Happy First Day of September!

And just like that, August is over. Happy September, friends! Just a quick photo to show you what I was up to this morning.

About 6 weeks ago, I started mache indoors. Mache, also known as lamb's lettuce, is a cold tolerant salad green. Today I planted the mache seedlings into one of the three garden troughs kept on our deck. All three of these troughs now contain cool season veggies, with easy access from the kitchen. So on rainy days, I only need to pop outside for a minute to clip some mache, pull a turnip or two, or cut some Swiss chard.

I have one more set of veggie seedlings to plant out for autumn harvest, some kale starts that will fill the bare spot left by the harvested garlic. And then I'm done planting for our fall and early spring harvests. 

I'm a little late on these plantings this year. Harvest time overlaps with late-season planting, and sometimes I fall behind in one or the other.

On the Monday holiday, we'll have a hot dog cookout over the fire pit, with watermelon, our own corn-on-the-cob, a tossed garden salad, and s'mores.  Do you have any plans for Labor Day? I hope you don't need to labor on Monday and can just relax.

Wishing you a lovely Labor Day weekend. I'll be back on Tuesday.

Recents Failures and Success At Last With Bread-Baking

I've been baking bread from scratch for 35 years. You'd think I'd know a thing or two about making good bread dough. Apparently, that's not the case.

I don't have any photos of the failed bread batches, but I'll tell you briefly what's been happening with my dough. For the last few batches of bread, my dough has been sticky, requiring extra flour, and has failed to rise completely, showing signs of falling back before a full rise. The resulting loaves baked up pale, flattish, and chewy (according to my husband). I had run out of my white flour at about the same time my bread took a downward turn, one month ago. 

Last week's bread was no different, and I noticed I had to add quite a lot of extra flour to achieve a dough that I could form into loaves without sticking too much to the counter or my hands. I thought I was beginning to lose my mind. The recipe I had always followed was suddenly not working. I was thinking I'd lost count of the cups of flour or mis-measured the water, or didn't add enough sugar (effecting browning), or, or, or. . .

Today I started another batch of 3 loaves of part whole wheat, part white bread (per the recipe). I paid much more attention to amounts and counted precisely. I was definitely needing to add lots more flour. I had very carefully measured the water, so my thought was the flour was holding moisture grabbed from the air while in storage in the paper sack. So I added lots more flour, extra sugar, salt, and yeast. Since it was the white flour I thought may be causing trouble, I went heavy on the whole wheat flour in my additional amounts. I added the sugar, salt and yeast in proportion to the extra flour amount, based on the original recipe. A recipe that calls for 8 cups of flour ended up using more like 10 1/2 cups. So for the last month, I've been baking bread with flour out of proportion to the salt, sugar, and yeast, and loaves with more white flour than whole wheat.

The final result for these 3 new loaves can be seen in the photo above. These are well-developed, fully-risen, browned loaves. I'll have to wait for my husband to give me the critique on texture and taste tomorrow, when he cuts into the first loaf.

Anyway, this frustration and experience prompted me to look into causes of sticky dough and poor rise with bread dough. Not only has moisture content of the flour likely been an issue, but the protein content of the white flour used may have played a part. Good bread dough relies on flour with a protein content of around 12.5 to 13+% protein. 

My white flour is all-purpose. The white flour I ran out of a month ago was a bread flour of much higher protein content. With my wacky diet, I'm not using much of our all-purpose flour, and we now have a surplus. I thought I'd use some of it in the bread. In years' past, I've made successful loaves of bread with half all-purpose, half-whole wheat bread. So I thought this would be okay. Only, I had used a different, more expensive brand of all-purpose flour than what I currently have on hand. And with recent loaves, my family had expressed interest in less whole wheat, more white flour bread. 

After doing a bit of math, I determined that my current all-purpose flour is about 10% protein. So, what I was doing was trying to make good bread with an average of about 11% protein content flour, between the lesser whole wheat and more all-purpose. The combination of added moisture drawn into my flour and a lower than ideal protein in the flour just sort of doomed my loaves.

Going forward, because I still have a surplus of all-purpose flour to use up. I'll have to reduce the water I add to the dough and use a 67% whole wheat, 33% all-purpose flour ratio for my bread. I hope that next week's bread doesn't throw me any more curveballs.

