Avivah Werner

Category: Intentional Spending

  • Weekly menu plan

    Today ds10 asked me what we were having for lunch, and I suggested to that he start writing some ideas of what he’d like down for the week.  He ended up getting a call from a friend and going out with him, but dd13 decided to put her ideas down instead.  I asked her to make it slanted more towards non-meat meals since our camping trip was so high on the meat proteins (used 12 pounds of hamburgers, 5.5 lb beef hotdogs, and a couple of pounds of canned ground meat for chili – for three dinners).  After writing it all out, she told me now she appreciates the effort it takes for me to do it every week!  Here is what she decided on:

    Shabbos – dinner – chicken breasts in coconut curry sauce; roasted root vegetables, rice, gravy, salad, pecan power bars, apples; lunch- meatballs, sweet potato pudding, marinated mushrooms, Japanese radish, sweet and sour carrots, fresh salad, hot cherry peppers, pear chutney, watermelon, pecan power bars

    Sunday – b – oats and milk; l – apples and peanut butter; d – chicken coconut curry, rice, pickled veggies

    Monday – b – banana bread; l – peanut butter popcorn; d – split pea soup, cornbread

    Tues – b- polenta; l  – leftover split pea soup; d – pizza

    Wed – b – Perfect pancakes (flour soaked overnight – not indicated in recipe); l – sweet potato fries, ricotta cheese; d – chicken noodle soup

    Thurs – b- Amish oatmeal; l -to be determined; d – bean burritoes

    The breakfasts will be supplemented with fruit.  Dinners and lunches are supplemented with vegetables – we’ve used a lot of our home grown veggies in the last weeks.   Almost all of the squash plants were hit by powdery mildew and are dying now, but we got a lot of nice winter squash before that hit that I’m putting in storage – mostly butternut squash, since that’s what we planted the most of, but we also have acorn squash and a couple of pumpkins.  So far our tomato plants are still doing well, despite the blight that has hit a huge number of gardeners across the country.

    I really would like to put in our fall/winter garden right away, but haven’t yet done it because I don’t have compost to add to the soil.  Last Shabbos we had an organic landscaper and his family for Shabbos lunch, and he told me to speak to him since he sometimes comes across stuff that would be good for boosting soil quality for free that he’d be happy to pass on to me.  If I can get a truckload of stuff this week (not likely, but you never know!), then I’ll try to get the cold weather seeds in.  I specifically ordered a bunch of seeds that can flourish in the winter in my part of the country, mostly green leafy vegetables, to supplement our meals even when the summer is over.  I’ve never done that before and would love to see how it works out.  But it’s not worth trying to grow in clay soil that hasn’t been amended.

    I also need to start saving seeds for the coming season – the autumn is already almost here!  That’s something I’ve never done before, but whatever seeds I can save from my heirlooms will save me the cost of needing to buy those seeds in the spring.

    I’m planning to go fruit picking with the kids this week, pears and maybe figs, if the person I was in touch with a month ago still has them (they were unripe when we went).  Naturally, whatever we pick will end up in large part being eaten fresh this week!

    Avivah

  • A delay in plans

    Surprise!  We didn’t end up leaving for our camping trip today after all!  After hours of packing, we finally finished loading up the van.  Dh wanted to do a couple of errands on the way to the campgrounds, but since two littles were sleeping, I suggested he do them first so we wouldn’t have to wake them up and then start our trip by sitting and waiting in the van while he took care of things.  He agreed that would be better, and after finishing his first errand, the van overheated  – steam billowing out – so he stopped at the mechanic to see about getting it taken care of. 

    The water pump broke, and when he got a diagnostic done, we found out the radiator cracked and the thermostat needed to be replaced, too. $1400.  When he got home he immediately apologized to me since I told him about a week ago that the van started making a really terrible noise and he kind of brushed it off.  I didn’t think an apology was necessary since I didn’t have any negative feeling about him not giving much weight to my comments about the van.  Unfortunately, the noise I heard was the warning about the water pump, and because we didn’t get it looked at right away, the water pump broke, causing the radiator to overheat and crack. 

