Grocery Shopping, Then and Now: The Booming 50s and 60s, My Mother's Day

My mother's experience as related to me over my childhood and younger adult years and my own observances

My mother was born in 1937. Most of her childhood memories were from the WW2 years and then the post-war boom. 

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When my mother went to college for the first time (she would leave to start a family and finish her degree when her kids were older), beginning in 1955, she was a Home Economics major. The study of homemaking included meal planning, grocery shopping and cooking in addition to budgeting and organization, sewing, creating a pleasing home, and rearing children. 

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Home Economics in the university was treated as a science, with researchers investigating the best way to do just about anything regarding keeping a home. This would affect how my mother grocery shopped, among other tasks.

My father and mother married in the late 1950s. They lived in the city for the first three years of their marriage. My father was furloughed several times, which necessitated them moving to other states twice, finally settling in California. My mother was a stay-at-home wife, for the most part. She worked a couple of jobs during periods of my father's furloughs. They, too, just had one car for their early marriage years. Because they lived in the city, my mother could drive my father to and from work on a day she needed the car for shopping. After those first three years, they bought a small house in the suburbs and lived in suburbia for the rest of their lives. 

Planning meals

My mother's cookbook, a wedding gift from an aunt in 1957

My mother was a fabulous planner (frankly, she was a fabulous homemaker in general). One day a week she would get out a pencil and 2 sheets of paper. On one sheet she would plan all of the meals and snacks for the week, using favorite cookbooks as inspiration and guide. 

With uncertain employment at times, my mother would rely on recipes which were deemed frugal. The Better Homes & Garden cookbook, © 1953, had pages of menus that were "money-saving." I remember a lot of these meals from my early childhood.

This cookbook also used a tiny icon of a piggybank next to recipes which were deemed frugal at that time. When I first lived on my own, my mother gave me this cookbook. I relied on some of these recipes to feed myself and roommates.

On the other sheet of paper for planning, my mother would write out everything she would need for all of a week's meals and snacks, down to the last apple or onion. With just one car and a couple of small children in the early years, shopping once per week made my mother's life simpler. 

Paying for groceries

My father gave my mother an allowance each month to pay for household things and clothing for herself and the kids. I recall grocery stores only took cash at the check-out in the early 1960s. If you were short on cash, you could cash a personal check at a "teller" they had set up near the front of the store. This teller was also useful for workers who wished to cash their pay check in the grocery store. In the end, though, stores began accepting personal checks at the point of purchase, sometime in the mid to late 1960s. 

Grocery operating hours

Most grocery stores in the very early 1960s were open Monday through Saturday from 9 AM to 6:30 or 7 PM, with occasionally a store offering evening hours one day per week. I can recall a couple of occasions when my mother would have been waylaid during her regular grocery shopping day in some manner, and she would have to pile us all (my brother would have been a baby then) into the car late in the afternoon to go out and do a last minute week's worth of grocery shopping before Market Basket would close for the evening.

By the mid-60s, grocery stores had a new competitor which offered longer operating hours -- the 7-11 (named for its original operating hours, 7 AM - 11 PM). The first 7-11 that I can recall opened in my area around 1967 or 1968. It was a real novelty to have a store open longer hours and on Sunday, too. It may have been what prompted grocery stores in my area to be open 7 days per week and hours later into the evening. We wouldn't see 24-hour grocery stores for my area until the late-1970s.

Alternatives to the grocery store

Living in the suburbs, my mother had a few more shopping choices than my grandmother ever did. Still, my mother preferred one particular store (Market Basket) for in-store, weekly basic shopping and supplemented with other sources of obtaining groceries.

Helms Bakery truck, sold donuts, bread, cream puffs

Living in the suburbs had its benefits in the 1960s. Several vendors drove through the neighborhoods weekly. Most families in the early 60s in our neighborhood had just one car. So milk delivery service or the bakery truck were popular with the housewives. The Helms Bakery truck would drive through the neighborhood and stop at houses that had a placard in their front window indicating they wanted to buy baked goods. Additionally, the Helms driver would pull on his whistle to call housewives into the street for their purchases. 

