Doing the Sustainability in the Chaos

With a large contract to work on, blogging has taken a back seat over the past few weeks. It’s also been school holidays, and the entire family came down with the cold and spew bugs in the same week. Messy.

What is interesting is how all the little sustainability projects I’ve been experimenting with have helped me get through the busy times.

The apple cider vinegar drinks helped clear our noses.

The seeds on the mantelpiece and in the cold frame have been germinating well, left to their own devices and squirts of water – giving me a little thrill to look at every time I walked past them on the porch.

Aloe vera masks with a drop of lavender oil helped my stressed skin.

My hand scrub (plus I used it on my feet) was a lovely pamper treat tonight at the end of a very crazy (but successful) work week.

It took no time at all the clean the bath and microwave, and do a quick dusting session with my sustainable solutions. These were chores I had very little time to do.

Homemade greek yoghurt with a teaspoon of homemade lemon curd stirred through has become my fast, easy and deliciously tangy breakfast.

These busy times are when I thought I’d drop the ball on being a Sustainable Wench, but I’m happy to realise that I’ve set some positive habits for myself.  Didn’t stop me from spending the money and treating ourselves to fish and chips tonight however.

Seeds go Postal

A bit of a thrill today when seeds arrived via courier. The reasons I ordered them online were:

• I was getting cross at the lack of herbs my local garden shop supplied (they’re great with veges and flowers though). Three times I went there looking for German Chamomile, with no luck for seeds or seedlings.
• Getting things in the mail that aren’t bills is exciting.
• It’s inexpensive.

It’s good to know there is no excuse for not planting your favourite herbs. It’s also a lovely winter thing to do so you can get some of the spring planting planned.

The Green Grocer

Shopping Day. Not the supermarket chore it used to be. Now it involves buying up bulk at the peaceful bulk food shop, then popping next door to the family-owned green grocer. The great thing about the green grocer, is that I know their eggs come from happy chickens near Mt Somers in Canterbury. They also give away big bags of fruit and vege scraps – ideal for chickens or to boost your compost. You get to chat about the state of the nation and the weather for free too.

Seedy

More seed planting tonight while the oven heated up for lazy bread. The reasons for this were:

• So I don’t have to splash out a small fortune on seedlings in the spring
• To supplement my (so far very lazy) chickens’ feed
• To provide me with something to trade with over the coming months (esp. for lemons)

I chucked seed raising mix into 3 punnets and planted more basil, silverbeet, and bok choy. These three punnets get the sunny spot on the lounge windowsill. The seedlings that were there go in the cold frame outside, and one of the punnets from the cold frame is now hardening up under the eaves. Bit like musical chairs. One is always left out in the cold.

It helps that all this is done within an eight metre radius. Not too much walking required. Then the bread went into the oven. Whammo. Sustainability Wench-ness achieved, thus cancelling out the takeaways we had for dinner (no actual scientific evidence in this theory).

Brown Sugar Pamper Hand Scrub

I made a quick and easy sugar scrub for my poor chapped hands tonight. Winter doesn’t do skin any favours. This is something you can do in an ad break, while the coffee is brewing, or as the wine chills. The reasons for making it are:

• cheap
• fast
• you know what’s in it
• no stupid packaging
• makes great pressies for friends

In a bowl, put:

• about 1.5 cups of brown sugar
• 1/3 cup of olive or canola oil (or whatever cooking oil you’ve got available)
• juice and grated zest of one lemon
• a few drops of essential oil. I like peppermint oil for this, but you could use whatever is in your cupboard. If you don’t have any oil, it’s no big deal.

Mix it all up and put it in a jar. You can see that the quantities are pretty informal. When you use it on your hands, take the time to massage your skin with it. It feels amazing. I then rinse and wash it off with my homemade soap.

Winter Pasta Sauce

The bottom shelf of the pantry is looking a bit empty of preserves. We’ve exhausted our supplies of homegrown tomato sauce and relish. Sadly, the midwinter garden vege supply is not very forthcoming. My solution is to make a massive batch of pasta sauce from tinned tomatoes. I’ve done this before in the summer, but below is my winter recipe.

• Buy the biggest tin of chopped tomatoes you can find, or use a whole bunch of tins (6-7 if you only have regular size tins)
• Saute 6-7 roughly chopped onions until clear, in a dollop of whatever oil you have
• Add fridge remnants like half a dozen anchovies, some preserved peppers, capers, spinach, broccoli etc
• Add a good couple of tablespoons of sugar and salt to taste, and a few bunches of herbs (I used parsley, rosemary and thyme today)
• Simmer the whole lot for half an hour or so
• Whizz up with a stick blender if you have one (bit tidier than transferring it into a food processor), then pour into hot sterilised jars and seal

You can see my ingredients list and measurements are pretty relaxed. The sauce is good with pasta, in casseroles, with rice and veges and all sorts of bits and pieces.