I'm fortunate that my family isn't terribly picky about my cooking. Even though the previous loaves of bread were dense, flat, pale, and chewy, they still ate it all. I'm very grateful for that, and the fact they don't complain about my cooking and baking failures.

You know what's really great about having a small success like this batch of bread? One single small success seems to blur the memory of about 30 small failures. Life feels less frustrating, and I am encouraged to do more.

Wishing you all a wonderful Thursday!

Dinner at the beach (or cheapskate dining out)

our view from the bench

We've skipped this family favorite tradition the past few summers. Prior to the Covid shutdowns, my family has taken dinner to the beach one night during summer. 

In case you missed it, summer is running out of time. When this occurred to all of us, we decided to do a dinner at the beach right away. We had fabulously warm weather over the weekend, with Sunday slightly warmer. My daughters wanted to swim, so we chose high tide in the late afternoon. (High tide allows for less hazardous swimming at our local beach.)

my dinner 

We made burgers at home, washed some of our tree apples, filled a jug with water, and packed supplies like cups, plates, napkins, and a fork and knife for my bunless burger.

Of course, with this beautiful, end of the summer weather, we weren't the only ones who thought to make an excursion to the beach on a Sunday evening. One pass through the packed parking lot told us we'd have to park up the hill in town and walk down. Fortunately, once at the beach we found a nice bench available to eat our dinners and to use as home-base for our seaside activities. Fun swimming, wading and a little sand play as a bonus to our waterside meal.

You already know this about my family, we rarely eat in restaurants. Eating in our own kitchen. dining room or on the patio can feel repetitive and mundane after a while. Taking our dinners someplace else is our way of combatting home-meal fatigue, without spending extra $$ on the meal.

I'm really glad that we restarted this favorite summer tradition, even if it was just in the nick of time. Summers fade quickly in the PNW. 

What are your must-do end of summer plans?

What foods are you canning, freezing or dehydrating this month?

6 pints of blackberry jam, 3 made on Saturday and 3 made on Sunday

I don't normally labor on Sunday afternoons. That's usually my time to rest and restore myself. This past weekend, however, found me making jam both Saturday and Sunday afternoons.

Saturday, my jam-making was definitely a to-do item on my list. I had a bunch fo blackberries to both freeze and turn into jam. But Sunday afternoon was a different story. I wasn't planning on making jam this day. I was going to have a restful afternoon. Those berries were enticing. So fresh and plump, full in sweetness and flavor. I wasn't in a rush to get anything done. I simply felt called to make more jam.

The kitchen was uncharacteristically quiet on Sunday. It was just me and the berries. I took my time, allowing the berries and sugar to heat slowly on the stove. I inhaled the deep berry fragrance as I leaned over the pot to take a taste. You could say I was in the groove. My relaxing Sunday jam-making felt so different from my hectic, got to get this done, Saturday session. I wish every time I preserved or prepared some food for my family I could feel this same sense of ease and enjoyment.

So blackberry jam has been my most recent food preservation effort. With the winter's jam now made, I'll move on to making blackberry juice later this week.

How about you? Are you preserving any foods for fall and winter enjoyment? 

Your Favorite Multi-Purpose Kitchen Tools

not related to this post but a favorite lunch or dinner for me these days -- 
tomato, basil, garlic, Parmesan omelette

It's blackberry harvest season in my area. Every day there's another batch ready to pick and freeze to use in fall, winter, and spring. I have these two jumbo zip-loc bags that came in grocery shipments during the lockdowns. Each is about the size of a standard bed pillow when filled.

My family's part is to do most of the picking and I rinse and freeze the Barries on trays then add to the jumbo bags once frozen. One bag is now completely filled and I'm about 1/3 of the way on the second bag. 

This morning as I was rinsing today's batch of berries, I thought about how useful this large bowl has been over the years. Twenty-five years ago, my little family's bread consumption exploded. I had been mixing the dough by hand in my largest mixing bowl, which meant I could bake 2 loaves at a time. In order to keep up with my family's appetites, I needed a much larger bowl. I bought a large, shallow stainless steel bowl at Target just for mixing bread dough. This bowl is so large I could not only mix the dough but also knead the dough in the bowl, making enough for 4 to 5 loaves in one go. I used this bowl for bread dough for 15 years, until I bought a stand mixer to do the dough mixing and kneading.