My sister was in kindergarten and first grade during this time, but I was home all day with my mother. When my mother went out to buy bread for the week, if I had been very good that morning, I might get a donut. Of course, this wasn't a given. But I knew that if I was naughty, there was no chance I would get a donut. Being able to get bread and milk brought into the neighborhood meant that housewives could throw together some sort of meal between what was in their kitchens and these more perishable foods. 

Around the time Market Basket adopted longer operational hours (about 1970), both of my parents had a car, which meant my mother had more flexibility for grocery shopping. I don't recall ever seeing the Helm's bakery truck again after about 1966. But my mother continued to have milk delivered to our house through my high school years.

Milk was delivered weekly to the doorstep in clear glass quart and half-gallon bottles. The milk man would come before anyone was awake for the day and leave our order of milk on the front porch. Each week, my mother would put out the empty and cleaned out glass bottles from the week before. The milkman would pick these up and take them back to the bottling factory. The empties would be scalded and reused for customers. At the end of the month, the milk man would leave both a bill (with envelope) and an order form to make requests for the next month. The following week, my mother would put the payment into the envelope with the order form and place this out on the front porch with the empty milk bottles to be picked up.

The milk was not homogenized. Homogenization keeps the milk fat from separating from the milk solids and water. In our non-homogenized milk, the fat would rise to the top. My mother would pour off this fat into a small pitcher, and this became our family's weekly supply of cream (mostly used in my parents coffee, but occasionally sweetened and poured over a bowl of berries or peaches for dessert).

drive-thru dairy -- customer drove in similar to a full-service gas stations of the time, the attendant came out a door and took your order, came back a minute later with your products, you paid and drove off. No getting out of the car.

In addition to shopping at the grocery store and having milk and baked goods delivered, we also had a couple of drive-through stores. The one I remember most was the drive through dairy that also sold ice cream! The drive-thru sold milk, cream, butter, cheese, ice cream, fresh orange juice (not from concentrate), eggs, bacon, and popsicles/fudgsicles. If we were out running errands in this part of town (the drive-thru was directly across the street from Woolworth's), my mother would stop and buy some frozen treats to take home.

How to save money in the 60s and 70s, housewife edition

My mother used coupons, mostly getting them from magazines. Some of the earliest coupons in my memory reflected a new age we were entering -- the computer age. These coupons were heavier weight than magazine paper, were inserted into the folds of the magazine, and had punch-outs across the coupon. At the time, I didn't know why my mother's coupons had holes. I just thought it was something space age-y or the like. Now, I assume it was for the product company's use to speed processing when it came time to reimburse the stores. The punchcard coupon was phased out sometime around 1970. My mother then began clipping coupons from magazine pages and the newspaper.

There were so many stores in the area and ways to procure groceries that stores began competing against each other, not through lowering prices but by offering trading stamps in exchange for your purchase. Trading stamps could be redeemed for hard goods. We had both Blue Chip and Green Chip stamps offered in our area. My mother preferred the Blue Chip stamps, only because we had a redemption store nearby. The number of stamps the grocery store would give to you depended on the amount of money you spent for your purchases. Stores also provided the booklets you would need for collecting the stamps. Once home, you would adhere the stamps to the pages of the booklets. (This was a Saturday afternoon kid-job.) There were larger stamps and smaller stamps. A larger stamp represented several of the smaller ones, so you would only need a few of these larger ones to fill a single page in the booklet. You would need several completed booklets to redeem for an item at the redemption store. A redemption store was a showroom-type store. You walked around the showroom looking at all of the items, which were priced in booklets needed not dollars/cents. Items my family "bought" with our Blue Chip stamps included a world globe (I still have this), a set of TV tray tables, games, puzzles and a lamp. It would take a year of grocery shopping to save enough stamps to redeem for something we would want. Gas stations also participated in trading stamp promotions in the 1960s, boosting a family's ability to save for something "good" in less time.

Sometime in the 1970s, grocery stores dropped the trading stamps and began offering products for free or to be purchased at a small cost in exchange for spending X amount of dollars. My mother collected an entire set of almost-free, blue and white patriotic dishware just in time for the 1976 Bicentennial in exchange for shopping only at Ralph's Supermarket. You could also buy the dishes by the piece for the full price. I'm sure that Ralph's counted on many well-intentioned housewives filling in a few gaps with purchased pieces to make their complete dish set.

