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Real Talk: The Latte Factor

There’s this cliché out there that if younger generations would just stop drinking lattes and eating avocado toast, they could put that money towards retirement and turn out just fine. It’s a sloppy judgmental blanket statement. But there’s a nugget of truth in there, and this is how that nugget looks in our situation.

We live very close to a Starbucks, and for years, I’ve gotten up in the morning, fed the cats, and then popped over to ‘bucks for a couple coffees for me and my husband. Not lattes, nothing fancy, just 2 Grande blonde roasts with milk. But that’s not insignificant over time, especially as the cost of coffee has risen post-COVID.

In fact, it’s a little over $5/day. EVERY day, of course, not just weekdays. And on the weekends? Sometimes we’ll spring for a little afternoon pick me up, and swing by there a second time for a tall coffee, or maybe this time it is a latte.

And then some Sundays, when we feel like really treating ourselves, we’ll go to Pressed Cafe instead and spend about $12 on a couple lattes (Pistachio for him, Lavender for me, and they are so SO good).

Weyelll, the math isn’t great on this, and we know it. We’re talking at good couple hundred dollars a month. Plus there’s that iterative price of gas I’m spending on these little coffee runs. And honestly, of late, the Starbucks hasn’t tasted all that good. It’s been somewhat inconsistent, and watery at times, or burnt at times.

So in March, we decided to go back to our French Press I bought to make really good Irish Coffees on a whim like 10 years ago. We’re buying our own whole beans and grinding them (thank goodness I held onto the burr grinder) to make exactly 2 fresh cups of coffee in the morning. So many upsides to this approach. First, we’re saving money, obviously. $10-15 in beans lasts a couple weeks for us. And not filling our trash with empty coffee cups. And the coffee grounds can go into the compost. And I think the coffee is actually better.

So , while I’m not a fan of the “latte factor” argument, I can’t deny that we’ve increased our savings by a solid $200/month by making this change, and have not deprived ourselves of morning coffee in the process.

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Meal Prep: Week 1

This isn’t my first meal prep rodeo. And probably not my last. But every time you do it, that’s a win. So let’s see how long this one lasts.

My situation is that I work from home, husband works in an office, and I have 2 teenage kids that do school lunches, yet still seem to come home hungry more often than not. So I need to cover packed lunch for my husband, dinners for 4, after school snacks, and ideally lunch for myself as well since I absolutely don’t have time to go pick up takeout for lunch (nor would I, given that we’re on the FIRE program).

A lot of starting this up again was inspired by the Ethan Chlebowski chicken meal prep YouTube vid. I really like his approach of aiming more for flexibility than a rigidly planned week, or one of mass-producing 12 servings of the same meal for the week. It’s sort of like the agile version of meal prep.

So I salted half a dozen chicken thighs and 3 thin-cut chicken breasts, with the idea of using them for Ethan’s Go-To Chicken Salad, Curry Chicken Salad sandwiches, and a Chicken Caesar Salad during this week.

I took the dry-brined chicken, coated it with mayo and about 1/3 a packet of blackened chicken seasoning powder, then fried the chicken thighs for 4-5 minutes per side in a dutch oven. The chicken breasts needed a slightly shorter amount of time so as not to overcook.

I have already found that trying to do ALL the week’s prep on a Sunday is a mistake, and that for me, it’s best to do a big chunk of it Sunday, but plan on a second round mid-week. So here’s how the week shook out:

Made Sunday

  • chicken thighs
  • 1 batch of curry chicken salad
  • Cut celery for lunches
  • Cut pineapple for snacks/lunches
  • A batch of rice – for whatever
  • A batch of granola
  • 2 yogurt parfaits for lunches

Made Tuesday

  • Chicken bone broth for hot pot. For some reason this was a total bust. I guess partly because I added a couple chicken boullion cubes, which imparted a totally artificial flavor and made the broth feel really unspecial. It was a bummer since bone broth takes hours.
  • Ground beef stroganoff. I had a seasoning packet for crockpot beef stroganoff, so I just used that with some ground beef and however much water and sour cream it looked like it needed. This provided dinner that night, plus 2 servings of leftovers that my husband and I had for lunch the next day.