What I discovered was this oversized bowl also makes a great basin for washing and rinsing. When we were redoing our kitchen, I used it as a portable sink for dishwashing. And when I've needed to rinse produce from our property, this bowl has been just the right dimensions for that purpose. I can rinse 2 quarts of blackberries at a time in this bowl, or large leaves of kale or chard or heads of Romaine lettuce.

I do still use the bowl for mixing dough, pie pastry dough. I can mix a batch of pie dough enough for 5 single crusts at a time in this bowl. In addition, this bowl is our popcorn bowl. When our family of 4 to 5 wants popcorn, our appetites aren't exactly dainty. We make a gigantic bowl of popcorn, oftentimes having some leftover for snacking the next day.

I think I originally spent $7 for the bowl, and out of that I've gotten a bowl to mix large batches of dough, a popcorn bowl, a kitchen sink, and a produce rinse container.

There's another favorite multi-purpose tool of mine, the serving spoons that came with my stainless flatware. Along with forks, spoons, and knives came a large slotted serving spoon and a non-slotted serving spoon. I had intended to buy things like mixing spoons for cooking, but I never did get around to it. All these many, many years of marriage, I've used the serving spoons as mixing spoons. When I mixed bread dough by hand, it was one of these serving spoons that I used. 

The slotted spoon is not only handy for serving foods that you want to drain a little, like veggies that have been cooked in liquid, but it has also been my slotted spoon for deep-frying, when needing to remove fried foods from the oil while leaving most of the hot oil in the pot. 

I've also found the size and the rounded edge of these spoons to work well when cooking in my non-stick pan. We have a non-stick spatula for those pans, but it's so old it's quite warped. The rounded edge of a spoon also works and doesn't scratch the finish. 

It's funny -- when my son and daughter-in-law were asking for hints for a Christmas gift a couple of years ago, one of the first things that popped into my mind was a mixing spoon. I really have always intended to buy one. But now, in looking back over my many years of home-cooking, I haven't needed a mixing spoon, the serving spoon has worked just fine.

When I first married, I thought I would need so many tools and gadgets to outfit my kitchen. As it turns out, I didn't need nearly as much as I had believed. It reminds me of how simply many folks lived up until the second half of the 20th century. Tools often had multiple uses. take a 19th century washpan, for example. The washpan was not only used for dishes, but also for laundry (to heat the water and wash the clothing) and for bathing. Now that's versatility!

These thoughts got me to wondering what you've found to be your favorite kitchen tools, ones that you've used for much more than you originally thought you would. Do you have favorite multi or dual purpose kitchen or cleaning tools?

Update on a growing project, plus my new growing experiment

 

This is one of several primrose plants that I started from seeds my daughters gave to me for my birthday this year. The plants are now the size I would buy from the store in early spring, just without any sign of blooms. I suspect they need a cold dormant period before they would flower. I will find a spot in our yard to plant them where I will see them blossom in early spring next year. I'm so tickled with how well this worked. I didn't start all of the seeds, in case I needed a do-over. But now that this worked so well, I'll start the rest of the seeds later this week.

And here is my latest experiment. These are apple seeds from one of our tree apples. I've got them wrapped in a damp paper towel in a loose plastic bag at the back of the fridge. Apple seeds need a cold and slightly moist period before planting in soil, known as stratification. After about 6 weeks, I'll pot these seeds in soil and see what happens. They won't produce fruit that is true to the tree the apple came from, as apples use cross-pollinators to produce fruit, and each resulting apple carries characteristics of both the fruiting tree and the rooster tree. But I think this will be interesting nonetheless. If I can coax one plant to grow, I'll find a place in our landscape for this new apple tree.

That's about it from me tonight. I hope your week has been a good one!

Freezer Storage: Freezer Containers or Freezer Bags?

I was chopping and freezing Swiss chard and basil today. As I was trying to make room for the chard in the kitchen freezer, I had to smash down a whole bunch of bags. Miscellaneous containers just seemed to take up more space than the foods they contained.

As much of a nuisance as the hard-sided containers are, I do prefer those over bags for freezing liquids (blackberry juice, crabapple juice) and semi-liquids (pumpkin puree and applesauce). 

