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Soundtrack for today's post:

Coming home - My little brother came home this week from Afghanistan.  It's good to have him home again.  This was his second deployment.  Last time he was in Iraq, and I was living in India for a good portion of that deployment, so it was nice to be in the states for this deployment.  I was able to send him dried fruits and baked goods and occasional summer sausages. Of course, he flew home to the other side of the state, so I wasn't able to make the  6 hour drive to see him land.  But, I was able to take down the star from the window.

Home year round - We're getting ready for another long winter. Window quilts are going up, plastic on the outside, the whole nine yards.  We've got the heater on, but just barely.  I think it's at like 69  right now. The basement is nice and cool and has a good selection of potatoes, onions and garlic.   With my free apple tree not producing this summer, I don't have any apples stored. But, I'm feeling like we're pretty prepared for winter.
 The summer bounty is all canned and pickled. Yay for being done with the canner for the year! lol I have 3 butternuts, and dozens of pumpkins from my winter squash vines.  Awesome!  The Swiss Chard, kohlrabi and the turnips are still unperturbed by the frosty mornings, so I'm continuing to harvest fresh food.

Home for the holidays - We'll have much loved guests for Yule this year, so we've already started planning for that.  What food we want to cook, what presents we want to make.  What we want for decorations. I've fallen behind on my sew along for the Tree Pants, but it's ok.  I'm still plugging along, and I fell behind to make Rowen the cutest costume.  I went to my local fabric store and bought 1 yard of red cotton, a quarter yard of white, and I free handed a big circle and a little 'm'.  I backed the red circles with some fleece so he stays warm enough after the sun goes down, plus it helps to keep the shape.  Rowen was so happy with his M&M costume, and he got lots of complements during it's inaugural run last weekend.   We all went out to the Trick or Treating at the local county park.  It was a great night and we had a blast.

My first star!

Anyway, here's a shot of the first star I completed.  I didn't like it 100%, so I went to the fabric store and bought some cream to mix in with the cream/flower print.  Those stars look awesome. I have several of those done, I'll try and snap a picture of those this weekend.  (While I'm frantically trying to catch up with the other sewers ... lol)
It's not to late to join in the sew along.  You can follow the action at the Happy Zombie blog. Or at Sew Mama Sew.

Home for one more - I'm finishing up my 10th week with the tadpole.  Basil is still a no go, but the nausea in general is slowly starting to decrease. We're moving on the eating-every-three-hours stage. :-D Dave took some pictures of me this last weekend, but we'll keep this post family friendly. :-D  You're welcome mother.  We'll snap some PG ones soon and I'll share some belly bump.
Here's a candid shot of the tadpole.

Winter Storage Update

We're a couple months into the Winter food storage experiment. Almost exactly halfway so I wanted to try and update on where things are at.
Things that have been nice: watching the price of onions, garlic, winter squash and potatoes climb and knowing that I don't need any, making quick meals out of cheap good supplies, watching the snow fall and knowing I don't need to go anywhere.

Meals I've been making out of our storage food
-Pasta and white sauce; this one doesn't get mentioned much, but pasta is one of those things I store a lot of. I'm trying to keep 2 months worth, (or about 25 pounds) of various types and shapes. I stock up when I find some well below the 1.20 average price per pound.
-Roasted root veggies; I've posted this one before and it's still great. With or without meat, it always gets rave reviews from the men-folk.
-Roasted Squash; just the basics, cut it in half, put it cut side down in some water and roast it for 40 minutes. I do this with acorn squash, then add butter and a little brown sugar and spices. Mmmm. Easy meal, literally 1 minute of prep, then I have 40 minutes to clean or play with Rowen, which ever seems most pressing. :-)
- Potato Soup, nothing more than stock, onions, potatoes, carrot, garlic and spices. I add in some condensed milk and cheese at the end, salt and pepper to taste. Reeeeally good.

State of the Storage
- Apples 24 left of the original 60.
- Onions 27 left, (15 pounds) of the original 80ish that I started with. (35ish pounds)
- Squashes, all 3 of the zucchinis are gone. 2 of the 6 Acorns are left , 1 of the 3 Butternuts is left. I think I still have 1 pie pumpkin left too. (I should eat that soon, it won't last much longer.) I also have that giant hubbard to do battle with. It'll probably deserve a blog post of it's own. :-D
- Carrots, as I suspected were very unhappy in my dry basement and didn't last even a couple of weeks. We did eat a dozen or so, but most became worm food.
- Garlic, 10 of the 24 remain.
- Sweet potatoes, 12 of the original 25 are left, plus my southern relatives sent us up another 20 little ones that are quite tasty.
- Red Potatoes, I think there's about 12 pounds left of the original 36 lbs. This is a guesstimate.
- Russets - 8 of the original 20 pounds remain, again an estimate.