    But – isn’t it wonderful that it happened when he was close to home?  And only had one child with him who was old enough to wait patiently through it all?  Imagine what the towing fees would have been like if it happened an hour away!  I’m sorry that this happened, but it could have been so much worse. 

    He took it to one mechanic, who said it will be two days until he can fix it, and then to another, who said he can do it sometime tomorrow.  Meanwhile, our van is totally loaded for our camping trip and the kids are wanting to know when we’re going to finally get on the road!  While dh was still having the diagnostic done, I called a local mechanic who does house calls – who came tonight and is doing the work for $650 instead of $1400.  Not only did he finish the repairs tonight, but discovered something else that he’ll come back first thing in the morning to replace.  That’s another noise that I keep telling dh is concerning me (that started a year ago immediately after the work a different mechanic did -$2600 – no we won’t be going back to him!), that he keeps telling me isn’t important.  To be clear, dh wasn’t blowing me off.  We took the van to two different mechanics about four weeks ago when we had the difficulty with the starter not turning over, and asked about that noise and both told him it was nothing that would affect the running of the vehicle.  I’m so glad that this mechanic realized what the problem was, so we can finally get it taken care of.  It bothers me when I know something is wrong and the ‘experts’ tell me it’s nothing.  That will be another $150.  Oh, and it seems whatever is causing this noise is what led to the water pump problem, so had we been able to get that fixed when we were first asking about it, we would have saved ourselves the need for that repair.  But gam zu l’tova – this too is for the best.  I think to myself at times like this about how coins are shaped like a wheel, sometimes rolling towards you and sometimes rolling away. 

    I feel so happy to have found this mechanic!  His prices are much lower because he doesn’t have a shop – he has a well equipped van and comes to you.  And not only is that extremely convenient, he’s very nice, and he’s also very competent!  Yay!  A good mechanic is a good find.  He’s coming at 8 am and as soon as he finishes (should take about an hour), we plan to leave for the campgrounds immediately.  We’ll be staying until Friday mid morning instead of Thursday afternoon, so that we’ll still have three days and three nights.  It will make Shabbos preparations tight, but we’ll be keeping Shabbos preparations simple and will have the menu plan decided on before we get home so we can jump into gear as soon as we jump out of the van!

    I wasn’t sure I’d be able to make this switch, since several weeks ago I had committed to pick up someone from a medical procedure she’s having done this Friday morning.  My mother has agreed to pick her up so that we can stay another day, in addition to taking care of our cat and mail while we’re gone.  I appreciate her help so much!

    So today’s frugal tip is, when you first notice something crack, rip, or make an unusual sound, get it taken care of right away.  It’s so much better (and cheaper) to deal with it when it’s a small problem!  And if you do your best and it doesn’t work out, remember that you’re not the one in charge, H-shem is, and He runs things better than us all. 🙂

    Avivah

  • Weekly menu plan

    First of all, I said last week that I wanted to post the cost of each meal last week at the end of the week, and because we were didn’t adhere to our menu plan for dinners, I’m not going to do it.  I’m sorry about that – it would have been fun!  Between the kids noshing veggies from the garden every day and dd accidentally making a huge recipe of lentil rice mushroom loaf (that lasted about four meals instead of two), we didn’t need to cook as much as usual.  Which is just as well, because as it is people sometimes think I’m lying about how much we spend a month and our costs last week were probably 50% less than average and I wouldn’t want to tempt some others to disbelieve me.  🙂

    We’ll be leaving on our annual camping trip after lunch today and will be gone the next few days.  In preparation for our trip, last night I made several pickled recipes to use up the vegetables in the fridge so they wouldn’t go bad in our absence.  I made 3 quarts of tomato relish (we’ll take one jar with us), 3 quarts of garlic pickles (also taking one of these), and 5 quarts of zucchini pickles.