I'm now at the end of my supply of both containers and freezer bags, and I'm needing more for putting away additional garden produce. So I've got to decide what to acquire more of, bags or containers. 

So, I'm thinking this through. Maybe you can help by pointing out what I'm missing. Here's my pro and con list:

Starting with freezer bags

Bags -- pros

• store in small amount of space when not in use
• when filled and in the freezer, no additional airspace taking up valuable room
• with less air in the bag, less chance of frost build-up or freezer burn on food
• for loose foods in a large storage bag, like a gallon of peas or green beans, as the bag slowly empties, it can collapse and take up less space in the freezer 
• washable for reuse

Bags -- cons

• lack durability, can be used a handful of times each
• any holes in the bag or damaged seal could cause leaking when thawing frozen items for cooking
• if freezing semi-liquids or liquids, the bag will freeze solid in the shape it is in when placed in the freezer, possibly making it harder to stack with other bags in the freezer
• need to be washed by hand

Now for sturdy freezer containers

Solid-side freezer containers -- pros

• very durable, can last many years
• good for liquids and semi-liquids
• easy to wash in the dishwasher
• stackable in the freezer

Solid-side freezer containers -- cons

• depending on shape, they may not tessellate well with other containers in the freezer
• cost -- more expensive to buy
• if the food doesn't completely fill the container, the airspace not only takes up unnecessary space in the freezer, but frost can build up on the food
• frozen containers are prone to cracking and chipping when dropped
• bulky for storage when not in use

What am I missing? Do you have a preference for bags or containers? Do you store some foods in bags and other foods in solid-sided containers? Do you use glass jars for freezer storage? I personally have a fear of glass jars breaking in the freezer, even if that is rare.

How much garlic do you eat in a year?

The last week or so have found me at work in the garden bringing in some of the early harvest. My big chore on Saturday was to dig this next year's garlic.

Last October I planted 99 cloves from the 2022 garlic harvest. On Saturday I harvested 94 heads/bulbs of garlic. Either 5 heads have eluded me and will send up shoots in spring, or 5 cloves rotted in the soil over winter. Despite the loss of 5 heads of garlic, the 94 is pretty good, I think.

For the past several years, I've increased the number of garlic cloves I plant by about 10 each year. So my plan is to plant about 110 cloves this October. That will take about 12 or so heads, leaving me with around 80 heads of garlic for this fall, winter, and spring. 

The heads are not large ones. For this next year, I plan on amending the soil more completely before planting and increasing the spacing between cloves. I hope this will produce larger heads next summer, which would mean each head would cover more of our meals.

We still fall short of my goal to grow our year's supply of garlic. The 2022 garlic lasted until the end of May, at which point I bought garlic powder. So, how long will 2023's harvest last us? That's a good question. I hope the 80 heads last through June 2024. That will move push us closer to the goal. Perhaps in another couple of years we'll be able to grow as much as we need for a year.

It's interesting to think in terms of a year's supply of any one food, in relation to what we grow. In modern times, most of us only think about how much of any one food we may need for a week or perhaps for 2 weeks. A century or more ago, estimating on a year's scale is something most folks always did, at least with some foods. 

I'm guessing my family goes through 2 of my smaller home-grown heads of garlic per week. That would be 104 heads per year. It sure sounds like a lot. But maybe it isn't. How's does that compare to how much garlic you and your household use in a year? Do you have any foods that you procure just once a year, necessitating the estimation of a year's consumption?

Herb Seasoning Blends For Winter Cooking Using Garden Abundance

 clockwise beginning top right:
thyme, garlic, carrot leaves, celery leaves, oregano, parsley, sage

Those of us who keep gardens, whether small or big, try to use what we grow. One area that I have fallen down on this is in using all of the herbs that I grow. With both perennial and annual herbs I tend to use what I need in summer, dry or freeze the ones that we use most, then let the rest die off.

As I was watering the parsley this morning, I noticed that I really have an abundance of this herb. I also noticed the thyme was quite prolific, as was the sage. I decided I wanted to make sure we do use these herbs. I thought I could just cut and dry or freeze each, as individual herbs. But you know, I know myself, and I could just see all of that frozen parsley waste away in the freezer, neglected for the most part.