Keeping foods

Sometime in the mid-1970s, my parents bought a stand alone freezer for the garage. It was your basic, tall upright freezer. With this, they bought a side of beef. My mother also froze fresh produce and sometimes stocked up on special breads when her shopping would take her the 30 minutes away to a favorite bakery. 

My paternal grandmother was a single mother of 5 children and worked as a bookkeeper during the day. My father had been in charge of the family's victory garden when he was a kid, having to coax younger siblings into doing their share of the work. He really grew to dislike keeping a vegetable garden. As a result, my parents never had a vegetable garden. But they did have some citrus trees at a couple of the houses where we lived. We had fresh-squeezed orange juice and fresh grapefruit every morning during those years. 

on CSU's Extension page for what not to do when canning -- using paraffin wax seals

My mother canned some -- mostly high-sugar or vinegar products. During her day, paraffin wax was an acceptable lid for a jar of home-canned jam. One of my earliest memories of my mother was sitting on a stool across the counter from where she was making plum jam. I watched her pit and chop plums, cook them with sugar, while simultaneously melting wax in another saucepan to pour over almost full jars of hot plum jam. When you went to "open" a new jar of jam sealed this way, you dunked the edge of the wax round into the jam and pulled it out by the edge that popped up. To reseal the opened jar, my mother used a square of waxed paper and a string tied around the top of the jar. 

To bake from scratch or not

My mother became a housewife at a time when packaged products exploded on supermarket shelves. She used a lot of convenience foods, by my standards. But that was the norm and was considered a good use of time, as it would free up valuable time for other homemaker pursuits, such as sewing all 5 of us matching outfits for our family vacation. (I'm glad I don't have that photo to show you!) My mother only baked yeasted bread a couple of times in their early marriage. And she said she preferred the texture and reliability of cake mixes over scratch cakes. She also bought canned soups instead of homemade soups most of the time. And my father preferred instant mashed potatoes over fresh potatoes boiled and mashed. My mother was either insulted or amused when I bounced into the house exclaiming loudly, "did you know you could make mashed potatoes from regular potatoes? Stephanie's mom is making mashed potatoes and squishing them herself!" 

My mother's use of these boxed and canned products was what I think was part of a greater emphasis on learning from experts (as in the Home Ec as a science) instead of learning to cook from your mother and her mother. The boxed cake was more reliable.. The canned soup always tasted good. That line of thinking. In many ways, buying mixes and prepared products saved money, too. No need to buy special cake flour if you're only baking one cake in the coming months. Cake flour, like any other flour, can get pests. Unfortunately, product labeling requirements in the 50s and 60s was not as extensive as it is now. A homemaker might not know that the can of soup contains cheap fillers. The tide would change drastically for a sector of Americans (the counterculture) in the 1970s, with a rejection of mass-produced foods. Anyone here have a copy of Laurel's Kitchen?

Throughout my mother and father's marriage, my father always gave my mother an allowance that covered groceries. They never had a shared bank account. I thought this was standard practice until I talked to other friends as a young adult. At that time, I discovered that while some partners choose to have separate banks accounts, some also choose to have joint accounts. I can see the merits in doing it both ways. My parents both experienced some humble beginnings in life. I think this shaped their approach to financial planning. Even when my father's career was successful and furloughs were a dim memory, they were still frugal. My mother continued to clip coupons and shop at what would be considered the discount supermarket in their town, even when it was probably no longer financially necessary. 

My mother passed away 2 years before I was married. In my first year of marriage, it was my father who told me stories about their very early marriage meals. Hotdogs and fish sticks came in packages of 10 pieces at that time. They ate hotdogs and fish sticks often those first few years. When they had hotdogs, my father would have 2 and my mother would have 1. After 3 meals, that left 1 remaining, which my mother would slice and add to a stew of sorts. When they had fish sticks, my father had 3 and my mother had 2. This worked out perfectly for the package size, 2 meals and no leftovers.

Stories of my parents' experience of financially-lean years in early marriage really helped me when my husband and I dealt with the same. I went into marriage knowing that we might be relatively poor at first, but if we worked hard and were frugal, we could save enough to buy a house and the life we have now.

Stay tuned for my story . . .

