Golopomo In Your Closet

Nathan came across this article with some great tips for sustainable fashion:

http://content.govdelivery.com/bulletins/gd/MNPCA-334f0c

What are some other things you have done or heard about related to dressing sustainably?

Easy Homemade Yogurt

We love yogurt at our house – it’s a healthy sour cream alternative, great for cooling down spicy foods, a quick and easy dessert when paired with fresh or canned fruit, yummy in smoothies, a tasty and filling topping for pancakes and waffles. But I don’t like wasting plastic containers, so the golopomo way is to make it myself.

Here’s my recipe for yogurt made at home, with no special equipment except an optional candy thermometer. The hardest part about it is remembering to check on the milk throughout its stages of heating and cooling. Bare-bones instructions are in bold font for you skimmers.

Easy Homemade Yogurt

Fill a quart-size Mason jar with milk. (only to top of shoulders, not into neck area). Or if you don’t care about extra dishes, measure one quart (4 cups) of milk in a measuring cup.

Pour milk in a saucepan. Insert a candy thermometer. Heat the milk, stirring occasionally, until thermometer registers 180 degrees F. Or, if no thermometer, until bubbles form on top of milk (but don’t let it boil).

While milk is heating, rinse Mason jar and then add yogurt (with live cultures) until it covers the bottom of the jar (approximately 1/2-1 tablespoon, no more).

Once milk has reached 180 degrees F, remove from heat and let it cool, stirring occasionally. When the thermometer registers 110 degrees F (or if no thermometer, when milk no longer “bites” your finger when you dip your finger into it), pour the milk into the Mason jar. Use a funnel!

Immediately wrap the jar in dish towels and place it in a cooler or insulated container of some sort. 

Let the yogurt incubate for 4 hours or more. Overnight is best. You can eat it right away after incubation, or refrigerate for longer storage.

Save a little yogurt for your next batch!

These are the only dirty dishes produced from this recipe. The Mason jar will also be used for storage, so that will be washed later. The thermometer is optional. Also, you wouldn't need to use both a spoon and a spatula. I like to use the spatula to scrape the yogurt out of my previous batch's jar - and then I could have used the same spatula for stirring.

Notes and Extras:

You could use a quart-size thermos instead of a Mason jar, and then you may not need to do any further insulating for the incubation period. But you’d probably want a thermos dedicated to this purpose because it might pick up the smell/flavor of yogurt. Also I’m not sure about storing a thermos in the fridge, so you may end up with extra dishes if you transfer it from the thermos to a jar or other container for storage.

For the incubation period, some people use a dehydrator or gas oven with pilot light on, or the top of a refrigerator – any warm place where it will maintain a temperature of about 100 degrees Fahrenheit. This recipe suggests placing it in a bowl of warm water that you reheat from time to time.

Remember that if you add yogurt to something you’re cooking or baking so that it gets heated to over 130 degrees F, you will kill the live cultures and lose much of its healthful benefits.

You can strain yogurt to make a simple cream-cheese alternative. Line a colander with clean dish towels, cheesecloth or coffee filters, and let it drip over a bowl until the yogurt in the colander thickens like a soft cheese. The drained liquid is called whey, and you can use it in cooking or baking (but, again, if you overheat it, you will kill the good live cultures). You could also add whey to smoothies, or soak grains in it before cooking, or get creative and try your own ideas! The yogurt cheese can be spread on toast, or you could try subbing it for ricotta or cream cheese in other recipes (if you’re willing to kill the live cultures by cooking it).

This recipe works well for cow’s milk, and I would guess it might work for goat’s milk too. I may try it next with soy milk; my cursory research tells me that the simple dairy-yogurt method works with soy milk too.

I have tried this recipe with packaged almond milk, with poor results (it separated, but I used it for baking just as I would have used any other milk, and that worked fine. So at least no waste!). Making my own almond milk and then yogurt-izing it is a future project I want to try. I found a recipe for that here, which looks quite good. The blogger says it’s a bit sour, but I prefer sour yogurt to sweet, which encouraged me since other almond-milk yogurt recipes I’ve seen include adding a sweetener.

