HJ Waxing Moon

The Challenge: Northwest Edible Life has a yearly Eat from the Larder challenge in April. I only read about it on April 1, but it had been a half-assed goal of ours anyway so I jumped onboard. Their rules are a ZERO dollar food budget and no intentional stocking up ahead. Of course without any forewarning I couldn't possibly have intentionally stocked up ahead, but I'm not interested in a $0 grocery budget--just cleaning out some of our excess pantry storage and being a little creative. We're having an issue with our freezer & fridge that requires us to minimize our perishable food stock before fixing it, besides the excessive collection of condiments and pickles in there. Our Rules: No purchasing non-perishable food items.  Minimal purchase of perishable items.  No opening of new condiments if they can be avoided (until after the fridge is fixed, whether that's in two weeks or May).  Be creative!  Keep it simple, right? Bonus goals: Use ever...

A lot of my life is spent with sore muscles. Pain relievers only help so much, and depending on the pill & the person they can rip your digestive tract to shreds. It was Jillee's Pain Cream recipe that started this. I decided to go ahead and make my own version, to see how it works. Of course, I did a little research myself, and I wanted this cream to do a few different things. One thing I saw was about having some essential oils that cover the smell of the eucalyptus, so it's not so overpowering. Well, I'm here to tell you, that's hogwash--covering the scent also decreases the efficacy a bit. However, if the ones you add to it have purpose, it might be worth a little dilution. Without further ado, my pain lotion recipe. Ingredients: 1 three-ounce travel bottle of your preferred lotion. I use a coconut-oil-based lotion.  10 drops peppermint EO 10 drops eucalyptus EO 10 drops lavender EO 5 drops clary sage EO 3-5 drops cinnamon EO 5 drops rosemary EO ...

Once upon a time, I didn't have a cat. [Cut for the bug squick, click through for more:]

We have been using outdated checklists since we moved into our new place, just because everything has been so dysfunctional in our lives. I think there is a point at which routine & organizing is impossible, and then a point at which routine & organizing will help you get the rest of the way to where you want to be. There's definitely a tipping point, just as there is with menu planning. I think we've finally hit that tipping point. Finally today I've got our checklists updated and ready to be printed. One of the nice things about living in a place before updating the lists is that we can see what's been missed and make sure to get it on the list. So that's helpful. Bright side, right? I have to tell you though, don't skip getting the shopping list white board up on the wall as soon as you move in. Forgetting that rice vinegar was on the list for over a month was torture when I kept re-discovering for three whole weeks that I was out. Or the day we f...

The garden is really making progress! I'm pretty excited about it. One of these is kale, the other is mustard greens. These and the lettuce below, I'm not sure at what point I start thinning and eating micro/baby greens. It took a while, but the dill decided to come out to play! Plus a volunteer oregano there at the bottom left corner. Marigolds! I'm pretty excited for these. When I was planting I was really disappointed in my lack of nasturtiums this year, but I've got more pots now! Hanging ones even. I don't think we get warm enough or enough sunlight around here for tomatoes, so maybe I will use my hanging pots for nasturtiums. The scallions are so much happier outside in dirt with some sun than they were on my counter with no sun in a glass of water that we rarely remembered to change. However, they grow more slowly out here which makes me a little sad.  My lavender did decide to grow back! Maybe I will cut off the silly stump now. I ...

This is going to get a bit gross. Don't eat while reading this, and feel free to skip it. It's just scalp stuff though so it isn't TOO gross. I've had psoriasis & eczema since I was a kid. High school was horrid, because being a swimmer, the chlorine really irritated my skin. Frankly I didn't know anything else and I liked swimming enough that it didn't bother me too much, I just went through a lot of lotion. After high school, I still have kept the habit of having a bottle of lotion next to the bed for my hands and feet, and my worst spots are my upper arms. And my scalp. Oh, my scalp. My scalp has been the bane of my existence for as long as I can remember. No amount of dandruff shampoo has ever helped. Quite the opposite, it's always made my scalp worse. Since HS I've known that showering more than every 2-3 days irritates my skin horribly, but I can keep the patches on my arms down to splotchy-hive-looking things (not too scaly and gross) if ...

