Some Reading on the Cheap

I have a lot more chores to do than on a traditional Sunday. Hubby is under the weather and can't get about like normal. There are heating bricks to be pressed from the recycled paper shreds, water to be drawn to flush the toilet for the day, bread baking for the next three days, laundry, meals, bill paying, vegetable picking, and some cleaning. Our little urban homestead takes work.

While the Hubster is relegated to bed, I thought I would find some books for him to read on his Kindle.
Here are some of the titles I found. All of them are free as I'm posting this. You never know how long the specials will last so always check the price status before 1Clicking them into your device. If you don't have a Kindle, you can download a free reading app on the kindle site or in your device's app store. Happy reading!

• The Quest For the Simple Life by William Dawson 
• Survival Guide for Beginners by Vitaly Pedchencko
• JeBouffe Home Canning Step-by-Step
• The American Frugal Housewife
• 21st Century Self-Reliance: Homesteader or Prepper?

Year Round Canning at Dinner Time

There was a time when I didn't can year round. With only the Super Hubs and me, we always have leftovers. He loves good food and I love cooking from scratch. While many people would see this as a problem and quickly declare, "It's not worth it to cook for two." I would counter that it is actually easier to can regularly with only us eating. We make a big batch and before it's even started to cool, fill pint canning jars with our anticipated overage of leftovers. The jars are in the pressure cooker before I even sit down to dinner.

Chicken is on the menu today. The whole chicken was cut up and cooked. After pulling out the meat for today's meal, The rest of the meat was removed from the bones and cut up, then placed in canning jars with hot water and a pinch of salt. Voila! Canned chicken with a shelf life that far exceeds refrigeration or freezing. Next the bones and skin are put back in the stock pot with some water and mirepoix. After this is brought to a boil and then simmered for several hours, we will have a supply of gelled chicken bone broth stock to cook with. Bone broth is fabulous for achy bones and weak knees but that is another post. Go google it if you are curious. After rendering the stock, we will employ the art of remouillage to do another boil and make chicken broth. By the time this chicken is done, we will have over a case of other healthy, shelf stable products that would have cost us far more than our single meal.

Okay, I'm guilty of asking friends to freeze chicken carcasses instead of throwing them out after the family dinner. So many people perceive the practice as time consuming or messy. It's not! Taking care of the rest of the chicken immediately, makes use of pots that are already out, a stovetop that is already hot and utensils that are already in play. My smaller pressure canner lives on my stove now since it is used a few times a week.

On the days when I don't want to or have time to cook, there is always something yummy on the shelf that just requires reheating. The chicken products are a great base to other dishes with rice or beans.

By the way, you guys probably know how much I adore the S.H.A.R.E. program. The Virginia Peninsula Foodbank oversees our local co-op. For $20 and 2 hours of volunteer work, I can get approximately $45 worth of food. The S.H.A.R.E. packages are always full of meats and produce that are great for meals with pressure canner meals later. Can't wait to see what is on the menu next week.

Well, the timer is about to go off and it's time to strain the bone broth.

Well, That's Crafty  

We just completed week one in the February #SpendZero Challenge. I wrote about it last week. You can find more info or join in at www.livingwellspendingless.com. For us, the challenge really isn't about not spending anything at all. It's more about making conscious choices about where we spend our hard-earned money and what this says about our priorities.
Over the past week, some things struck me.

1. It's easy to spend "just a little more."  It occurs to me that little add-on items really boost the bill. The appetizer, extra drink, chips, whatever...just boost the bill. I still went out to eat last week but limited myself to an appetizer and water. For me, that means visiting my beloved Plaza Azteca and ordering a side of refried beans and water. No cheese dip. No peppers, sour cream, soda or tea. Good friends ordered cheese dip and shared. So, do we really need all that food? Probably not. How much of it is habit? Probably, quite a bit. Might this approach save people more than money eating out? What about gym fees and special diets later? What about the toll on our health?

