Sunrise over tomatoes

I think this has become one of my favorite sights: the sunlight in the eastern window, just barely illuminating a row of jars of new food.

Tomatoes in the dark.

Yesterday, N-son and I spent 4 hours "putting up" tomatoes.   We canned 28 quarts of tomatoes and 4 more quarts of tomato juice. And this morning I rose to test the lids, and discovered happily that all-but-one of the jars sealed properly. 

There's a word -- liminal -- that I've kind of fallen in love with.  It means, "relating to a transitional or initial stage of a process; occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold".   Sunrise over canning jars is a liminal moment: a threshold between yesterday's hot, messy work and the comfort of having summer tomatoes in my winter basement.  And canning jars full of tomatoes, when backlit by the rising sun, are beautiful.

At a pre-semester gathering last week, a colleague of mine picked my brain about trash. (That happens a lot nowadays).  She, like many other people, lamented the recent changes in recycling rules and said she wants to produce less trash, but "I'd have to totally change how I shop".   She buys bulk food at Costco, because that's how she manages to afford organic food for her family.   But apples come packaged in plastic containers that are almost like egg cartons, keeping each piece of fruit isolated from the others.  So much plastic, she frets, and now she can't dump that container in her green recycling bin.  But what choices are there?

Of course, she's right that if she wants to do it differently, she'd have to totally change how she shops.  For me, this change came over the course of many years, and by now the idea of buying apples out of season seems like a bizarre, almost alien, practice.   Of course I buy apples from an orchard in October and then can applesauce.  (Cherries in June; peaches in August).   I have fresh fruit in the summer, or when scavenged from catered events my college holds, and the rest of the time I eat fruit from the basement or not at all.  This is such a different way of thinking, of living in the world.

As an example of a different way of thinking, here are some "notes to self" that I'm gathering as the sun rises over my tomatoes.   Other people make shopping lists for their next trip to the grocery store, but I'm making lists for next August:

• Canning tomatoes and not tomato sauce goes a lot faster.  Continue this practice?  
• I got two buckets of Roma tomatoes.  This last year, though, we ran out of jars of tomato stuff in May; next summer should I get three buckets?  Or with N-son moving out to go to school, will two still be enough?  Not sure.
• We spent two hours actively chopping, and about a half-hour cleaning; the other hour-and-half was just processing time. 
• When I let N-son pick the music we listen to, he picks Reba McIntyre, same as last year.  Apparently, she writes good canning music.
• If I get more tomatoes next year, especially if N-son isn't around, I'll need to budget more than 4 hours for canning. 

This is a hugely different kind of thinking than my colleague does, and for a very small difference in trash output.   (In fact, metal tomato cans and glass jars are still recycle-able in our area, so this is really just a difference in how much we'd recycle).  And I don't know if it's a huge difference in cost -- our 32 quarts of tomato stuff cost $24, plus gas/energy expenses.  

My colleague gets the convenience of not having to spend a day each summer devoted to tomatoes, and another day in the fall devoted to apples.   For me, I get the convenience of not needing to grocery shop weekly during the cold and paper-work-intense winter months.   Not a better life necessarily, but certainly a different one.

But seeing the sun rise over my tomatoes . . . well, that's a moment to enjoy.

When you can't see the kale for the pickles

When I was growing up, everyone in my family took turns at making dinner.  My mom actually had me -- the artistic one, apparently-- design a KP chart*, so we knew who was cooking dinner, who was washing dishes, and who was vacuuming and sweeping each day.  (Okay, we "only" vacuumed and swept the house 3 days per week, one day per daughter, but the KP chart said which one of us did it which day).

*KP is an army abbreviation for "Kitchen Police",

or in my mom's lingo, a Girl Scout abbreviation 

for "Kitchen Patrol".  My mom was organized and strict!

It was sort of an ongoing joke that my mom's meals consisted of leftovers.  In fact, she'd pull a chair up in front of the fridge and pull out pyrex container after corningware container.  She'd reheat those containers in the oven or the microwave, and that would be our meal for the evening.  My sisters and I grumbled a lot about the fact that we and our dad had to cook, but my mom got to reheat.

But the scavengers have a place in the ecosystem, too.  And every once in a while, when I clean out my own refrigerator, I'm glad for the chance to have a "grandmother meal", which makes the most of former meals before they go bad, and also allows me to see what fresh foods still exist in between the bowls and and plates and pots of stuff.

Problem is, my refrigerator is usually in the state where there's "no food, only ingredients".  My love of canning jars and all that goes in them means that we tend to accumulate lots of jars of something-or-other waiting to be made into dinner somehow.  Just last Friday, in fact, we'd reached a stage where I knew I had a head of kale in there somewhere, but I couldn't see it for all the mis-matched jars of olives, diced carrots, sliced turnips, and other potentially yummy vegetables that had yet to find their way into a meal.  Not to mention, we had lots of partially filled jars of sauces cluttering up the refrigerator door.  Some people can't see the forest for the trees, but I couldn't see the kale for the pickles.

