Green and Thrifty
A Christmas bouquet from a friend's garden. includes lovely chive and oregano flowers
Hello my lovelies, and welcome to another green and thrifty year. I'm hoping to be greener and thriftier here at Chez Blueday, but also wiser, kinder, more generous, less wasteful. Always aim high!
The main trouble with green-ness and thriftiness that I can see is that every so often I have the horrifying realisation that I am turning into my mother. The third drawer down, you know, the one with all the plastic wrap and baking paper and foil, has also become a depository for piles of saved brown paper bags, aluminium foil and a box of washed and reused ziploc bags. Under the sink is my growing collection of odd rubber gloves. Usually, the one that gets the hole in is the right one, so I have a number of surplus-to-requirements left gloves under the sink. Finally, this week the right one gave up the ghost, so I was able to triumphantly produce a perfectly good, slightly used left glove and save that new packet of gloves for another day. Yes, not only turning into my mother, but both my grannies as well.
I have tried SO HARD to use up leftovers during the Christmas season, and have succeeded pretty well. It is, of course, perhaps not so very difficult to use up leftover smoked salmon and double brie, but we have done our best. We have also used up boring veg in fried rice and soups, and made lots of creative salads. Tomorrow my job will be to make soup using up a number of saved broccoli stalks from the vegie crisper, all the remaining celery and a few carrots in a lovely minestrone. Into that will also be going the last left-over parmesan rind that I found in the fridge door the other day. I save them in a paper bag inside a ziploc bag, to stop them sweating and smelling respectively. A parmesan rind just makes a minestrone, gives it such a depth of flavour. Like the bay leaf, you take it out at the end of cooking and pop it in the compost. The last of the cavalo nero kale in the front jungle garden will make the minestrone even more authentic, healthy, and delightful for the children. After all, what child can resist kale?
One of the plans I have for the summer holidays is lots of cheap and free entertainment for the children. It started yesterday with a trip to the beach, and a walk to a completely darling lighthouse, white and dumpy with a red door, a red railing, and a sweet weathercock. I have always wanted to live in a lighthouse. Although it would be tricky to acquire enough round furniture.
I finally got around to planting my spring veg this week, tomatoes, zucchini, basil, lettuce. Better late than never. My 'bouquet buddy' also sent round a homegrown zucchini, which shamed me into planting some, and I sent her some lemons. My other thought is just to keep planting more citrus trees, and swapping citrus for veg instead..
From the garden this week we ate lemons, kale, warrigul greens, rocket, parsley, the last broad beans, and I harvested a splendid load of garlic, which perfumed The Man's shed for a couple of days until he objected. It sat in the laundry for a couple of days, making the whole house smell very Mediterranean, but is now back in the shed as The Man went away, and what he doesn't know won't bother him at all.
Do tell me about your green and thrifty projects for January, or for all of 2014. Any green and thrifty New Year's resolutions?
Comments
I wanted to live in a light house too. I was trying to find this blog I read of a couple who did the care taking of a lighthouse down your way. No luck so can't share it. I'd love it except we have no building or mechanical skills. Just want the peace and quiet! There's a tiny island in the middle of Sydney Harbour (Fort Denison) and the family who lived there when it was a lighthouse looked like they had a wonderful time.cthey grew their own food and the fig tree still fruits.
Now frugal and green? Well, instead of going out for lunch or high tea, a friend and I made fancy sandwiches and cut then into fingers. We both made two different types and shared. With fancy pants crockery, it was like going out for high tea. Oh! Yes! We use up all our leftovers too. Very little food waste here.
Very jealous of your garlic. So much of bought garlic is from China, and not very flavoursome.
@lucindasans I like your style doing a stay at home "coffee date"
More green/less wasteful goals: Make more of my own cleaning and beauty products. Grow more of our own food. The winter garden is looking a bit sad, due to an evil bunny getting into the brassicas, but the kale perseveres.