In another area of my life related to food, I can no longer use bouillon powder or soup base for flavoring when cooking due to allergens to ingredients.

So, a light bulb went off. I could kill two birds with one stone and make seasoning blends to store in the freezer with my surplus herbs. The seasoning blends would be allergen-free for me and they'd ensure I used what I chop and freeze because they would seem more handy to me than separate bags of parsley, thyme, sage, celery leaves, etc.

Here's what I made today. I made one all-purpose soup, sauce, gravy, bread or rice stuffing seasoning blend, using lots of garlic, lots of parsley, lots of thyme, some celery leaves, lots of carrots leaves, a little sage, and a little oregano. This will allow me to quickly season homemade chicken stock, a beef stew, a meatloaf, whatever. It should be full of flavor. I didn't follow a recipe, but I used roughly the proportions I would use in most of my basic savory cooking. And I made another bag of a poultry specific blend of herbs, celery, sage, thyme, carrot leaves, and a small amount of parsley. 

The difference between the two bags is a couple of extra ingredients in the all-purpose (namely garlic but also a little oregano), and proportions. When I cook American poultry dishes (like chicken and dumplings, chicken soup, bread stuffing, chicken pot pie) I tend to go heavy on the celery and sage, with a little thyme, if I have it, and a little parsley. So the poultry seasoning reflects my use of herbs in chicken and turkey dishes. I expect to have enough seasoning in the all-purpose blend for about 10 family-size recipes and in the poultry seasoning blend, about 8 recipes worth.

I'm looking forward to having the simplicity of adding a few tablespoons of a single blend to enhance my cooking this coming fall and winter. I'm doubly glad because I harvested and processed garden produce that I might have missed.

Finished My Wire-Wrapped Sea Glass Bracelet

When my kids were school age, one of our favorite summer excursion venues was our local beaches. The kids would comb the shore along with me, hunting for the perfect seashell or jewel-like piece of sea glass. I accumulated quite a collection of sea glass over the years.

There aren't many opportunities for my kids to beach comb with me these days. Their lives keep them busy. But I have my seashore collections to bring back those fond memories.

You might remember that a couple of years ago I posted about some of the wire-wrapped jewelry I was making. I also began a sea glass bracelet, using wire-wrapping to both make the frame for the bracelet as well as secure the pieces of sea glass. I put it away unfinished and pretty much forgot about it.

One day this summer I came upon the project in a drawer and set it on my dresser to get to this summer. In clearing up the dresser earlier today, I decided to just finish the bracelet. I didn't have much left to do, just fashion some sort of wire-wrapping clasp.

The silver-plated wire bracelet holds five pieces of sea glass, 1 large pale blue piece, 2 white pieces, and 2 lime green pieces.

I'm pleased with how it turned out for my first such piece of jewelry. And I'll always treasure the memories it represents from my children's younger days.

Do you clean and/or polish your shoes?

I remember watching my father polish his work shoes when I was a girl. He had a cardboard box with all of the supplies kept inside. I would watch him rub the polish into the leather then buff the dried polish till the shoes shone. My mother took care of our shoes, removing scuffs from patent leather with rubbing alcohol, covering marks on other leather shoes with a liquid polish, or washing our sneakers in the washing machine periodically. There always seemed to be a pair of drying sneakers sitting in front of the refrigerator where warm air came out and dried the shoes. This was normal care-taking of shoes. 

If a shoe developed a problem, there was a shoe repair shop nearby that could fix them. My dad would boast that he'd had the same pair of dress shoes for over a decade, taking care of them himself in the evenings and by getting them resoled at the repair place when needed. My dad wore an odd shoe size which was difficult to source, so making shoes last longer was imperative. But my parents were also just normal thrifty people, like most folks I knew as a girl.

I wore leather dress shoes to my job pre-kids, and I used the skills I learned to keep my shoes looking nice for as long as possible, too. But sometime in the last 35 years, the art of shoe care and repair just got lost in our society. Shoes got cheaper, were often not made from good materials like real leather, and replacing worn-looking shoes seemed more feasible than doing the work to make them look nice again. There's a big exception to this, though. Good quality sneakers/athletic shoes are expensive.