    We didn’t decide where we’d be going until 10 pm Sunday night – the fallback option was to go the place we went last year but as much as we enjoyed it there, everyone voted to try something new this year.  The size of our family complicates finding campgrounds that can easily accomodate us, since generally they won’t let so many people into one campsite, regardless of how large the site is.  We’ll have to get two campsites at the new place we’ll be trying out tomorrow.
    It’s on a peninsula off the Chesapeake Bay, an area we haven’t been to before, and we’re all looking forward to exploring there .

    This week’s menu plan is looser than usual because of the camping trip.  The kids do most of the packing; we loosely plan breakfasts and dinners and bring along a bunch of other food to fill in the gaps.  But I’ll share what it is so far with you:

    Shabbos – dinner – challah, baked ziti, chicken cutlets, yellow squash curry, broccoli/zucchini quiche, apples and watermelon; lunch- baked ziti, roasted chicken salad, potato salad, sweet potato pie, broccoli/zucchini quiche, fresh salad, sweet and sour carrots, pickled Japanese radish, zucchini relish, pesto, beet salad, watermelon, kokosh cake ring

    Sunday – brunch – vegetable omelets, yogurt; dinner – Shabbos leftovers (this is good since we’re leaving the fridge pretty empty while we’re gone)

    Monday – b – not yet sure; l – chili

    Camping trip:

    • breakfasts – instant grits, quick oats, eggs
    • lunches – sandwiches – tuna salad, peanut butter, cheese
    • dinners – eggplant parmesan; beef hot dogs, baked potatoes; hamburgers, yams, tomato relish, pickles
    • snacks – watermelon, smores

    The kids have packed also canned vegetables like corn and peas, dried fruits, and some other miscellaneous things.  In addition to the watermelon we’ll take apples and maybe some pears.  We can also take jars of cooked ground beef and beans that I’ve canned to make a quick dinner with, but the kids aren’t sure they want to take glass jars since my ds who will be 2 next week is very…..active. 🙂 We usually take a lot of potatoes and yams so there’s enough to supplement several meals, serving them in different ways.  If there’s time before we leave, we may bake some biscuits or a couple of loaves of Cuban bread to take with us.

    I’ll try to post a recipe or two from those requested last week before we leave.  Have a wonderful week!

    Avivah

  • Kids who are picky eaters

    >>You make a lot of interesting and exotic foods. Do your kids eat all of it, or are they picky eaters? What is your policy in terms of if kids don’t like a certain food?  Or if they’re not picky eaters, how do you ensure that?<<

    Yes, my kids eat what I make.  I don’t see any reason they shouldn’t!  I try to make foods that my kids will enjoy, and they have the ability to enjoy a wide variety of foods, so that makes it easier to make foods they like!  None of them are picky eaters at all and it’s not because they were born with a genetic tendency to eat what is put on the table. 🙂

    The reason they have the ability to enjoy so many foods is because they’ve been given the opportunity on a regular basis without any emotional overtones attached to their eating habits.  I remember years ago a good friend used to always tell me how picky her children were, and how ‘lucky’ I was that my kids weren’t picky.  One day she was at our house and since it was getting late for our young children, I served an early dinner for all of them.  It was egg pancakes, something my kids always enjoyed and her ‘picky’ four or five year old daughter was gobbling it up.  My friend started exclaiming to me, with her daughter sitting right there, “I can’t believe she’s eating this!  She never eats anything.  She’s so picky, I can’t get her to eat anything.  I can’t believe it!”  And right on cue, her daughter suddenly stopped eating and told her mother she didn’t like it.  It was so obvious that the problem wasn’t the child or the way she ate, but her mother paying too much attention to it; the child got a lot of attention as well as a feeling of power because of her ‘pickiness’.