One-Bowl Easy Chocolate Brownies

Time to fill the biscuit tin again. I tweaked this from the Chelsea Sugar website. It’s pretty delicious. It’s also really unhealthy, so eat it with a side salad to cancel out the calories.

In a bowl, melt 200 grams of butter in the microwave. Then add:

• just under a cup of cocoa (this feels like LOADS, but it’s not a typo)
• 4 eggs
• 1 teaspoon vanilla essence
• couple of handfuls of choc chips
• 1 3/4 cups sugar

Stir the wet mixture together, then add 1 cup of flour and 1 teaspoon of baking powder and mix again. No need to bring out a machine – stirring with a spoon works. Bake in a cake or slice tin at 170 deg Celsius for between 20-30 minutes (depends on the height of it in your tin).

Due to pantry constraints, tonight I made it with only 3 eggs and no choc chips. It tastes fine. I have no battery life left in my camera to take a pic, but if you imagine a dark chocolatey slab of cake . . . that’s pretty much it.

Black Banana Loaf

Officially, this isn’t called ‘Black Banana Loaf’, but I always stash marginal-looking bananas in the freezer.  When you pull them out to defrost, they are black and squishy. Calling it ‘Soggy Black Banana Loaf’ might not quite appeal though.

This is a classic New Zealand Edmonds recipe. It’s cheap, easy, and you can do most of it in an ad break. It also uses those manky bananas that the kids won’t eat. I had to use rice milk and dairy-free margarine in it when my son was a baby, and it worked just as well.

In a large bowl, mix:

• 1 3/4 cups of self-raising flour (or I use 1 3/4 cups of flour and 3 1/2 teaspoons of baking powder. Silly to have another flour in the pantry)
• 1/4 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cup sugar

In another bowl, melt 75 grams of butter. Then stir in:

• 1/4 cup milk
• 2 eggs
• a couple of mushy bananas

Add the banana mix to the flour mix and stir. Put it in a loaf tin. Bake at 180 deg Celsius for about 45 minute or until cooked. Often mine only takes about half an hour so keep an eye on it.

Snow Prep

Apparently it’s going to snow lots over the next few days. Christchurch as a city gets a bit panicky in the snow. We’ve had snow in the city every winter for the past few years – not a whole lot – but it’s still a big novelty. Most things shut down. Which must be hugely entertaining for the Canadians I think.

I thought it best to get the garden ready this afternoon. The thing about gardening though, is that weather happens. You can only do so much to help the plants. Sometimes they die. That’s life.  My task list was pretty small:

• stake all the large broadbeans (a couple of months ago it snowed and they got hammered). They look a bit wonky in the pic below. That’s because I ran out of tights to tie them up. I will have cold legs.
• pick all the ripe limes, lemons and mandarins
• tuck the seedlings away in their house
• put the shovel and secateurs close to the garage entrance
• admire my winter garden while it still looks good . . . because next week it may all be under water
• open the doors of the house to give it a big dose of fresh air before we hunker down

What’s quite good about this Sustainability Wench bizzo, is that if the shops shut, I can:

• make my lazy bread
• make my yoghurt (with homemade lemon curd stirred through)
• keep my coffee warm
• eat our bottled fruit
• drink spiced quince gin

The hardest bit will be keeping the small fry entertained.

Using Up ALL of the Apples

My friend Kàren looked out my kitchen window the other day and noticed the ‘rustic’ display of windfall apples in our backyard from the tree next door. We’ve just had considerable rain which has really helped the apples look revolting on the ground.  ‘They’d be perfect for apple cider vinegar’ said she. So the seed was planted in my head.

This is what the apples looked like:

The tree next door is very big – it hasn’t been pruned for years. Consequently, the apples fall quite a distance and either impale themselves on the corrugated iron fence, smash on the little concrete pad, annoyingly placed right below the tree on our side, or the lucky ones fall into the Herb Tyres or onto the grass. I’ve managed to brew a few bottles of preserves out of some of them, but didn’t think there was any hope for the rest.

After some Googling, I found this recipe that suited my needs. There were others that didn’t include adding existing vinegar, although they seemed to take much longer to brew. I used lots of medium sized jars because I didn’t have large jars, and it’s silly to spend money when you can make do. I also used lots of chunks of good bits of apple, not just the peel and cores. There’s no conventional hot water cupboard at our house, so I hope that on top of my kitchen cupboard will be warm enough.