Where, oh where, is the kale?

So I pulled a Miser Mom version of my Mama.  I emptied the shelves of the refrigerator onto the kitchen counter, and I concocted a recipe made of . . . well, of ingredients.   I gathered all the root vegetables and tossed them into a hot cast-iron skillet with oil, garlic, and salt.  I consolidated as much as I could of four bottles of barbecue sauce into one bottle.  The remaining three bottles, I added a bit of water to, shook for all I was worth, and tossed the liquid in with the root vegetables (thereby simultaneously rinsing those bottles before recycling them).  I added a jar of sliced mizuna stems and a bunch of arugula.  I added pretty much everything I thought my husband or son wouldn't want to cook with, and I returned to the fridge the few remaining jars or bowls of things my guys might actually use -- the tomatoes and (yes) the kale.

I love it that the recipe was accidentally awesome.  I made it just for me because I figured no one else would like it.  But when my husband and son got home later that evening, they snarfed it all down and there was none left for me to take to school for lunch the next day.  Huzzah for serendipitous recipes!

But I also continue to appreciate the magic of canning, so that I can store the bulk of my food on non-refrigerated shelves.  On  shelves,  I can see all of my stored food easily.  Finding food in the basement is so much easier than finding it in the fridge or the freezer.  So here's a shout-out to my daughter and her best friend, who came over later in the week (long after the danger of being served Hot Barbecue Root Vegetable Medley), and who helped me cut up apples and can 24 quarts and a dozen smaller jars of applesauce. 

Twirly apples are one of the most enjoyable things about
spending 4 hours canning applesauce.

Even after we canned all those jars up, I had a few more bags of apples left for eating.  Fortunately, I'd cleared out space in the fridge for the remaining apples; they go right next to the kale.

Sunrise over canning jars

I woke up to this view this morning.

Sunrise over canning jars. 

Yesterday we had a huge canning session, wrestling our way through two bushels of tomatoes and 24 peppers. In this round of canning, I was ably assisted by N-son.  He's been a bit of domestic whiz this week.  He moved bedrooms, and he used his Senior Year Photo proofs (complete with the word "proof" emblazoned across them) to decorate his new bedroom door.  I love it.

N-son's door.  He's not usually so linear;
I love the attention to detail here.

When I asked for help with the many, many tomatoes I'd brought home, I was fearing I'd wind up with a tale of the "Little Red Hen".

Who will help me can these tomatoes?
"Not I", said the big yellow dog.

But instead, I got the "Little Engine That Could".  N-son actually asked me if he could help, instead of me asking him. When I agreed, he grabbed his favorite ceramic knife, put on one of his favorite musical CDs (Reba McEntire's Greatest Hits, in case you were wondering), and got down to chopping.

(I do not know how many people who decorate their bedroom doors with homemade "Black Lives Matter" signs count Reba McEntire as one of their favorite singers.  That right there is an interesting juxtaposition, I have to say).

N-son washed and cut up so many tomatoes that he joked to K-daughter that his hands were getting wrinkled "like old man hands". We also worked our way through a round of pickled peppers, which is one of N-son's favorite foods.  And then I'd had enough, and we all went to bed.

This morning, I woke up to my ready-for-winter food congregating in my window shelf, waiting to take the ride together in their cardboard box bus down into the basement, where they'll bide their time before coming back upstairs, one by one, to remind me week-by-week of the sun that rose over these physical manifestations of a day well-spent.

Garbage offsets

This post isn't about tomatoes.  Still, I want to show you how happy my tomatoes are, enjoying their recent field trip outdoors.

Tomatoes in the sunshine.

I've started them in canning jars, per my usual custom, because (a) I don't want to spend money on plastic starter trays, and (b) plastic starter trays are so small that they require up-potting the plants anyway and (c) I already have gobs of canning jars just sitting around, and (d) this hasn't resulted in tomato genocide in past years, so I figure why the heck not stick with what's worked?

In the same way that I'm too cheap to buy plastic starter trays, I'm also too cheap to get grow lights, and even when I borrowed grow lights, I was too cheap to leave them turned on.  (Sometimes it's hard being a Miser Mom; I get a little too wound up about leaving on the lights).   But my high-E windows mean that my tomatoes languish without additional help, making the transfer from jars to the ground problematic, unless I give them a way to get full-spectrum light.  So during April and early May, whenever the weather is warm enough, I take my tomatoes outdoors to play during the day, and then bring them back in at night to protect them from cold and/or rain.