Strawberry-BananasCream

On a late winter day when the temperature reached 80 degrees Fahrenheit (last Saturday), I made this cool treat for my family and we enjoyed it on our shady front porch. Crazy.

The week before, I had bought a discounted bag of over-ripe bananas at the grocery store, peeled them, broken them in pieces (halves or thirds), put the pieces in ziploc bags, and put them in the freezer. We also had a bag of frozen strawberries. On our hot winter day, I combined a quart-bag of frozen bananas, the one-pound bag of frozen strawberries, and about a pint of runny, separated yogurt-ized almond milk (I had tried making yogurt with store-bought almond milk, but as my Internet research had suggested would probably happen, it failed).

Anyway, I threw all that in our high-performance blender, used the ice-crusher mode to break up the frozen fruit, then pureed it. I was planning for smoothies but got this sorbet-like consistency instead. And no one complained!

Now, this is an example of a “lopomo” compromise. The fruit had been stored in the freezer, the almond milk-yogurt was stored in the refrigerator, and I whizzed it all up in my blender. That’s three electric appliances used to make our treat (though the first two are always in use anyway).

But, since we made this at home, the packaging was (and could have been more) minimal. The ziploc for the bananas was reused, but the strawberries and the almond milk were store-bought, so they each had throwaway packaging involved. Maybe we’ll pick extra strawberries to freeze this summer, and experiment with making homemade almond milk.

Still, this is one healthy, delicious, affordable, easy-to-make treat you might want to try yourself!

Re-Fridged

In June of this year we installed a small refrigerator back into our kitchen. We lived for just about a year without a refrigerator, but we always had our chest freezer running in the garage, and for most of that time, we tried to keep things cold in a cooler we stocked with jugs of water we froze in the chest freezer.

We learned that if you want to keep food cold at a controlled temperature, refrigerators are really good appliances for that task! Our main problems with our alternative method included:

1 – More wear and tear – and electric usage – on our chest freezer. Freezing jugs of water meant we were opening the chest freezer at least once every couple days, both to retrieve a jug of frozen water and to add a jug of melted water to freeze again. This more frequent opening of the chest freezer meant that it needed defrosting sooner. Adding water to freeze every couple days meant the freezer needed to run more often to freeze the water. So between the higher amount of frost collecting on the sides and the routine addition of unfrozen water, the freezer was using more electricity to run.

2 – Uneven cooling in the cooler. The items closest to the water jugs stayed the coldest, while those further from the jugs didn’t always stay cold enough. And as the jugs melted, the temperature in the cooler warmed up.

3 – Our unheated back porch made a perfect walk-in refrigerator for a part of the fall and winter. But for most of the winter, food tended to freeze there. Again, we learned that climate control is a significant feature of refrigeration.

4 – Some produce – especially fresh greens – just don’t last long without refrigeration. They will last a day or two if you keep them in water as you would cut flowers, but especially this time of year when gardening and the farmer’s market are a distant memory, and fresh produce comes from the grocery store, a refrigerator is really helpful.

5 – Inconvenience. (Of course.) We are willing to trade some convenience for energy efficiency, but in this case, if we really wanted to keep some food cold but not frozen, it turned out that there really wasn’t any net gain in energy efficiency!

Since this photo was taken, we've removed the door and shelf for the upper freezer compartment, adding more room for refrigeration.

We definitely learned that we don’t need or even want a standard-sized refrigerator. We bought a 4.4 cu. ft. Frigidaire compact refrigerator, and it is more than enough space for our family of four – especially since we removed the panels for the freezer compartment and are using the entire box for refrigeration.

We studied our electric bills for the past couple years, and the addition of the refrigerator (which means, remember, we are opening our chest freezer and adding unfrozen food to it less often) hasn’t noticeably increased our electric usage. The bigger electricity difference we noticed was last year, when we gave the large but energy-efficient all-refrigerator we had been using to a hospitality house we work with. The hospitality house recycled their 1980s-era refrigerator, plugged in the new one we gave them, and their electricity usage dove noticeably.