After we moved, my health took a sharp downward turn. There were a lot of changes that happened all at once, and so it was difficult to pinpoint any one particular cause. I thought most of it was just pushing myself too hard in the moving process, or maybe the fact that we had been in survival mode for so long and now I was allowed to give myself some more time for self-care. But that wasn't it. Shortly after we moved into our apartment, we noticed that a couple of our food items were freeze burned. We put it down to the old freezer which was not well-maintained, or some abuse during moving, and ignored it. Then we discovered brand-new food items were getting freezer burned. We checked to see if a vent was getting blocked, and checked for excess ice crystals. I checked the seal on the gasket on the door. We adjusted the temperature gauge with no change in temps or results. As time went on, I started noticing a metallic, almost anti-freeze flavor going on in our food. Everything b...

First off, I have been dealing with a bunch of fatigue and lack of creativity. For a while now. It's why I haven't posted about the plum project that we worked so hard on. I don't know if I'm just burned out on it or what, but I feel like I have nothing to say about it. Maybe I should just post the pictures without commentary.  I also promised a discussion about the Oat Dough I made, but then I discovered my oats had been rancid before I used them and the stuff tasted nasty. So I didn't even have a good product to discuss. I am really winning this week, huh? But one thing did go right! I have been meaning to make my own laundry soap for about two years now. Unfortunately, Mr. Moon has trouble gauging when he needs to add laundry soap to the shopping list, and waits until we are completely out on/right before laundry day and we don't have time for experiments like making laundry soap. Combine that with trouble finding the ingredients, and it's taken two...

I was toodling around on the internet one day and came across an offer for a free heirloom seeds catalog. Figured I might as well look through it, for entertainment value if nothing else. Well when it arrived and I finally had a chance to look through it, I discovered that the seed packets aren't significantly more expensive than buying GMO seeds from the local nurseries. And CERTAINLY less expensive than buying a garden's worth of starts!  I made myself a wish list in the catalog, starring everything I wanted. Then discovered that I could order online, so I went through and started adding things to my cart, paring down some of my selections as I went. $112!! Well that was a little more than I wanted to pay, and I'm still not sure how much space I'm even working with, so I pared it down a bit further. Removed some of the more exotic varieties, replaced some of them with slightly less expensive more familiar varieties, and tried to map out a bit in my head where I expe...

First let me start by saying: The lot this house was built on was the rock pit for the subdivision, and if you dig more than about 2 inches into the dirt, you get rocks. Solid rocks. There's not much dirt to speak of, and tilling the "earth" for planting is a pain in the--well, everything. Plus, when you add dirt, it just filters into the rocks further to fill them in. As you can imagine, the entire yard got VERY dry this past summer! So, raised beds are the way to go here. Combine this with the old lady with bionic joints, the younger lady (that'd be me) with old lady joints, and kneeling on the ground to plant a garden is simply out of the question. We need raised beds to be at least 18 inches tall (preferably closer to 2 ft) just to be able to reach them from a chair, which means extra wood and dirt expense to build the 4 ft x 48 ft raised garden we want in the side yard. I mean it's literally two to three times what we NEED, since we only NEED a raised bed t...

Do you ever find yourself doing one thing, and the next thing you know you've embarked on an adventure you hadn't entirely planned? That happened to be this week.  I decided that I'd like to make my own yogurt. It's not cheaper to make my own sour cream, but yogurt! That I can make for cheaper than I can buy. I also decided that with my recent difficulty buying reasonably priced sandwich bread without sugar that tastes good to me, I'd like to try making my own. So I made a sourdough starter (but that's a topic for a different day).  How did I make my yogurt? I didn't like the fussiness and on-my-feet time required with some of the recipes I found for homemade yogurt. So I added "crockpot" to my recipe search, and right on top was a link to one of my favorite blogs. Oh wait, you mean the one I was reading a week ago when I decided I wanted to make my own yogurt? Oops. Thanks Google for the reminder! So I started by putting my milk in...