The tomatoes in their new "school bus",
hanging out with the violets.

What's different this year is that these field trips have a new tomato school bus, so to speak. Instead of carrying my tomato-canning-jars around in their cardboard boxes (a dozen to a box), I now have a fantastic wooden basket with handles that just perfectly fits all two dozen jars. This box is a most excellent acquisition, because not only does this box allow me to carry all the jars out (or back in) in one trip, but it also means I don't have to worry that errant rain will destroy my storage boxes by making them soggy. I love my new tomato school bus.

And where, you might ask, did I get this wonderful box?

From my neighbor's trash pile.

My neighbors, they throw away such amazing stuff.  Here I am, agonizing over two tortilla bags that go with feeding 8 people at our family's annual money dinner (internal monologue: "Is there  any way I can buy green tortillas around here without plastic bags?"  fret, fret, fret . .  ).  I obsess over eliminating material that is designed exclusively for the purpose of being disposed of.  And my neighbors, their trash piles contain object after object that remains perfectly useful . . . just not useful to my neighbors.  I've rescued I-don't-know-how-many beautiful wicker baskets, art canvases, flower pots, pieces of furniture, children's toys.   Just the other day, I pulled out a tea kettle.

This gets me steamed.

The kettle is in perfect condition.  But my neighbors are renovating their kitchen, and apparently the kettle no longer fits the decor.  I admit I don't need a kettle either, but I couldn't bear the thought of this thing taking up space in our increasingly overflowing landfill, so I grabbed it off the top of their trash pile and added it to our "donate" box.

To be more specific, I added it to our "donate -- household goods" box.  We have donation boxes for household goods, for clothes, for books, for scrap metal, for rags, and for arts and crafts, all near our garbage can, which is slowly-but-surely filling up for the third time this year.  I saw the level in my own garbage can rising even as I rescued the tea kettle from my neighbor's garbage, and a thought struck me.

If companies (and even individuals) can buy carbon offsets from other sources to make up for their own excesses, maybe I could use garbage offsets to make up for my own landfill contributions.  What would happen if, for every garbage can my family produces, I rescued an equal amount of perfectly good stuff and got it into the hands of people who could use it?  My net effect on the local landfills could be zero, even if I'm not technically zero waste myself.

I want to be clear that I know I sound like a zealot and/or crazy person saying all this. I don't actually root around in other people's garbage cans, and I'm not about to start doing that now, nor in the future.  (I've only rescued the stuff in plain sight, left on the top of the can or on the ground next to it).  I don't actually want to structure my life around being the Don Quixote of Garbage, riding off to tilt at trash cans every garbage day.

And yet, the idea of having a net-zero effect on our landfill appeals to me.  If I can't quite figure out how to avoid the tortilla bags and other soft plastics that seem to make up the bulk of our garbage, maybe I can help see to it that our garbage has a little less companionship as it heads off to its final resting place.

It's something to think about.

De-cluttering the lotion mosh pit

An odd thing happened to me a few weeks ago.  I got into a funky mood in which I wanted to clean things up, to declutter . . . but there was hardly anything to clean.  I wouldn't say my home is an example of minimalism, because we still have lots of decorations and toys and books and tools around the house, but when I looked around the living room, dining room, and kitchen, I was really happy with everything I saw.  I'd done a major reorganization of our first floor a few years ago, and apparently, it's worked well.  I guess I've been getting really good at heading towards "enough".

But I know that real clutter is like cockroaches -- it doesn't like to be out in the light of day.  The stuff that we see is the stuff we use.  Said another way, the stuff we don't need is not the stuff we keep out in plain sight; it's the stuff at the back of our cupboards.  So after wandering through the house, eyeing all my belongings and realizing that I actually liked everything I could see, I headed upstairs and decided to get rid of stuff I couldn't see.

When I got to to the bathroom closet, I hit the jackpot.  This particular bathroom has been the primary grooming spot for five different teenage girls over the past 20 years.  All of those teenage girls have now moved out of the home, but a cursory archeological dig through the closet unearthed evidence of their past presence.  I pulled out bottle after bottle of facial scrub, eye make-up remover, and other such concoctions.

lotion in bottles, and bottles in a basket

When my four daughters were here for Christmas, I encouraged them to take what they wanted now.  Most of the specialty stuff left the house with my daughters.  Yay!  By the time my offspring were gone, what remained was two baskets: one with several bottles of sun screen, and one with an assortments of lotions.

Ugh.  The tyranny of lotion bottles.  How the heck do we get so many lotion and sun screen bottles?  I mean, we do use lotion, and sunscreen too, so I understand why we have lotion and sunscreen.  But the vast number of different semi-empty bottles of the stuff was what was screaming "clutter!" at me.  The stuff inside is useful -- but who needs all the packaging that goes with the stuff inside?