So, my advice at the end of this experiment – if you want to keep your food cold, buy the smallest, most energy-efficient refrigerator you can find. Note that our 4.4 cu. ft. refrigerator actually doesn’t use much – if any – less electricity than the large highly efficient model we gave away last year. Energy efficiency is more noticeable in larger refrigerators than small ones. But we like having more space in the kitchen – and not losing and therefore wasting food in a large refrigerator.

I Say Dehydrate, You Say Water-Bath

photo by Nathan Bloom

It’s tomato time!

Tuesday evening I picked an ice-cream bucket and a cardboard flat’s worth of tomatoes from our community garden. Wednesday morning I washed and sliced and filled up the dehydrator with the red gems. Cherry tomatoes are great for dehydrating since they only need to be cut in half. For larger tomatoes, just slice as you would for sandwiches, and cut again in half if you like. After they are dehydrated, you can cut or break them into smaller pieces for storage.

I highly recommend the Excalibur dehydrator, though I haven’t tried anything else. But it lived up to the things I read about it when I was researching dehydrators (this is now my second harvest season using it). And definitely go for the 9-tray – dehydrating food takes a lot of space because you must spread out so many slices.

Making tomato sauce was Wednesday afternoon’s project. Summer in a jar! Water-bath canning is relatively easy and economical. I will give no directions here, as they abound on the Internet and at your library or bookstore. Also perhaps in the brain of your brother-in-law or grandmother or next-door neighbor!

This winter we will make some yummy pasta dinners with pesto I froze and tomatoes I dried, in a sauce with maybe some olive oil and wine. And we’ll be pulling down jars of tomato sauce for spaghetti, pizza, chili, tomato soup . . . but, that’s enough thinking about winter for now.

Green Schmeen

I came across the text of this radio commentary in a Reader’s Digest back issue recently. It’s good for us “liberal white greenies” to have a good laugh at ourselves from time to time. I thought this did the trick:

http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2010/11/26/mm-mexicans-were-the-original-frugalistas/

Cold-Brewed Drinks for Summer

For an easy, tasty, refreshing way to golopomo in the summer, cold-brew your drinks!

Today's cold-brewed tea blend - rooibos with lemon and herbs

Coffee – Mix ground coffee beans with water in a jar. I use roughly three tablespoons ground coffee in the bottom of a pint jar, then fill the jar with water. Stir the coffee and water together, put a lid on it, and let it sit at room temperature or in the fridge overnight. When ready to drink, strain the grounds out and pour your coffee over ice. You can add a little water if it’s too strong, or cream, or whatever. There’s a more official recipe here, but I wouldn’t follow their advice about mixing equal parts coffee concentrate and water. Too weak.

Tea/Tisane – This works the same way, and the combinations are endless! Fill a loose tea strainer with tea leaves as you would for brewing a pot of tea, but put the strainer in a lidded pitcher. Add herbs or fruit as desired. Fill the pitcher with water and cover with the lid. Let it sit for a few hours or overnight at room temperature or in the fridge, then pour over ice when ready to drink.

Mint is plentiful out my back door, so I’ve done both black tea with mint and green tea with mint. Today I used rooibos tea and added lemon wedges, and a couple sprigs each of pineapple sage and stevia which I had growing in pots. It is so refreshing! Not to mention sugar-free, cheap, easy, and free of packaging.

One fantastic thing about cold-brewing coffee or tea is that it is a very smooth brew, never bitter, even though you leave the strainer in overnight. I rarely sweeten either cold coffee or tea.

With both coffee and tea, you could make the process even simpler and use a French press. Enjoy your lopomo treat!

What if?

Keep being creative!

Here’s a great example of people using imagination and technology to reduce environmental impact:

Winter Bicycling

Nathan returning from work

We read this piece by Joe Soucheray in the St. Paul Pioneer Press today. It captures well why even in January we cheerfully bundle selves and children and use our legs and maybe the wheels of a bicycle or heavy-duty stroller, or the smooth bottom of a sled, for transportation around this Minnesota prairie town.