I can't wear cheap sneakers. I spend the extra money to get sneakers that work for my persnickety feet. For most of the last 10 years, I've bought black sneakers, because black doesn't show dirt as readily as lighter colors. I hose my black sneakers off from time to time when coming back in from the garden, then let them dry in the sun. This summer I decided that I wanted some light-colored sneakers. I chose this pale green pair. They go well with capri-length pants and my khaki skort -- my summer uniforms for casual days. I feel that now I don't look as dorky as I did with black sneakers and a skort. But I still wear my black sneakers for really dirty work.

One issue with the light-colored sneakers, they show dirt very quickly. I've been reminded that I need to clean these more frequently than I do my black shoes. One of the things that's changed over the years, though, modern sneakers and athletic shoes are often made of synthetic materials that seems to clean easily. With this pair, I hold a shoe over the kitchen sink and use a little dish soap on a rag to clean the dirt off the toes, where I seem to get my shoes the dirtiest. Then rinse under water and set in the sun to dry. I seem to need to do this a couple of times a month. This last time I was thinking to myself that you don't hear much about people polishing or cleaning shoes any more. A couple of years ago I went to buy actual shoe polish for my husband's dress shoes and had to go to a couple of stores to find what I needed.

So now I'm wondering, does anyone else regularly clean or polish their shoes? Is this a chore you routinely do? Have you found ways to make the job easier or gentler on your shoes?

Summer Dinner With Guests Using What I Had on Hand

Hi friends, how was your weekend? Did you find some time to relax and recharge, or were you in go-go-go mode Friday through Sunday?

I was medium busy. We had company for dinner Sunday, so I spent most of the weekend cleaning, cooking, and rearranging furniture. I didn't have access to a car to go grocery shopping before Sunday afternoon, so I just decided to work with what I had on hand. In the end, it all worked out, dinner was delicious, and I enjoyed the challenge. Here's what I found in our freezer, pantry and garden to use for a "company" meal.

(Is it food porn if it's basic humble foods?)

I had a whole chicken and a package of little smokies in the freezer for the meat portion. I barbecued the chicken whole.

After the chicken had sat for 20 minutes, I cut it apart (like I do for roasted chickens), giving us a total of 10 pieces of chicken, 4 breast portions, 2 legs, 2 thighs, and 2 wings. This was a casual meal, so eating with our hands was definitely in the plans. 

While I was parting the chicken, one daughter was heating the little smokies. I'd bought these packages for 49 cents on markdown at Grocery Outlet a few months back and kept them in the freezer.

For vegetables I looked to my garden. I picked 2 large cucumbers, several ripe tomatoes, and a small bowl of basil leaves. I made a dressing of home-grown garlic, home-grown oregano, lemon juice, olive oil, salt and pepper. Just before serving, I grated in some Parmesan cheese.

I also dug some of our potted carrots. I cut the greens off and scrubbed the roots, split in halves, and oven-roasted them. I like to leave just a tiny amount of the carrot tops still attached -- evidence they're home-grown.

I needed a starch, so I made rosemary-olive oil bread (a French bread recipe adding chopped fresh rosemary and using olive oil in place of vegetable oil). I doubled the recipe, so this made a very large loaf. We served this sliced with butter (nothing quite like real butter).

And for dessert, a blackberry pie. My husband picked 1 1/2 quarts of blackberries from our property early Saturday. I baked the pie later that afternoon.

In addition to chilled water to drink, I also made a pitcher of blackberry lemonade, using (of course) juice from our blackberries plus lemon juice, sugar and water.

It was a warm day, so I set up a table on the deck where we could enjoy the lovely evening breezes. We lingered over the table until the sky overhead darkened. A lovely evening with lovely guests.

Although I spent a good chunk of the weekend cleaning and prepping for company, there are a couple of  side benefits that I get to enjoy for days to come. One, the next day's meals are easy to throw together. Chicken sandwiches on rosemary bread along with little smokies made easy lunches on Monday. And Monday's dinner was a simple pot of chicken and dumplings with leftover salad and more fresh blackberries. The other side benefit is I get to now enjoy an extra clean house and tidy outdoor living spaces until we mess it all up again. 

I'm a bit tired this evening, but I'll be back tomorrow with another post.

Another Way to Cook With Leftover Meat Fat

If you have a surplus of fat leftover from cooking meat, here's another way to use it while cooking.