Canning jars to the rescue.  Because.  Because I love canning jars, and I miss writing about them.

I emptied what was inside the four bottles of sunscreen into a single, cup-sized canning jar.  (For thick gooey versions that didn't want to flow quickly, I stuck the bottle in the microwave for about 15 seconds; that seemed to get things flowing beautifully).  Last year, K-daughter gave me a pump that goes on a canning jar, and so now I have the sunscreen all together in one easy place to get to.

Baking soda, lotion, and sun screen: my morning ablutions.

Ditto with the lotion; that goes in another canning jar (although no pump on that one).  All of these go on my dresser, which is where I actually use them.  Every morning I use lotion and baking soda as my deodorant, and then I put on my rosacea medicine and a bit of sun screen.

(Just to add: I was surprised at how little space the sunscreen took up once it was outside of the plastic containers -- those four big semi-empty bottles all condensed down into one little canning jar.  So now I'm even happier that I thought of this -- that's a huge reduction in shelf space).


So now, the next time I get into one of those gotta-clean moods, I'll have to dig even deeper.  Because my bathroom cupboards are looking pretty danged good.  Sigh. 

As easy as apple . . . sauce!

My friend June made her annual stop at a nearby orchard and brought me a bushel of apples for $16.  This time of year, local apples are abundant and inexpensive (not to mention delicious!).

Applesauce might very well be a sort of a gateway drug for future canners, because applesauce is so easy.  First of all, the ingredients of applesauce are minimal:  apples, plus a tiny bit of water.  Second of all, all the cooking that goes with applesauce happens when the weather is cool, so (unlike in August when the tomatoes and peaches are steaming up my kitchen) heating up a pot of hot apples makes the house feel better, not worse.  And finally, the actual making of the apple sauce is surprisingly simple, especially if you like including the peels in the applesauce (like I do).

The steps of making apple sauce are basic: chop them, heat them, and mash them.  To cut them up, I've used an apple peeler corer in the past, but this year decided just to cut each apple into eighths and then remove the core (triangled wedge).  N-son, with his growing confidence because of his culinary arts training, started on this even before I got home from church, and we worked happily on this together while listening to Chris Thile make his debut as the host of Prairie Home Companion.

We tossed the cut-up pieces into a pot with a small amount of water (about a half-inch, enough to prevent scorching the apples), and then heated up the apples until they got soft.  I used a potato masher, followed by a stick blender that I scored at one of our annual Bad Gift Exchange parties.

At that point, the applesauce was done!  To summarize, all you do is chop them, heat them, and mash them.  No extra ingredients (aside from a bit of water) needed, no special thermometers.  So it's a really quick and easy food to make.

To can the applesauce, you put the applesauce in jars and then boil the jars for 20 minutes (if they're quart jars) or 15 minutes (if they're pint jars).  You'll need actual canning jars and jar grabbers, but that's the only special equipment you need -- you could use a spaghetti pot for canning, if it's deep enough that the jars can be completely underwater.

For us, this past weekend, canning 19 quarts of applesauce took three-and-a-half hours: that's the time from opening up the bags to putting away the freshly-washed pots.  If you start with fewer apples, of course this will take you less time, and there's no reason you need to do so many at once -- you could can just one pint of applesauce if you wanted.

My favorite step-by-step site for canning directions is here.

***
Canning apples was so easy, that I decided to try my hand at making my own apple cider vinegar as well -- this will be my first attempt.  Basically, I just put the apple scraps (cores) in glass jars with water and a bit of sugar, and I'll wait a month or so and vinegar will magically appear.  Or something.  I'm mostly following the directions from the PrairieHomestead site (no relation to Chris Thile, as far as I can tell).  Advice is welcome.  

From fence to canning jar shelves

This  little essay could be called

"Reason #167 I love my cordless drill".  

In between preparing my syllabus and going to all those bazillion meetings that seem to pop up just before the beginning of a semester, I love the feeling of ripping wood apart and putting it back together in new configurations.

The fence that has come apart has been coming back together in a variety of useful new ways.  Like, as a solar dehydrator. And as Adirondack chairs.  But also, most recently, as shelves for my empty canning jars.

(We had had shelves for the spare jars before, made out of cinderblocks and scrap wood, but because of recent basement renovations including getting a new hybrid electric water heater, those shelves had to move.  And once we moved them, we realized they were falling apart. Plus, they weren't really exactly the right size for canning jars -- sort of space-inefficient plus saggy -- so making a new set of shelves is like a basement upgrade.)

At any rate, I started with two-by-fours to make a pair of ladder-y things, with the rungs spaced 9 inches apart, which happens to be just about the right separation for storing quart-sized canning jars.  The circular saw was my first friend, to get all the pieces the right size. But after I was done with the circular saw, I pulled out my BFF, the cordless drill, and started forming strong attachments.