    Here’s my general approach to food: Don’t make a big deal of it and neither will they.  Food is just food.  Kids learn very quickly when the mother has a lot of emotion invested in their eating habits.  I serve the food, and if they’re hungry, they’ll eat.  I rarely insist on them eating if they don’t feel like it.  (They do have to sit at the table with everyone, whether they’re choosing to eat or not, since mealtime isn’t about just the food; it’s a time for family togetherness and connection.)  If they don’t want what I’m serving (and don’t think that they absolutely love every single dish I make – nope!), that’s fine with me.  We have three meals a day and if they’re not hungry right at that moment, then they can eat when the next meal comes along.  I don’t make a second dinner for someone who doesn’t want what everyone else is having, and they don’t have the alternative of making themselves a sandwich or eating a bowl of cereal.  What I serve is what the choice is.

    Does that sound harsh? I don’t think it is. It’s a simple biological reality – the body gives a person signals as to when to eat.  Hunger is the best spice.  🙂  If they don’t feel like eating, I understand that’s not what their body needs right then.  I don’t like every food, and I don’t expect them to. I don’t put food on my children’s plates except when they’re small – we put out serving bowls in the center of the table and everyone takes as much or as little as they want.  I’ve sometimes suggested that they take just a small amount of something new that they’re not sure they’ll like.  I don’t insist they finish everything on their plates, but I also want them to learn not to be wasteful, so I don’t want them to heap their plates full and then end up throwing most of it away.

    I categorized this under frugal strategies because the willingness to eat a wide variety of foods means you can utilize whatever ingredients are affordable at that time, without worrying that someone will turn up their nose at it.  I so often heard people say they could never cook like I do because their families are so picky that they wouldn’t eat beans, or they have to have meat every night.  Picky children weren’t created in a vacuum and it’s a situation that can be changed.

    Avivah

  • Reminder – start buying for the holidays!

    Hopefully all of you frugal mamas out there have been taking my advice and buying the deals in advance!  If you have, that’s great!  But sometimes it’s easy for the holidays to sometimes be upon us before we realize it, so I thought I’d remind everyone that there’s just a few weeks until Rosh Hashana!  Remember, now’s the time to get what you need as far as meat and grape juice from Rosh Hashana through Sukkos, since generally the closer you get, the more expensive the prices are.

     Since last month I did my monthly shopping at the end of the month instead of the beginning, that effectively means that I have the bulk of this month’s budget to use for yom tov.  In advance I mentally budgeted a chunk of money this month for grape juice; I try to buy six months of grape juice at a time since I’ve noticed the sales are usually a month before Rosh Hashana and a month before Pesach/Passover.  Last week I stocked up on grape juice when it was 2.99 for a 64 oz bottle.  Well, since I only got 30 bottles I can’t say I exactly stocked up, but they didn’t have any closed cases and it was a pain in the neck to individually load so many bottles, so I stopped at thirty and told myself I’d send dh to get more.  Which of course I didn’t because I rarely ask him to go food shopping and didn’t do this time, either. 🙂  But it will hold us for a while and I’m hoping that a different supermarket will run a grape juice sale that will allow me to fill in the gap so I don’t (gasp) have to pay full price for even one bottle in the course of the year.

    I also bought meat for the holidays.  I buy very little meat and don’t find expensive cuts necessary – we like chicken and ground beef – but since I stocked up on staples at the end of last month, it leaves me with the bulk of the budgeted funds to use on other things.  So I splurged and got four roasts (2 were 5.49 lb, 2 were 5.99 lb), four family packs of ground beef (3.49), and four family packs of chicken cutlets (3.79 lb).  It will add some nice variety to all the meals.

    I also bought a couple six pound boxes of ground beef patties and beef hotdogs (each 2.49 lb) for our camping trip next week.  When I got the beef patties, it was just because it was such a great price, but when I got home I realized it was very convenient for our trip!  There are some staple foods that we always take on our yearly camping trips – one dinner is always hot dogs, one is always hamburgers.  Chicken is usually the third night, and we have to have smores at least one night (still have to buy the marshmallows, got the chocolate and graham crackers already). 

    So all of the above has been half of my monthly budget, but the most expensive foods (meat/chicken) are stocked up a lot for yom tov and I’ll only need to buy a case of chicken to round it all out.  That will leave an ample amount left for the other things I’ll need.  Hope you’re all filling your freezers with your local bargains!  (I’d love  to hear about your great deals!)