Here's about 2 tablespoons of bacon fat that sat in the fridge for about a month and may or may not have picked up questionable odors and flavors. Rather than risk ruining whatever I'm cooking, we've been using old fats in place of lighter fluid for starting charcoal briquets when barbecuing. 

To use the fat, I first melt it in the microwave.

Then we pour it over the cold briquets as I would lighter fluid. We've also experimented with spreading the fat right onto the briquets. That also works, but pouring melted fat is easier.

Then we light the briquets with paper, sticks or bits of cardboard inside the chimney along with the briquets.

The fat is a little slower to catch on fire than the lighter fluid, but it burns longer, allowing the charcoal to fully heat and develop a nice white ash on each briquet. To help the fat-covered charcoal catch fire, we add some paper and sticks to the chimney. 

As a bonus to the long burning of the meat fat on the briquets, I feel better about eating food that has been cooked over charcoal covered with meat fat than charcoal covered with a petroleum or alcohol (not the drinking kind) product. Adding fewer chemicals to our food is always a plus.

Anyway, we've been doing this all summer and are not only glad we have a way to use the old fat, but also we appreciate how well this has worked while saving money on not buying the commercial fluid.

This Summer's Stay-cation

There wasn't going to be an opportunity for me to have a getaway type of vacation this summer. So when my husband told us he would be going out of town for 8 days (part business/part pleasure), I thought I could try to do some local stay-cation types of outings to make my week feel like I'd gotten away. One daughter is house-sitting for the month, but she was able to join my other daughter and I for 3 outings.

On the first outing, we visited the vintage and antique town a short drive from our home. Again we brought a picnic lunch, this time a simple one. I made a container of egg salad and brought slices of homemade bread and a rice cake for me, plus apples, nuts, and jugs of water. We treated ourselves to dessert at the locally-owned fro-yo spot. We'd gone into this place to check it out on another visit. I loved that they made many of their offerings from scratch. And they had a sorbet that would work for my dietary restrictions. Since I was shopping for a birthday gift for a friend, we visited shops we'd never been in before, which made this outing feel special to all of us.

On the second outing, the three of us visited our town's farmer's market. It's located in the central part of the business and retail district of town and just up the hill from the beach. Our main goal at the farmer's market was to buy some peaches and for my daughter to buy a gift for a friend. The guy selling the peaches gave us great tips for picking ones that would be ripe very soon. He told us the peaches we chose would be ready in two days, and he was right.  After visiting the market we ducked into the lavender shop to enjoy the fragrance and a complimentary cup of tea, the the art supply shop for my daughter to pick up a needed item for a job the next day. And we weren't done yet. Remember I said the beach was just down the hill. The three of us walked down the hill and spent an hour at the beach with a kite. Fun day!

The third outing was our biggest adventure. We got up and out early to catch a ferry across the Sound to the peninsula. A short drive from the opposing ferry dock brought us to the Norwegian town of Poulsbo. This is a fun place to visit. Lots of Scandinavian atmosphere, a couple of great little museums, a free aquarium, shops, restaurants, a waterfront with a nice park, and locals who never fail to entertain us with their stories. We enjoyed the town for the entire day, walked close to 5 miles, enjoyed our breakfast by the water, had a picnic lunch in the waterfront park (we're big on picnics), walked a beachside boardwalk around part of the bay, enjoyed the sights of a frolicking sea lion, and basically exhausted ourselves on fun. On the ferry ride back to the mainland we spotted a harbor porpoise and some flying fish.

In addition to taking these outings, we tried to make the 8 days feel like a vacation in other ways. We ate meals outdoors, had a movie night at home, barbecued, and even had a couple of nights where I didn't cook dinner instead each fending for oneself.

The stay-cation came to an end with this evenings dinner of hotdogs and fresh produce from the garden. My husband will return late tonight and tomorrow life will go back to non-vacation time.

For a variety of reasons, away-from-home vacations rarely work for us in summer. The garden needs constant attention from June through September. My daughters are more and more becoming busy with their own lives and jobs. Summers are actually the good time of year to remain in the Seattle area. And frankly, I find so many places I enjoy going that are a short drive from my house. So a summer stay-cation will likely be in my plans for many years to come.

How about you? What kinds of activities are there to enjoy near you in summer?