First I made two ladder-like things. Then I stood the two ladders up with diagonal braces while I attached the fence boards-cum-shelves.

The drill: it stands at the ready.

And here are the completed shelves, empty.   (Note the diagonal brace on the back, to add stability.  The mathematician in me loves how useful triangles are!)

Here are the shelves with boxes of empty canning jars.  The quart-sized jars near the bottom of the shelf have almost no head-room (as I designed--perfecto); the pint-sized jars in  the middle have a bit of space above; the one-cup jars fit double-stacked.  This will store a lot more jars in a lot less space than before, and it also keeps everything nice and visible. I'm so happy with how this came out. 

**
More up-cycling is happening in here.   If you look carefully, you'll see a printer box in the middle.  I love using printer boxes for storing things, partly because they're free and abundant, partly because they're recyclable once I destroy them, and partly because they're so easy to cut down to make handles or visible openings.  I've discovered that if I cut them right at the top of the flap that folds up, they're the perfect height for quart-sized canning jars.  This means I can store the jars with a printer-box lid on top, which will help even more with keeping basement dust and dirt out.

You are what you . . . drink?

"A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems."
--Alfréd Rényi

(Rényi actually said "device", not "machine", but this little saying of his has become part of the folk-wisdom of mathematics, and like many sayings, it has various forms; the version above is the version I "grew up" with, mathematically speaking).

I started drinking coffee the summer I was working on my doctoral dissertation.  My thesis advisor had gone to Oxford for a whole year, and I scraped together money to follow him there for just one summer.  "Summer" is a relative term in Oxford, especially in June, when it rained every day but one. The heat in the buildings was off (because, y'know, "summer"), but the outside June temperatures never rose above 60-some degrees.  I was miserably cold a lot of the time, and I turned to warm drinks to try to help me feel better.  British tea was an acquired taste that I couldn't manage to acquire, so I took up coffee.

Fortunately for me, July and August warmed up (AND I figured out the Sobolev inequality that helped me nail that compactness argument that I needed to finish my thesis--whoop!), but the rainy, cold June had made its mark on me:  by the time I left Old England to return to New England I was hooked both on mathematical theorem proving and on coffee.

Coffee, coffee, coffee . . .  I love it.  There are so many ways it has permeated my life.  Like Bach, I have sung (or rather, said) its praises: in our family game of "I like", my third or fourth offering has  often been, "I like . . . drinking coffee."

I've designed my bags so that they can carry my favorite insulated bottle (perfect for getting coffee on the go).

And I have come to love the coffee-making ritual in our marriage: my husband grinds the coffee beans at night, and I press the "start" button in the morning.  I make coffee and transfer it to a thermos for low-cost warmth preservation.

Coffee has been a part of my mathematical identity; it's been a part of my marriage; it's shaped the physical possessions that I own and the way I model gratitude with my children.

Can you sense there's a change coming?

There have been downsides to drinking coffee.  The expense . . . well, since we mostly brew coffee at home, coffee has been an affordable luxury, even to a Miser like me.  Even so, there's no getting around the fact that coffee is one of the more expensive ongoing pantry purchases we make in our home.  A larger downside is that I've been so addicted for so long, that even when I don't *want* to shape my life around coffee, I sort of *have* to.  In particular, when I'm traveling, locating early morning coffee (trash-free, where possible) has loomed large in my travel arrangements.

I've toyed around with the idea of giving up coffee for a while. I held back in part because it would be just another way to freak out my husband, who already thinks I live a life of hair-shirt-self-sacrifice, and worries about being dragged into the same. But then I came down with a health scare that turned out to be persistent heart burn (it's how I learned I'm beautiful on the inside).  And after taking mondo piles of medication day after day, I finally decided to say good-bye to . . . well, to a big part of my life.

Sigh-yay.  (!/?)

And so I've gone over to the herbal tea side of the world.  (Note: herbal teas -- cheaper than coffee and not addictive).  I get them from market (canning jars, no trash).  And just so I can inject a little of the happy side of me in here, I'll note that canning jar lids make great mug covers to keep the tea warm, and small canning jars are a great place to drop your tea ball when you take it out of the mug.

Canned dirt

The first time of doing anything new can be exciting, but it can also be darned intimidating.  I'm thinking, for example, of a student who came to my home for lunch last month and who said, sort of wistfully, "Yeah, someday I'd like to learn to bake bread."  Even after I wrote down a recipe, she kept saying, "Someday I'll learn . . . "  so I walked her into my kitchen and handed her a bowl.

"Here, put the water in the bowl. Okay, now add the yeast.  Now the flour . . . "  Five minutes later, she had a dough ready to rise.  And she was floored: "You mean that's it?  That's all you do?"