2. When did we start going to look for crafts? I'll be honest, I don't have time to craft (in the normal sense) these days. What I do have time to do is solve an immediate problem with a creative solution. My composting sign (above) made from a meat tray is a good example. I needed a way to direct the neighbors to which compost bin we were actively filling at the time. A bit of paint, a meat tray, and a ribbon from a Holiday package solved it. That's crafting. The best crafts arise from NEED. This week, I made household cleanser from vinegar and discarded citrus peels. Really simple. We normally clean with vinegar but citrus scented cleanser cuts the grease better and smells delish! When the coffers were full, I started making orange peel and honey marmalade by boiling orange peel in salt water and then adding honey. By the way, the honey is from left-over packets that came with tea over the last few months. Put it all in a jar and store in the fridge to use on meats or toast. It's fun. It doesn't cost me anything but time. It gives me a feeling of accomplishment.

3.When did we forget we had resources past our credit card? Friends help friends. It keeps us connected. It's fantastic that we can use a credit card and go online to solve any problem but should we use it as our first line of reaction? Probably not. Keeping items out of the landfill is good for the environment. Repairing is good for our wallet and those in our neighborhoods. It's hard to outsource repair to another country. There are worst things than owing a favor to a neighbor and few better than them owing you a favor. A favorite site is www.freecycle.org Just this week, I was able to find a part for a truck at work--for free. Sure, my boss would have opened his wallet and paid for the part (which is made overseas). Finding the part allows an employee to get more hours on the clock doing the install and get some training. It saves the fuel for shipping and the packing materials which would end up in the landfill. It allows us to keep equipment operating and reduces the chance that we would need to raise rates to clients because of expenses. You get the point. Sometimes the easy way robs us of so many benefits.  

Any challenge has a way of making us look at things in new ways. Someone else, somewhere, is thinking these same things. Someone has written an article or a book and has lectured on it. But until it's in our path, we don't see it the same way. If it were routine or easy, we wouldn't call it a challenge.  We started this challenge because we faced new uninsured medical expenses and needed to be sure we could cover them. Our safety net disappeared several years ago. There is a lot of uncertainty in life. We don't know if we will be able to cover them or not but it won't be because we didn't try. This challenge gives us a little bit of control in a wildly uncontrolable world.  These little seemingly insignificant choices are the very fibers that form the fabric that is our lives.   A friend said, "We are just three poor choices away from disaster."  We are hoping that with the guidance of others, we can stop at one or two.        

This February We are Doing the Spend Zero Challenge

I can hear you now. "Spend zero? How are you going to do that?" Well, we are doing the next best thing, taking the challenge to pare down our spending for nonessential expenses. It's actually pretty cool. We make the rules ahead of time. What is allowed, what isn't, and in what cases we can break the challenge. We have done similar things before, including the cold turkey, freeze your credit cards and lock yourself in the house plan. While surfing the net, I came across www.livingwellspendingless.com and was impressed. Not only is the plan mapped out but you can print out all the resources you will need. It's a great site with coupon strategies and nifty DIY stuff too. So, Here goes... We did a meal plan ahead of time and equipped with my 6 inch thick coupon binder, I headed off to the grocery to try and stock for an entire month while still cutting costs. This is a unique challenge since we will be eating in and brown bagging almost all of our meals. At the same time, We want to rotate our stockpile and use up the odds and ends in the pantry. After an hour in the store, I emerged with two buggies of goodies and a bill of $217.00. Sure hope I estimated and planned well because feeding two people all meals and snacks for a total of $7.75 per day seems awfully low. That's $3.88 per person, per day! I'll be checking in to share how the challenge is going and any insight or pointers we come up with. We have been seriously homesteading in an urban environment for the last 10 years with fantastic results. Dealing with the damage from 3 major storms, serious illness, and career changes have given us new resolve to make even better use of our resources. Along the way, we'd love to share the hows. I'm sure you have your own whys. Tomorrow, I will share some of the rules we set down for the month and our biggest concerns. The Super Hubster will be enjoying the first free entertainment of the month--the SuperBowl--and eating a special meal to kick off (couldn't help the pun) the challenge!