Am enjoying reading about your summer now that our temps have dropped to below freezing and the winter wind blows. The bitter cold won't last long, but it makes me long for spring.
xofrances
I am learning/making/doing one new thing every day this year. A lot easier than it sounds because life lessons are also featured in this parade and life lessons seem to follow me in great measure wherever I go. I discovered that there is a fantastic little nursery in the south of the state called Frog Hollow. My wonderful daughters want to take a day trip down to Hobart to buy up big on Korean ingredients that they can't get here and are willing to spring for the petrol to head down and back and we just so happen to be going down on the day that Frog Hollow has a stall at the Bream Creek Markets so we will be heading out 40km from Hobart to pick up some amazing new finds. They sell potato onions and real French Tarragon (that you have to grow from plant division, not seed) and a most interesting perennial tuber called Chinese artichokes that are grown for their flowers as well as their edible roots that apparently resemble and taste like water chestnuts. I will be raiding the moth eaten sock under the bed for that outing! ;)
We are working on finding a waterwise way to water the veggie garden and I stumbled on a really interesting system on Pinterest. Using large 20 litre food buckets (the kind that David gives away on a regular basis) mounted to poles at the end of each garden bed, you connect a series of dripper hoses (in our case, regular hose that you poke full of holes ;) ) to the end of the buckets and run it down the middle of your veggie gardens. When you want to water, you fill the buckets with water and gravity feeds the water down to the veggie garden below. Saves time, water and sanity! SCORE! And who said that Pinterest was a waste of time? ;)
Not much time to think about thrifty things at the moment as we are painting our deck in a vain attempt to stop nature from eating it. Love your gorgeous flowers and your citrus idea is a good one. I have yet to grow successful citrus here as the possums eat all of the leaves :(
Lucinda, your high tea sounds divine and fun. My last two birthday parties have been high-morning-tea with friends.
Tanya, this weather! It's insane. I don't think the plants quite know what to do..
An exacting life, I'm impressed with the walking, and home baking, so much yummier, as well as healthier:)
Frances, I would like to join you in making more cleaning products, and I would love to make my own moisturiser. I am picturing that evil bunny.. have you seen the movie Hoodwinked? 'Never trust a bunny..'
Fran, I am loving the posts with photos of your vegie garden, it is just amazing. And trust you to fill it full of arcane vegetables that nobody has ever heard of. Love that you push the envelope and go where no gardener has ever gone before.. feel free to pop over and take cuttings/seeds of any of my fairly boring food plants any time..
We didn't have many holiday leftovers to take care of, but we will be gone for a whole week later this month, so we are trying to eat down our perishables to nothing before we go. It is going to make for some interesting meal planning right before our departure.
My son loves kale, while my daughter won't touch it with a 10 foot pole. My son is unnaturally obsessed with a simple soup that I make with garlic, carrot, celery, rice, chicken broth, and kale. Obsessed. You would think it was chocolate the way he craves it.
Right now, I'm utilizing the lemons from my tree and lettuce from the garden. This year I'm going to try to make sure that I use every single bit of fruit and vegetable that I buy or harvest before it goes to rot. That might be hard with my 10,000 lemons, but my son used about 20 making lemonade yesterday. It's a start.
Wishing you many happy pre-holiday picnic meals.
Heather, I would be pretty excited about that soup too. And I hear you on the lemons. I love each and every one, and of course, use them for currency, but also have an entire section in my recipe folder purely devoted to The Lemon.
I too wash the ziplocks when they haven't held meat and I also save and reuse paper bags and more. :)
Bring on a thrifty 2014.
Lynda, looking forward to the lettuce bouquet. I have a friend staying at the moment, and I put an entirely edible posy on her bedside table (in case she needs a snack in the middle of the night) - calendula, lavender, violas and oregano flowers.
I'd love to know how your cleaner goes. I want to make a general cleaner next, and I certainly have enough lemons to give a citrus version a go.
The benefit of this is that 75% of leftovers are consumed by the end of Boxing Day, and all that's left by New Year's Day is biscuits and slices and that sort of thing. Win!
Anyway, the only green and thrifty shenanigans I got up to was a) making sure the wrapping paper made it into the recycling and b) converting 500g of pre chopped and slightly squishy strawberries into three jars of strawberry jam!
I was thinking of you today because I have finally cut back to just one caffeine laced drink a day. (I'm not brave enough to just quit all at once!) How are you getting on without caffeine and gluten? I hope your health has improved and you are feeling great for it :-)
and i'm glad i'm not the only one who keeps odd washing up gloves :-)
Not entirely gluten free, but reasonably so, and still caffeine free, but iron levels still going down:( still a mystery as to why..
e, fianlly back on the blogging train, looking forward to more of your yummy baking experiments and garden photos as well!
Just popping in with a tip for you on the glove department:
turn a left glove inside out and it wil magically become a right hand glove!
Good luck and thank you for your nice blog.
Rina