And that's what I mean.  Doing something for the first time is hard because of the chasm of the unknown, more than it's hard because of the task itself.

And in the same way, doing something for a second, third, or nth time becomes a snap.  For example, this weekend I spent a half hour getting my tomatoes and peppers started.  I knew from past experience that the part I dislike most about seed-starting is gathering supplies from the basement and garage, so I tasked N-son with carrying things while I finished up some dishes.  From the basement: two-dozen pint jars and one-dozen cup jars, plus the shoe box of seeds.  From the garage: the potting soil and the tarp to keep the table clean. (It's so nice to know what I'm doing now well enough that I can delegate to others!  I can't delegate well when I'm still making stuff up as I'm going along.)  I got the ladle and funnel myself.  And, voila!  I was ready to start my seeds.

Keeping the bag of potting soil in a bucket makes for easy carrying
and also for less spilling while I'm potting up plants.

I already had potting soil and seeds from a previous year.  I already had canning jars from . . . well, from being a little nutso about loving canning jars.  This year the one new thing I'm trying new is to use canning jar lids instead of a dry cleaner bag or clear plastic tarp to keep moisture in until things start sprouting.  I'm crossing my fingers that the glass on the side of the jars lets enough light in to tell the seeds to wake up.  If this doesn't work, I'll cry for my dead seeds, and then go back to plastic tarp next year.

And, half-an-hour later, all the seeds were in jars, the tarp had been shaken out outside, the supplies were put away, and any mess was cleaned up.  All that was left on the table was a set of flowers I'd planted years ago.  More past-me making the life of now-me a little easier and prettier.

Sunscreen pump

It's been so long since I got to indulge myself in a good Canning Jar Lust post.  This topic has been long overdue in this neck of the blog-o-sphere, hasn't it?

I've often looked sort of longingly at people who make canning jars into pump dispensers.  But I didn't do it myself because, (a) really, we already have soap dispensers galore here in Chez MiserMom, and (b) I hadn't figured out a super-frugal way to do it myself.   Truly, if I don't need something, why should I pay good money to make it?

So I didn't make myself a canning jar pump.  But, as so always happens, procrastination and/or patience paid off.  Because for Christmas, K-daughter happened to give me a canning jar pump dispenser.  Apparently, she knows me well enough to know that is exactly the kind of thing I would like!

Okay, except that--now that I finally had this long-desired object of canning-jar-joy-dom--I kept it empty on a shelf for a long time, contemplating.  As I mentioned already, we already have more than enough soap dispensers sitting around our sinks and cluttering up our closets.  Also, the jar she got me is a small (one-cup) canning jar, so it doesn't hold as much soap as some of the dispensers we already have in place.  So here I was, having gotten as a gift something I'd really wanted, but now I wasn't really sure what to do with it.

And then the sun came out.  And with the sun, inspiration broke.

The inspiration is:  sunscreen!  Yes, here, next to my canned pennies (destined for the credit union soon) and the canned washable crayons (for writing on my bulk-shopping cloth bags), sits my pump bottle of SPF30 sunscreen.

I have rosacea (side effect: could be detrimental to my self-esteem, although I haven't noticed problems in that area myself).  Because of this rosacea, I'm supposed to take extra care of covering my face with sunscreen and shade-providing hats.  With spring peeking around the corner, I'm soon going to be doing much more daytime running and biking and such, and now my sunscreen is conveniently right there on my dresser, a quick pump away from decorating the old schnoz and cheeks.  

And so, this canning jar pump is really the MiserMom version of Eeyore's birthday present:  a solution in search of a problem.   

"I'm very glad," said Pooh happily, "that I thought of giving you a Useful Pot to put things in."
"I'm very glad," said Piglet happily, "that thought of giving you something to put in a Useful Pot."
But Eeyore wasn't listening. He was taking the balloon out, and putting it back again, as happy as could be....

It's that time again: Pickle Juice for Dinner!

I love my giant Thanksgiving list. I pull it out about this time every year, and I spend four or five days living by its wise guidelines. The first page is the massive shopping list; the next four pages are a day-by-day (at points, even minute-by-minute) guide to getting ready for Thanksgiving. I update it slightly year-by-year, but the bulk of it has been the same since I put it together six years ago.

The guide begins with a Monday cleansing:

Make space in fridge by emptying out gross moldy things.

Tuesday, the real preparation begins:

Grocery shop.
Make cranberry relish:
grind together in the blender 4 cups cranberries, 1 orange, and then 2 cups sugar. place in refrigerator.
Make dressing:
mix 1/4 c walnut oil, 1/2 c vegetable oil, 3 tbs cider vinegar, 1 tsp mustard, 1 Tbsp honey, salt, pepper, and 2 tbs chives.