    Avivah

  • Free plants for the garden

    At the end of last week, I called someone who was offering gardening supplies for free on CL.  After a short conversation, we both agreed that none of what she had was what I needed.  Then she mentioned she had a lot of perennials that I was welcome to since she’s moving away, and told me to call her back in the beginning of this week when things quieted down.  So I did!

    Today I went over with a couple of the kids, and we got a bunch of nice plants -free -to add to the garden.  The woman herself was so nice – you could tell she loves gardening and said she was glad to give her plants to people who would enjoy them. We got a lot of strawberry plants – we got home when it was dark so we haven’t transplanted them yet.  Anyway, I’ll count how many we have when we transplant them, but it’s a lot.  I also got lemon balm (smells amazing! and also good for tea), mint (I think it’s spearmint, but not sure – my mint in a pot is alive but hasn’t thrived this year – also good for tea and upset stomachs), St. John’s wort (chosen because I prefer plants that are dual purpose, and this is medicinal), and bee balm (I don’t know if it has a medicinal value or not, but it attracts bees and butterflies, which are beneficial to the garden).  There were many other plants I could have taken but I’m not interested in flowers that only look pretty.

    In addition to that, I got a nice sized agave cactus/aloe plant, a few pots of columbine, and a huge amount of scarlet cockscomb.  I got these just because they were so pretty and thought they’d look nice in the yard, and put them in front of the front porch.  We had three blueberry bushes there, but I had ds10 move them to a different part of the yard a  week and a half ago (the area I’ve named ‘the orchard’ because of my plans for it – a little presumptuous for a small side yard, but the kids like the sound of it! :)).  I was planning to make a small raised garden bed in front and fill it with ornamental edible greens, but the space is now taken by ornamental non edible cockscomb instead.  I planted most of the cockscomb after I got home, thinking that it was easier to plant them in the coolness of the evening than do it in the heat tomorrow.  It was a lot of work, and they’re such beautiful plants -I hope they’ll transplant successfully. 

    But I still have everything else to plant tomorrow morning!  When we took apart the platform deck to replace it with a brick patio, I saved the wood.  When we built that deck, I got all of the supporting boards free from someone who had taken his deck apart, and we used a high quality plywood for the top.  With the boards, we’ve so far built three new raised beds (each 9′ x 3′ 2″), and hopefully will make a fourth in the next day or two (I need to buy just one more board – I have one the right length, but it’s a little narrower than the others and I’d like them all to be identical and uniform).  I have more plans for repurposing the plywood – any guesses?? 🙂  But we have to finish this patio/garden work before starting another project.  Those four beds are going in my backyard, right where the mountain of dirt from digging the patio is, near where my first raised beds were built last summer. It’s fun to keep finding more and more way to fit more in – my ds16 was commenting that it seems strange, but even though our yard has so much more in it, it feels bigger now. 

    It’s been a lot of work to fill the new raised beds with that dirt, since the mountain was in the way of being able to put the empty boxes in.  But three raised beds are full now.  I was planning to get composted manure to add to the soil in the new beds to boost the soil strength, but the person I got some from a few months ago said the new batch isn’t yet composted and to call him back in a month.  Of course I could go buy compost but that’s not going to happen. 🙂  We compost all of our kitchen scraps, sometimes putting them in the compost tumbler, but in the summer, we’ve been keeping it very simple.  We either bury it deep in an empty part of a raised bed or pile it on top of the area surrounding the garden plants.  In the latter case, what I did was cover the soil with a flattened cardboard box to act as a mulch, put the scraps on top, and take a couple of shovels of dirt from the mountain to cover it.  That’s pretty much my daily way to do it now that the weather is so warm.  I’m hoping that once we fill all the new raised beds, we can add the rest of the dirt to the soil of the lasagna beds in back.  Right now it’s a little challenging since the plants are in the way, though.  Once we can do that, they’ll be higher, more like raised beds, and we won’t have to make yet another trip to the dump to get rid of all the dirt!