Made Wednesday

  • Hamburger mac. Basically just browning hamburger with some onion and Worcestershire sauce, and adding it to a family sized Kraft mac ‘n cheese. The kids love this stuff.
  • Pho broth. Yeah, I was super annoyed about the hot pot fail earlier in the week, so I went and got the beef bones and such to make a Joshua Weissman Pho. I made the broth on Wednesday. It took a total of 4 hours, though for most of that time you’re totally ignoring it. I didn’t have coriander seeds or cardamom pods, so I used ground coriander and cardamom, but even so, it turned out DAMN GOOD.

Packed lunches

Here are a couple examples of the packed lunches I made during the week:

  • Yogurt parfait, 2 hard boiled eggs with seasoning, celery with peanut butter
  • Curry chicken sandwich, pineapple, nuts, baby carrots, mini granola bar
  • Curry chicken sandwich, grapes, celery, date bites, dark chocolate

Dinners

  • Monday: Cobb salad with the prepped chicken thighs
  • Tuesday: Beef stroganoff
  • Wednesday: Chicken Caesar Salads
  • Thursday: Pho
  • Friday: Takeout

Learnings

I didn’t make enough chicken thighs, those were SO GOOD. My daughter brought them to work for her dinner. I’ll definitely make twice as many next time.

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Meal Prepping: Gardening and FIRE, Manifested

On some random weekend recently, for an unremembered reason, we got FIREd up again. We knew about FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) already, but it was decided on that day that we would revisit doing FIRE.

Maybe it was my first weekend going to Market Basket instead of Hannaford and seeing how much lower the grocery bill actually was. I don’t remember. But anyway, we looked at all our subscriptions, canceled the ones we didn’t need, broke out the old French Press so we could stop going to Starbucks every morning, and turned to meal prepping.

Bear with me, this does involve gardening. Eventually. But it also involves the homesteading mindset, directly, and I’m all about the homesteading life Or maybe I’m more of a glamsteading person? I don’t want to slaughter my own pigs, and I don’t yet own chickens. So maybe that’s a thing, and there’s no shame in my glamsteading game!

So NOW I’m thinking this blog will be not just about gardening, but also about all the stuff I’m doing that’s super adjacent to gardening/homesteading, and that I think are really interesting, valuable, and worth sharing.

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The 2023 Garden Plan

It’s only February 17, but it’s 61 degrees F outside, and you can’t help but think about gardening. And unseasonable warmth aside, it really ISN’T that far off before I need to get the seed starting shelf assembled. It’s time to open up that garden plan I created back in October and see if I’m in the same place now as I was then.

I’ve tried a number of garden planner apps. Some of them are pretty good, but at the end of the day, all the cute icons and estimated start dates don’t hold a candle to good old Excel. So here we go:

2023 Garden Plan

The plan has more or less stayed the same. I’ve expanded the size of the garlic bed by about 2 feet. Because honestly garlic is so easy, and the powder I wind up with is so popular with my family and my friends, I’m considering expanding even more for 2024.

But back to this year. I’m cutting down on the number of different things I grow, and sticking with the things I know we’ll use. Like for example, I had a ton of success last year growing acorn squash. I roasted a couple, and put about a dozen in the garage. And then forgot about them. When I finally went back to check on them, most had rotten spots. I think maybe because we had a serious freeze, and then some really warm days, and back and forth like that. I think the garage just wasn’t consistent enough with its temperature to store squash. And since I’m pretty much the only one in the family that likes squash… it’s a huge waste of time, garden real estate, energy, and FOOD. It’s a waste of food. Which is not what we’re in this to do. So no more acorn squash this year.

I’m going in harder on green beans, since they’re more popular with the fam and also more versatile. We can steam them fresh, parboil and freeze for winter eating, pickle them, and sometimes even just eat them fresh.

Last year was a horrible year for tomatoes. Not just for me, but across the country. That said, I’m cutting back on the number of tomatoes I’m growing for 2023. I’m planning for 4-6 indeterminate plants. I may regret that because I LOVE making ketchup, and a batch of ketchup takes about 25 pounds of tomatoes. Guess we’ll see.

What else worked last year? Peppers for sure. I’m convinced I can process as many jalapenos and super-hots as the garden will give me. And the best thing about peppers is that they do very well in grow bags, so they don’t have to take up space in the raised beds. For super hots this year, I’m going with larger volumes of a couple varieties, so I have some vague idea what’s in the hot sauce I’ll ferment them into. I’ve got a white hot pepper I’m excited about, and probably just do a Carolina reaper in addition to that. I’m trying out Fish Peppers, which I’ll treat more or less like imposter jalapenos.