The list ends Friday with directions for making shepherd's pie and canning turkey stock from the leftovers (20 minutes for pints, 25 minutes for quarts).

Right now, we're at the clean out the fridge stage.  My fridge has accumulated a lot of jars. 

And this year, a heck of a lot of those jars come from pickles.  We like pickles so much, we save the brine to make more pickles.

We have the brine from store-bought pickled cucumbers (actually, not bought by us: we scavenged them from a school picnic); we also have jars with whatever is left of pickled okra, pickled carrots, pickled radishes, pickled kale stems . . . you name it.

But since it's November, we're low on veggies and rich in brine right now.  (I think I counted six jars of brine, with a few briny but lonely vegetables floating here and there).  So last night, we  had pickles for dinner.  Pickles, and Cream-of-Leftover Soup.  Yum.  And a few other leftovers as side dishes.








But, in the "mission accomplished" realm, the fridge stands ready for the next infusion of food.

And, to my intense delight, the fridge clean-out resulted in zero trash:  the waste involved was one recycled pickle jar, a few hand-washed plastic bags (not yet trash, as I can use them again a few times), and a heck of a lot of canning jars getting ready for the dishwasher.  (Miser Dog, by the way, was very happy to help dispose of the food of questionable longevity, so there wasn't even anything to compost).

We are so fortunate to have this much food just sitting here waiting for us to eat it.  It's strange to make this fridge clean-out almost into a game.  I can't help but think that.

And I also think:  canning jars, yay!  Because later today, they'll hold homemade salad dressing and cranberry relish, and it's about time, because Thanksgiving is coming soon.  

Bleah for Beautiful Closets

As someone who loves-loves-loves organizing time, and space, and closets, and . . . well . . . and everything, I just want to do a rant against "Closet-Beautiful" type magazines.   Because the kind of "beautiful" these closet magazines show isn't even normal, it's airbrushed and unhealthy.   (Sort of like other kinds of beauty magazines, I hear, but I don't even look at those).

Why is this kind of closet "airbrushed"?  It's a closet for a person who has only three dresses (identical and pink) and two (identical) bathrobes.  This closet beautifully holds 8 shirts, and about 8 pairs of slacks.  If you have more than that, well, things are going to look cluttered. Note also the stacks of identical shirts.  Would this closet look as good if the clothes were, um, real?

 The unhealthiness comes also from the way these so-called-organized photos interact with our things, rather than with us.  To get the belongings to conform to space, their owners often use lots of plastic boxes.  Stacked, full plastic boxes are my least favorite "glam" shot: how the heck are you going to get the gold scarf out of the middle of the box that's third from the right on the next-to-bottom row?  This is a format archival storage, not for actual day-to-day use.

Oh, well, at least all the shirts that hang below are evenly spaced 6 inches apart.  That's a relief.

Okay, but I don't just want to rant.  Underneath this, there are some guiding principals that help to make a messy place look (and possibly even actually be) more organized.  Two keys to the aesthetic sense are symmetry and space.  So to get a good-looking space, you should (a) declutter, (b) group like objects together, and (c) use containers -- not only to group things, but also to make them appear more similar.

Here's a quick example:  the before (left) and after (right) photos are those of a proud person who has gone through a very satisfying bout of organizing a garage workspace.  What makes this feel so successful is that the after looks so uniform -- there are red containers (well labeled) on one side, and big gray containers (again, well-labeled) on another shelf.  Symmetry and space in action.

Here's another before-and-after.  I know I'm missing a larger part of the kitchen, so I'm not judging this particular effort, but these pictures make me twitchy.  What makes the "after" below look so good is the uniformity -- the absence of commercial containers, for example.  But where did the tomato sauce go?  And (the Miser) part of me asks, how much does all this plastic container cost the owner, and the environment?  

At the same time, I admit that I'd rather look at a pantry like the one on the right than on the left.  I mean, pretty.

So I did a little experiment with my husband's dresser, one afternoon when he was out bike riding.  (Fortunately for this experiment, I have a husband who conveniently sports a mildly cluttered habitat and who also doesn't mind if I play around with his stuff).  

Behold the "Before".  It looks disorganized because there are a variety of objects, and there is no space between them.  Indeed, the things overlap and heap up.  

Even from this other angle, the dresser top is really a pile-o-stuff:

Of course, I did not purchase a host of plastic storage bins for this experiment, but it just so happened that I have a stash of canning jars on hand.  (You knew I'd have to bring up canning jars at some point, right)?

And lo-and-behold the "After"!

 Gorgeous, right?

There are several take-aways from this experiment.  One is that grouping things together, especially if you can get them into similar-looking containers, really does make thing look nicer.