Regardless of your opinion on the state of our food systems, having options and making informed decisions is always good in my world. Years ago I started questioning every bite of food I put in my mouth, in some very specific ways: notably, with the goal of eliminating sugar and reducing carbs. Over the years my vision has changed a bit. New information about artificial sweeteners and insulin-reaction was released, I became a certified nutritionist and learned to cook even more, I was having trouble sticking to my choices without becoming a hermit, and I found myself questioning a lot of my decisions. I really couldn't understand how using a chemical that is known to cause cancer and obesity is somehow better than a potato, a whole food grown in the ground and eaten with skin intact for maximum nutrition. So now, I am trying to define my food values. A lot of this relates back to the hierarchy of food needs , though I'm not ready to prioritize them. In no particular order,...

I previously discussed, without pictures, the food storage situation at our house. I didn't have pictures then for a lot of reasons, one of which being that I've never been much of a shutter bug, as evidenced by the fact that I forget a lot of the "Before" pictures for some of these projects. Also, it's one thing to show the before pictures of a shed in disarray, most people with a shed are probably in the same boat. But I don't want to shame people publicly for being behind on major household projects, especially when there's no real "fault" to be thrown around. This is why we're here. But! That won't stop me from bragging on all the awesomeness we've accomplished! These shelves were just full, stacks had toppled over, things were stacked in front of other things so we had no idea what we had, and I'll just skate right on past the details of the mouse infestation issue which has been taken care of, thank goodness. Of cours...

When I was a kid, I did a science experiment about growing plants. What I found is that you can take away dirt and light, but plants need water to survive. Simple, right? Not so much. 20 years later, my parents still have that hanging basket of ivy plants that we stuck together after the experiment was over. Even now, you can still tell which plants spent their time lacking soil, or light, or worse yet both. They are a little smaller, a little spindlier, a little yellower. The leaves are closer together on the one that was lacking both light and dirt. After I posted about my scallions going slimy and shooting off their root bits, I was ruminating about that experiment. I owe a thank you to so many people for helping me learn as much about science as I have--and especially teaching me HOW to learn about science--but my mom is the one who stands out the most. We haven't always been on the same page, but she was awesome at helping to talk me through figuring out doing experiments wi...

As you may recall, I've been growing scallions in a vase in my kitchen. A few times, I've had to take a couple minutes and clean out the vase, soaking the rocks in vinegar water, and pulling soggy outer layers of onions off the stalks. I could probably avoid doing this as often if I remembered to change the water more frequently... Then one day I went to clean out the vase and found this: A bunch of these little root structures looking like they'd broken off the bottom of the stalks, but when I sorted through, each stalk still had roots at the bottom! Though you may be able to see here, some stalks had brighter-white, new roots. Exactly as many had new roots as I had stalk-less root structures, in fact. I have no idea what this means. But the experiment continues!

I saw this around somewhere and had to try it. The idea is that you can put the white-ends of scallions in water and they will grow, and that you can just keep cutting them off and letting them regrow indefinitely. Last week sometime I took all the white ends of some scallions and put them in water. A few days later, I added some other scallions I'd used. Kept the water changed every few days, used some as needed. This is the result! It seems like it takes about 4 days to grow from nubbins to a full, useable stalk. I'm considering getting another bunch of stems to use and make starts, because what I have here I use most or all of at once and then have to wait. I'd like to have at least a couple different batches going so that I always have some available to use. *Tip: Cut them all the way down into the white part of the onion, past any spots where they split off. Otherwise they seem to grow slower and not as sturdily, the tips get brown, and you end up with some spot...

All my life, I have struggled with planners, calendars, hand-held organization devices, computers, smartphones... All in the name of Getting Organized. It usually lasts about 3 months. Part of the struggle of course is that I will start a system and then circumstances will change. When I was scheduled so tightly that I needed to remind myself when to eat and sleep, a planner with multiple lines for every 15 minutes of the day was essential, but sharing it in that kind of detail with others wasn't as critical. When organizing a household of computer-users who had smartphone access, Google Calendar worked wonders. The hardest thing for me to learn is that no system will ever do everything I want it to. I have to pick what's most important to me. Is it having everyone on the same page instantly? Is it having information synced to multiple locations without me re-writing things? Does it need to be color-coded? How far out do I need to be able to see? How much do I care about scribb...