What IS going to take up more space there this year is cabbage. I grew ONE cabbage last year, a small variety of purple. At the end of the season I turned that into saurkraut, and it wound up being SO SO good… so the hoop bed is going to host cabbages this year. And pumpkins. Because having the insect netting over brassicas and squash helps keep the cabbage moths and vine borers away.

And then I’m trying Inca berries, which are bigger ground cherries. Just for fun. And raspberries because I know all too well how mind-blowing the taste of fresh raspberries is.

So, in a nutshell:

Removals:

  • Acorn and Butternut squash
  • Strawberries in the GreenStalk
  • Edamame
  • Broccoli
  • Cauliflower
  • Tomatoes (reduced)

Additions:

  • Inca Berries
  • Cabbage (expanded)

Expanded:

  • Garlic
  • Green Beans

Still Trying:

  • Beets
  • Carrots
  • Onions
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Making pepper powder

It’s winter and finally snowing. We’re still months away from seed starting season, but the onslaught of seed catalogs has all us gardeners dreaming of spring. Maybe I can’t get anything done outside, but I finally got around to making pepper powders from the peppers I dehydrated during last year’s garden season.

I grow pretty much all my peppers in grow bags and containers. They seem to just do better that way vs. in-ground. And 2022 was a good year for peppers! I lost count of the number of times I sat down to lunch in front of a fresh bowl of blistered shishitos. I’ve got over a gallon of hot peppers that have been fermenting since September. Future hot sauce!

But I had more peppers coming in than even the ferments could accommodate, so I deseeded and dehydrated them. Threw them in bags with desiccant packages to deal with later.

So here we are with smallish bags of dehydrated cayenne, jalapenos, red bell peppers, and one of miscellaneous super hots. I’ve got a little spice grinder I use for garlic powder, though now that I did this with it, it’s probably going to become my dedicated pepper grinder. I use a wire mesh strainer to sift out the chunks the grinder doesn’t get, dumping the chunks back in with the next batch.

Not all the chunks are ground up fine enough by the end of this, and I threw those bits in the freezer. We’ve started doing hot pot at home, and dropping those in will add a lot of flavor to the bone broth.

As I mention in the video, I’m eager to try the jalapeno powder on popcorn, but in the meantime it’s made a really nice seasoning on various foods. And the paprika is out of this world. I wasn’t going to grow bell peppers again this year, but I think I might just to make paprika.

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Slugtoberfest: beer traps for slugs

It’s getting to be mid-October here in zone 5b, and where our first average frost date is October 1, the garden is winding down. But the nice weather we’ve been having and the fact that there hasn’t been a frost yet means that a number of summer garden plants haven’t gotten the memo.

Know who else hasn’t gotten the memo? The slugs. This was a very bad year for slugs (or a very good year, if you are a slug). They went after my sweet peppers and the ground cherries, and there were several loitering around in my cabbage this week.

Even though things are mostly over, it occurred to me that it might be a good idea to get some more beer traps in place and cull the herd a bit. Because slugs and slug eggs overwinter just fine if they’re in a highly insulated environment that doesn’t go below freezing. Once I prep the beds for winter, that’s exactly what I’ll be creating for the benefit of the worms. So I’m officially declaring Slugtoberfest!

Day 1: Setting the Traps

Day 2: First Tally

In the morning, I went out to check the traps, and each has 6-12 slugs in it. That adds up, but it’s not as many as I expected. And they were all little ones. I know for a fact that there are really big slugs out there. Hoping for better on day 3.

Unfortunately, there were also a total of 5 dead wasps in the traps. Less unfortunate, were the pill bugs, an earwig or two, and one mosquito also taking beer bath dirt naps. I would have nothing against pill bugs and earwigs, except it’s rumored that they take out seedlings and I did have a lot of trouble with that this year, especially the okra seedlings in my in-ground bed.

Day 3

As of noon on day 3, all traps have at least a few slugs in them. The single trap in the side garden bed had 2 big guys in there, too.

I know I could put down Sluggo or some other slug poison, but I got through the entire year without using any pesticides and I’m not going to start now. Besides, Slugtoberfest is more fun to say than, “I put down slug poison.” Next year I’ll be trying copper strips and see how those work to deter the slugs, but if they’re already in the bed, I don’t see it helping much. I’ll probably just start using beer traps more often, because they work, and they don’t do much harm to other more beneficial garden critters.