So, with everything but sweet potatoes, I'm more than half-way through the stores. That's ok. I'll still get good information about our usage rates, and I'm learning good stuff about storage.
I'll post some of my thoughts on that as I get things organized in my own mind. I'm still crunching some numbers for the useage rates and estimated dates for "shortages." (In quotations, because I want to assure my readers, I can and will be going to the store to replenish our stocks when I run out. In past times those dates would be when shortages would start, leading into the traditionally lean time of early spring.)

Anybody else storing food this winter? How's it going?

Still here, not (quite) frozen

Greetings. January has flown by, and I've been neglecting my poor blog. It's bitterly cold here, with ice and snow keeping all of us in the house more often than not. So, not much going on, thus not many posts. Contributing to the problem is the camera running low on batteries. I had to go buy some more to get pictures taken for this post.

The house bound time has contributed to a couple of projects getting done . I got curtains made for the kitchen, and they look really cute. I kept them really really simple, as the window quilts I'm making for the living room are going slower than I'd like. (Slower than Dave would like too, "You know we'll be in a new house before you finish that.") :-D So simple was the motto, and I wanted to get something done to boost morale. Cheery blue and white curtains, using large blocks of fabric, they sewed up really quick and were a big hit. It was a one day project from the cutting to the final iron and hang. Love it.

Some pantry de-clutter has also happened lately. A busy holiday season, full of baking, had reduced our pantry to a cluttered mess and no one could find anything. So, I spent a few hours sorting out, combining remnants, tossing the expired and generally bring some order to the chaos. I find a large supply of canning jars makes a task like this a lot easier. Easy to label, easy to stack, plus they're air tight.

Freezing our buns off challenge has been going well. We are consistently keeping the thermostat set at 67 or 65 during the day and 63 at night. No one has any frost bite, and we've all been pretty healthy so far. (Dave and I are fighting colds right now, but that's the first illness any of us have had this winter.)

I'll have an update on the Winter Storage project soon.

Hunkering Down for Winter

I was chatting with a friend on Facebook last week and I mentioned we were, "hunkering down for winter." He replied with amazement that people still hunkered. "Sounds like something people did in the 1900's," he said.
Well, we live in a big house in Iowa, where winter temps can get down to -30 without windchill, and since we're in the far NW, winds coming in out of the Dakotas is something that has to be taken into consideration. We hunker. Probably in a lot of the same ways they did it in the early 1900's.
We put quilts over windows. Not every window gets a quilt, it's decided based on direction, age and room use. This is a picture of our North facing living room window, it got a quilt on it because it faces North, it's old and it's in the living room which is heavily used. (Tangent, that is my very first quilt, recently completed, 5 years in the making.)

We put plastic on the exterior of windows. Again, not all of them, but the old windows in heavily used rooms get the treatment. I won't post a picture, it's just plastic. :-D Our view out of the plastic-ed windows gets a little blurry, but with the increased darkness and icky weather, there's not much to look at anyway.

We seal off doors that we won't be using during winter. We have 4 exterior doors, (stoopid house) and we have sealed off two of them, nothing too fancy, just filled cracks and put a blanket at the bottom to stop drafts.

We also pay attention to which heater vents are open, and which are closed. Right now we have most of the heat directed into the living room and kitchen, with a little bit going to the bedrooms upstairs. I like cold bedrooms for sleeping, so I constantly lobby for less heat upstairs. :-D

Finally we don't aim for summer temps. It's winter out, it's cold, faking our bodies into thinking it's 80 degrees is not going to do any favors to our immune system. So, we keep the heater at 67 during the day and 63 at night. I'm hoping we can whittle that down to 65/60 by the end of winter, but it will depend on how well the heat stays where we want it.

Other things we do, (or might do in the future) include leaving the door to the oven open after baking, I figure why vent that heat out, just crack the door and let the oven warm your kitchen while it cools. I want to look into venting the dryer into the house too. Not in the basement, it won't do us any good down there, but venting it into the heating ducts could be nice. (It's an electric dryer.)

And of course, the last layer of defense is layers. We all try to wear heavy socks, and layers of clothing and we keep blankets out in the living room for tv/reading time. Warm drinks work wonders, as does a bit of exercise.

Beyond the basics of heating, we keep enough food in the house to get us through any amount of snow. Historically speaking this part of Iowa would shut down after enough snow fell. With the budget shortfalls we have looming over most cities, I don't think it's too Doomer to keep a supply of food in the house in case clearing the roads gets too expensive for a week or two.

Thus do we hunker down like our ancestors before us did. It worked then, it works now. It may be a little unfashionable, but I feel like the trade-off in heating bill savings is worth it. I say feel, because there's no way I'm going to NOT do this stuff for a year just so I can have a comparison. :-D My need for concrete proof is not that great. We do consistently come in below average for electricity and gas use. That's all the proof I need.