another 10.

Cool them completely before transferring to an air-tight tin.  Personally, I freeze them: since they have almost no moisture in them, they thaw really quickly.  Serve as a base for cheese, or just butter them, or – as I do – top with blueberries and (unsweetened) yogurt for a healthy snack or breakfast. (Reputedly Queen Elizabeth eats them for breakfast, too.) Of course, BD, for whom I made them in the first place, can’t eat any dairy products, so he eats them as is. He may be a braver man than I…then again, he is a Scot.

Good Fences

November 3, 2015

Good fences make good neighbors, Robert Frost wrote, in Mending Wall.  Between our property and the neighbours on both sides, a split-rail fence delineates the property lines.  We built the fence ourselves, getting on for twenty years ago, pulling the cedar rails out of the brush of an old farm at the edge of the village, gladly given to us by the elderly farmer. When the fence was done, he walked down one day to see them in their new incarnation. “Good to see them used again,” he said, of the old swamp cedar rails, probably even then well over a hundred years old.

But in a massive thunderstorm earlier this year, with drenching rain and high winds from the east, unusual for here, the young butternut that grows just at the edge of our eastern neighbour’s property shifted just a little, leaning into the fence, and took down three rails. Oddly enough, it didn’t break them: the steady pressure on the fence snapped the wire that held them to the posts. But they couldn’t go back up – the trunk of the butternut was in the way now.

We debated taking the tree down, but I really didn’t want to. Another young butternut, at the edge of the maple swamp behind us, also listed in the storm, but it straightened itself up within a couple of weeks.  I decided to wait. Yesterday, mulching leaves, I took a good look at the tree, and realized it had grown straight again, but from about five feet off the ground, meaning its lower trunk still was an impediment to replacing the rails.

BD and I brainstormed, and decided the simplest thing to do was to add a post directly beside the one north of the tree. This would allow us to run the rails from the new post to the existing one south of the tree, creating a slight zig-zag (or, really, only a zig). We throw almost nothing out in term of wood, so hiding down with the compost bins was a huge old post that had once supported the far end of the washing line. Cut down and wired securely to the existing post, it was the perfect size.

It took us about half an hour to fix the fence, on a glorious November day, sunny, very warm, no wind. Overhead ravens swore at and chased migrating red-tail hawks. The chickadees went back and forth to the feeders, ignoring us, joined by two species of nuthatch and two of woodpeckers. The squirrels – black and red – are happy to have their highway contiguous again, and neighbouring dogs and grandchildren have their limits back. Good fences do, indeed, make good neighbours.