    Avivah

  • Cooling house without air conditioning

    This past week we’ve had a heat wave, but until now none of us have felt too hot in the house, even without a/c.  Last summer we took out our air conditioning window units, and didn’t replace them with anything.  I had wanted to do it for a couple of years but it seemed foolish to take out something of value and not replace it with something better. 

    I preferred not to use the units for cost reasons, but also because I didn’t find them very effective.  The area right next to them was too cold, but the area across the room was too warm.  When I opened the windows to take advantage of the natural breeze, the units blocked any cross breeze that we might have been able to enjoy.  opened the windows.  So finally I took the leap and consigned them all to the scrap metal pile for recycling. 

    It was a very good decision!  Our house was much more comfortable this summer and last than the preceding summers without them!  A couple of tips we’ve found helpful in staying cool without air conditioning are:

    – open windows opposite one another so that you’ll get a cross breeze

    – close the blinds on the side of the house that gets southern exposure

    – we  replaced the top half of the back storm door with screening, and now leave that door locked but open all day long.  Since this door is an exit from the kitchen to outside, it helps a lot of cooking heat be moved through.

    – in the kids rooms, they have window fans.  We’ve set them up so that they are positioned in two rooms opposite one another; one is set to exhaust hot air, and one to bring cool air in.  When we did this, it made a very noticeable difference in temperature on our second floor – it used to feel hotter as we went up the stairs, but now it actually feels cooler when we get to the landing on that floor.  For the third bedroom (the smallest), the ceiling fan is very helpful.  Our next step will be to buy a couple more for the living room and dining room and to install them after installing security bars on those two windows.

    – if you can, do the bulk of your cooking/baking/canning in the evening or earlier morning hours when it’s still cool.  Otherwise you’re unnecessarily heating up the house. 

    A very important part of staying cool in the heat is giving your body the chance to the temperature outside.  Our family is now more comfortable than most with summer temperatures.  Last year I read a great book by Eric Brende, I think it was called Lights Off.  In it the author wrote about how he got ill from the heat when working outdoors with a bunch of other Amish (type) men, and couldn’t understand why no one else was bothered by the heat.  He realized that the problem was he had just returned from a trip in which he spent most of his time in air conditioned cars and buildings, and his body hadn’t had a chance to acclimate (as I wrote this word it occurred to me the direct connection between climate and acclimate).  So he suffered from heat stroke while the other men he was working with were fine, since they had two weeks from the onset of the summer for their bodies to adapt.

    Wearing light clothes, putting cold washcloths on the back of your neck to cool you off, and doing physical work during the cooler parts of the day will also be helpful.

    Avivah 

  • What to do with overripe bananas

    I realized that I never answered the question of what to do with overripe bananas, and now I’m sure it’s way too late for the person who asked.  But I’ll answer now and in case another great deal on very ripe bananas comes along, you’ll have the suggestions already. And if you took my advice a while back and froze them, you might still have them waiting in the freezer, hoping for inspiration to strike so you could use them.  🙂

    I’ve already posted about how to freeze bananas.  So in this post I’ll write about what to do with those wonderful bargains on very ripe bananas that you find. 

    If you freeze them, you can then defrost them for using in banana bread, banana muffins, banana cake, and banana cookies.  You can use it for a breakfast of baked banana oatmeal.  You get the idea.  Anything you can bake can have a banana version!

    Blend the frozen bananas to make banana ice cream.  Cut them in slices and eat them as a frozen treat, or dip them in a peanut butter sauce for a really special treat.  Insert a popsicle stick in the banana before freezing, dip into a chocolate or carob sauce, roll in dried coconut or walnuts, and you have a tasty dessert for kids. 

    Bananas are perfect for smoothies and shakes – they add sweetness and creaminess.

    Slice them up and put them in the dehydrator to make leathery banana chips.  Blend them , put them in the dehydrator on the paraflexx sheet and make fruit leather – we’ve found that using bananas for part of the fruit leather combination is the key to success since it holds together well.