But the boost in appearance often comes at the expense of practicality.  I mean, you might not want your mouthwash in canning jars, and it's a dangerous idea to keep your medicine there.

Don't put medicine in glass jars, especially if they're unlabeled!

Much less dangerous, but no less ridiculous, is the idea of keeping bike gloves and important papers in a jar.  I mean, even *I*, who love canning jars, don't do that.  

And what you don't see in the photo is just as important.  To get everything to fit in the containers, I had to get rid of a bunch of stuff, some of which was clutter, but some of which really belonged.  Here, I've added that back in:  there is packaging (because commercial labels ruin the "after"photo) and trash, and also a few things like a calculator that are actually useful, but don't fit into my particular containers.  

In other words, caution is advised when deciding how successful the "after" is compared to the "before".

So the organizational enthusiast in me wants to close with one more example of why things that look like a mess (different sizes, different shapes, different colors, different markings, overlapping and unevenly spaced) might actually be a better way to be useful and organized.

Which of these two objects below is less cluttered?  Which of the two is easier to use without even thinking hard about it?

Exhibit A

Exhibit B

Next-Gen Canning Ring Uses

With many thanks to Penn, I bring you this late-breaking and new (to me) use for canning jars rings!

Here, you see K-daughter introducing a wide-mouth ring to my granddaughter, Baby A:

What does Baby A think about these things?  She thinks . . . 

. . . they're great!  Easy for a 3.5-month-old to grab and wave around!  Shiny!

Baby A loves them so much, she doesn't want to share.  

No, not even with her buddy, Miser Dog.

Quick riddle for you:  Why is a canning ring like a key ring?

Answer: Because they both go in your mouth, silly!

Dog food cans.

Just as I was getting ready to put a graceful end to this whole Canning Jar Fetish theme and move along, people, THIS happened.  My boys and I spent the day helping my dad clean out his old home, and he loaded us down with stuff for our home, including 6 cans of dog food.

Miser Dog seldom gets canned dog food, so we're mixing in half-a-can at a time with his dry dog food, spacing the pleasure out.  And when you have a half-full can of dog food that you're saving for later, how do you cover it up so that it doesn't stink up the refrigerator?

Out of canning jar habit, I reached for a large lid and ring.  And behold.

Oh, this is too funny.  The lid/ring combo is a perfect fit.

(This must mean that if you buy one of those snap-on-lids to go on top of pet food containers, it fits on canning jars, too?  I don't know if it would work in that direction.)

Hardly earth shaking -- but just too funny a coincidence for me to not share!

Breaking up is good to do

From the ongoing bedtime story called If You Give a MiserMom a Canning Jar . . . comes this one obvious chapter on the use of canning jars: you can use them to hold food.

Like, of course.

You can even use canning jars to hold food that you didn't even bother to can.

Still a no brainer, I know.  But it's one of the most common ways I'm using jars nowadays.

There's a purpose beyond busy-work for transferring food that comes in bags, boxes, and bins into these jars. I don't put my food into jars just because everything is prettier that way than when it's heaped up in bags and boxes (although I do think jars of dry beans have a certain aesthetic quality to them).

Pretty beans?

The reason I use canning jars is not so that I can store the food; it's so I can retrieve it.

I buy most of my dry goods in bulk. If I tried to store it all in the kitchen, my shelves would be so full I could never find anything.  So I store most of my food in the pantry in the basement, and I keep just enough upstairs that I can see it and use it.  If I need more, I just go "shopping" in the basement. I could store all of that food in large bins, but I use small jars instead:  I'm a lot more likely to grab a pint of dry beans off the shelf than wrestle with some giant bag or bin.  That means I'm more likely to use the food I already have.

For my hungry family, a pint jar of dry beans happens to be just about the right amount to toss straight into a pot of water to soak overnight: no measuring cups involved.  For the same ease-of-use reason, I've divvied up what was left from a bag of rye flour into pint-sized canning jars.  Before I put it into jars, the bag sat curled up in a drawer staring at me balefully and taunting me, for months.   Bags of rye flour are just messy beasts to use, aren't they?.  But once the rye was corralled and pre-measured within easy grab-n-go jars, it was a cinch to use the flour up the next few times I made bread.

The grab-n-go is why I put our leftover Swiss Chard salad in a quart-sized canning jar one night.  The next morning, it went straight into my lunch bag along with a small jar of cashews.  By lunch time, all was history.

It's why, when I make pots of soup, we don't put the leftovers into the fridge until we've transferred everything to jars.  (Canning jars don't leak, and once you remove the lids and rings, canning jars can go straight into the microwave).

What you're looking at above is lunch-lunch-lunch-snack-lunch.  No prep time, just yum.

If you give a Miser Mom a Canning Jar, she can take it anywhere.