Especially when the car won’t start on a morning when it’s twenty-five degrees F below zero!

Humanature

Hey, I know what let’s do. Let’s bust up a false dichotomy. Ooh, I’ve got one – how about “human vs. nature”?

I’m thinking about birds and buffalo. Birds, most of us know, are quite resourceful nest builders. In their nests, one can find bits of plastic bags, pieces of shiny streamers, small sections of twine, and more human “trash” items. Birds seem to make no more distinction between “natural” and “human” than they would between “natural” and “bird.”

This summer our family visited Custer State Park in the Black Hills of South Dakota. One afternoon we and a host of other carfuls of humans spent a good half-hour driving about one mile along with a massive herd of buffalo making their way through a pass in the hills.

We saw babies nursing. We could have reached out and touched a buffalo many times, as they walked the road alongside us, crossed the road, stopped and stood pensively in the road. We saw a shirtless man in the midst of them all, peeing into a stream. (Yes, we really did.) That seemed to surprise us more than the buffalo. We spotted two bulls, and I noted aloud that we were pretty vulnerable if the buffalo decided to charge, stampede, avalanche . . . whatever buffalo do.

“They probably think the cars are totally normal,” Nathan reminded me, and I thought about how today’s mommas and bulls were yesterday’s babies, who had likely also walked the pass accompanied by carloads of camera-wielding tourists. The buffalo, like the birds, seemingly make no distinction between “human” and “nature.”

everything here is natural!

Only we humans live with the false notion that we and the scads of stuff we produce are separated from nature. We show our children three pictures – a squirrel, a flower, and a computer – and ask, “which one isn’t part of nature?” and teach them it’s the computer. We don’t teach them that the materials and fuels used to make and run the computer all came from the world around us, and that when we don’t want the computer anymore and “throw it away,” it will be buried under the ground where it will – very eventually – be broken down and spread into the soil, air, and water of  “nature.”

This false dichotomy, I think, has stalled us in our efforts towards a sustainable future. Though we may not phrase it this way, many of us have lived as if we must choose between “nature” and “human” and since we’ve gotten pretty comfy with mocha lattes and fast cars, we’ve tried to forget about future generations and just enjoy life before the ice caps melt.

But humans – and all our past, present and future material possessions – ARE natural. As much as we’ve risen above the creatures around us (though that’s debatable – is there any species more cruelly and creatively violent than ours?), we are cut from the same biological fabric. We depend on the same sun, water, soil, seasons as the rest of nature, and we and our stuff lie back down in that soil, decomposing into nature, just like everything else on our planet.

The items and processes we have created, rather than being separate from nature, are part of nature. They influence countless layers of the “natural” world. They are remaking “nature” as we know it.

How about, instead of insulating ourselves in a cushy dream world that is destroying our actual world, we use our large and complex brains to build systems that function sustainably, like the web of systems we already depend on? Nature has produced systems that make use of the waste products from other systems, so that there really is no “waste.” (A simple example is how the leaves a tree drops in the fall decompose into the soil to enrich the soil, from which the tree will draw nourishment as it grows – a “closed-loop” system with no unused “waste”. An example of how absurdly wasteful human-created systems can be is that industrial agriculture now uses ten calories of fossil-fueled energy to produce one calorie of food.)

This doesn’t necessarily mean we must junk the cars and toss out the computers (far from it – we should use well the items we already have produced, though maybe find better uses for them or recycle them). It does mean that we can no longer pretend to choose between “human” and “nature.” Instead, with as much information as we can gather, with a good sense of all the factors involved in whatever situation we each find ourselves in, we can try to make the best choice for humans – for nature – for us, our neighbors (of every species), and our planet.

a candid shot of my kitchen counter

For further thoughts and information about the integral connections between humans, our stuff, and our world, check out The Story of Stuff.