    These are some things that we’ve done when we’ve had a lot of ripe or overripe bananas (and I have a bunch on the counter right now waiting to be dealt with, so you now what will happen to some of them!).  There are lots of other ideas and if anyone has tips to share or recipes that they’ve especially enjoyed, please share them!

    Avivah

  • Recycling jars for canning

    Today I was soaking some empty food jars I had saved (peanut butter, mayonnaise) to get the labels off so I can reuse them for canning.  That’s the best kind of recycling, don’t you think? 🙂    Then I soaked several more that I was given last week – I got six dozen jars for free, and about six of them had labels on them.   When I glanced in the box and noticed that, there was a feeling of, ‘oh, not real canning jars, but they’ll come in handy anyway’.  But it was really interesting to see that after I soaked the labels off, they were literally identical to Atlas mason jars in every regard, including the name of the canning company on it!  Then I remembered reading something posted by a long term canner about this, who always buys the spaghetti sauce in a jar made by a particular company (wasn’t kosher) because she gets the sauce along with a free canning jar. So while these particular jars were about ten years old, it’s still possible to get canning jars after eating up the supermarket foods that they contain.

    As long as the glass jars fit the standard canning jar lids, you can use them for canning, in addition to storing anything that you find helpful.  In addition to using them for canning, I also like using glass jars for storing my dehydrated foods, grains, and other pantry items, so they come in handy.  

    Some will say that you can only use jars that were specifically manufactured for canning, and that it’s unsafe to use other jars.   When I read this a few days ago in a local newspaper, I also noted a recommendation from the same writer to never reuse canning jar bands – because it’s not safe.  I don’t like when people feel they have to err on the side of caution to the point that everything becomes off limits and has warnings on it, even when it makes no sense.  The recommendation to throw away bands after one use unnecessarily brings up the cost of canning and is wasteful – I commented to my kids that anyone following that advice would at least be doing their part to stimulate the economy, since the ones to benefit from the suggestion are the companies that manufacture canning lids/bands.  And the writer also commented that canned goods have to be stored with the bands on them, which is exactly the opposite of what you’re supposed to do. sigh.gif

    Is it actually unsafe to reuse jars that mayonnaise or peanut butter come in?  Though this is frequently cited as a safety issue, I don’t believe it is.  I’ve seen a number of people who have been canning for years post online about their experience with used canning jars.  All of them have said they haven’t noticed a difference between the breakage rate of used glass jars and specially made canning jars. Some have noted that the canning jars are in some instances thinner than the recycled jars.  Some have said that they’ve taken the precaution of only using those jars for water bath canning versus pressure canning, which makes sense to me, if you feel the mayonnaise jars are made of thinner glass and wouldn’t be able to stand up to the higher pressure. 

    I’ve had jars break in the canner during processing, but all of those that broke were standard canning jars.  That happened in my early days of canning, and it was my inexperience in canning that lead to that, not a defect in the jars.  So far I haven’t made any attempt to treat the recycled jars differently than the canning jars, and haven’t had any breakage issues with them. 

    I also like the ‘twofer’ aspect of buying food in glass jars and then being able to use the packaging the food came in.  Unfortunately, so many foods now come in plastic jars that it’s not as easy to find glass jars to recycle! (And the kosher companies don’t use standard sized jars for the most part – all those gefilte fish jars weren’t helpful when it came to canning.  But I did use them to give Chanuka gifts in, so they were still useful. :))   These particular jars came from a health version of mayo and the others from organic and sugar free peanut butter; I think that the healthier items tend to be packed in glass rather than plastic.

    After soaking off the labels, I spent a very long time in the kitchen kashering used canning jars that I either purchased or was given.  The jars I bought several months ago were mostly still unkashered, so when I got this latest batch of six dozen, it was an incentive for me to get myself busy to clear the backlog.  I was getting tired after seven or eight dozen, and then noticed that my ds16 had kashered 4 dozen instead of the two dozen I thought he did (he marked the boxes a few months ago when he did them), and washed another couple of dozen in preparation for kashering (washing them is a chore since they have to be spotless and that’s not always easy).  Tonight when I write him a letter (since he’s in camp) you can be sure I’ll be thanking him for that! 

    I still have another four dozen to go, but decided to have mercy on myself and call it quits for tonight.  Tomorrow I hope to toivel them, along with a bunch of new lids.  (Rav Heinemann told us we have to toivel the lids, even if using them one time – and since I’m going with his psak on kashering used jars, I have to go along with that, too! :))  Since I have at least twelve dozen to toivel, that will be an activity.  Good thing it’s not a busy time of year for this kind of thing; can you imagine the line I’d cause if I was doing this around Pesach time?!

    If you’re wondering how many jars I have by now (Julie, you’re keeping track better than me!), I really have no idea.  It doesn’t seem like so many.  But I decided today that though a person can say that they never can have too many canning jars, I have an excess of the half pint size (some of you may remember last summer when I bought more than 30 dozen in that size, all brand new)- it’s not practical for my family at all since it’s so small; it’s like a one person serving!  I think I’ll sell them or take quart or pint sized jars in exchange. 

    Avivah

  • Rain barrels

    About a month ago I bought our first rain barrel for $50 from someone who had only used it twice, a heavy duty vinyl model that holds 100 gallons of water.  (A rain barrel, in case any one isn’t familiar with the term, is a large barrel that is set up to harvest the rain water runoff from your home’s gutters.) I got it with the intent to be more self sufficient with garden’s water needs.  It’s a shame to pay to water the garden when I can use the rain that falls for free!  This model collapses and can be stored compactly in the winter months, which I liked.  It’s also easily accessible to my darling toddler sons, one of whom turned it on this morning without us seeing him, and totally drained out all 100 gallons of water.  yikes2.gif  At least it wasn’t water we had to pay for. 

    A couple of weeks ago, I bought three more rain barrels, this time the standard 55 gallon size.  They’re recycled drums made of heavy duty plastic, much better for a family with active kids since they wouldn’t be easily damaged.  I think I’ll resell the vinyl rain barrel before one of my children figures out how to make a hole in it. 🙂   I bought them from someone who made them himself.  They were $50 each but I asked for a discount since I was getting three, so I paid $125 for all of them.  I researched how to make rain barrels quite a while ago because I wanted to make one, so I know it’s not a hard thing to do.  But while theoretically we could have made some ourselves, I knew that there was no way that the barrels would get done in a timely way because we had just started the patio project.  I also knew (since I’ve been looking for months for cheap barrels to make my own rain barrels and every single time the $10 ones were sold before I could get them) that I’d have to pay $25 for the barrel, and after buying the parts, I’d hardly come out more cheaply than buying them ready made.  My time and labor is worth the $5 or less I would have saved, don’t you think?

    I’d like to connect at least two of them, so when one is full the water is automatically diverted into the next one.  My ds10 connected a garden hose to the spigot at the bottom of it so we can water directly from the barrel, but it seems that hose has a blockage so I have to attach a different hose. 

    We got a little rain last week and it filled a six of one barrel.  Then we got a good rain, and it was incredible to watch how quickly the barrel filled up!  Since we don’t yet have the barrels connected to receive the overflow, we manually redirected the flexible downspout over the empty barrel.  It’s amazing to note the difference between that one, which is receiving the directed run off from the gutter, and the one next to it, that only collected the rain that fell directly.  The one that wasn’t hooked up got only a few cups of water in it after a good sized rain, while we easily could have filled all three barrels in the same amount of time. 

    It might not seem so frugal to buy rain barrels, since we pay about $160 every three months for our total water usage, and it will take a lot of collected water until we break even.  But that’s how a lot of money saving things are – you have to make the initial investment and it can take some time until you start to see the payoff.   If you look at the short term, it seems like a waste of money, but I look at it as a long term investment; since watering the garden would take a lot of water on a regular basis (and it’s something I plan to have each summer), I’m happy to have a way to cut the costs. 

    Avivah