Grocery Shopping, Then and Now: Post-WW2, My Grandmother's Day

I was thinking about how much grocery shopping has changed since my grandmother's day, piecing together tidbits of information from the recesses of my memory and wanted to write it all out. These are my family's experiences and may not be what your family has experienced, with relation to grocery shopping over the last 75 years.

Because my recollections for my grandmother's early years of grocery shopping were largely drawn from my mother's stories and my vague memories from early childhood, I only have bits and pieces for the years between when my grandparents married in the late 1920s until the end of WW2, when my mother was grammar school-age. I started this writing journey with the post-war years, when my grandparents moved back to their home state after moving house 6 or 7 times between the years of 1942 and 1948. (My grandfather worked for a government contractor during the war and was relocated frequently.)

My Grandmother's experience, as told to me by herself, my mother, and from my observations when visiting plus the two years that I lived with her

My maternal grandparents bought a house "in the country" at the end of WW2. "In the country" at that time and place didn't mean living in farm country, but more an area removed from the city but without the amenities of the suburbs, such as street lighting, sidewalks, and convenient shopping. Even so, there was a grammar school within walking distance for my mother. 

My grandparents had one car, which my grandfather drove to and from work in the city each weekday. All stores and markets were closed on Sundays. The nearest market was too far to walk to and carry very much back. Walking to and from the store would also use up valuable time my grandmother needed for keeping the home and caring for children. So, she did what many other housewives in that area did at the time, she ordered her groceries to be delivered. 

How grocery delivery worked back then

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Twice a week my grandmother would phone in an order for next-day delivery. (By 1950, 61% of American homes had a telephone, according to statista.com.) The store clerk would shop her list for her, box it all up, and the delivery man would bring the grocery box to her house the following morning. Roles for the market employees often overlapped. The store owner might pack it all up and deliver it. Or, the delivery driver might also work as clerk and a stock boy, ringing up sales, restocking shelves, unloading new items, etc. The owner might also function as the butcher, helping customers at the meat counter. The market owner's wife likely helped with all of the lighter work, such as cashiering, bookkeeping, packing boxes, and dusting shelves and tops of canned and boxed products. The market where my grandmother bought her groceries was a small one. 

Small markets had small staffs, often just the owners and a couple of additional employees. As such, my grandmother had the opportunity to get to know the owners and employees well. The owner might make recommendations or offer a special item to her. He would cut meat to order, especially useful when my grandfather's boss and his wife would be coming for dinner. When the store introduced a new product, the owner sometimes would include a sample (meaning full-size product) with her order. These samples would be free of charge for her to try, if the owner felt it might be something my grandmother might like. Whoever delivered her groceries, they would come into her kitchen and put her perishable items away in the refrigerator for her. Everyone knew her by name and she knew them by name, as well -- no employee-name tags needed.

How she paid

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My grandmother's groceries would be charged to her store account. At the end of the month, my grandfather would go into the market and pay off the account. By the 1961, they each had their own car. (The second car came from my grandmother's father's estate after he passed away.) With this addition, my grandmother began marketing in person. Their financial arrangement must have changed at this time, as well, as she paid for her groceries when she shopped and no longer carried a balance on an account. Just to note, she always (even in later years) paid cash at the grocery store, never brought a checkbook when that was an option.

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Despite my grandmother's small grocery market experience, many housewives were enjoying a new way to shop. The 1950s ushered in the widespread appearance of suburban supermarkets, with larger stores boasting numerous aisles, shopping carts replacing hand-carried baskets, mostly self-service meat departments, and an abundance of new brands and products from which to choose. All of this meant parking lot sizes increased, too. 

Supermarkets changed the way many suburban Americans shopped. The shopping carts encouraged customers to buy more at a time, so housewives would need to shop less often. Menu planning beyond 3 or 4 days would be necessary to ensure a household would have all they needed for a 7-day week. These early supermarkets experimented with extending operating hours, staying open into the evening perhaps one day per week. Yet most held to the closed-on-Sundays tradition.

Keeping perishables

similar to what I remember from my grandmother's kitchen in the 1960s and early 70s

My grandmother never had a stand-alone freezer. The only freezer she had was a small compartment in the fridge. She did just a small amount of canning to preserve food, relying instead on commercially-canned and boxed products for pantry staples. While she and my grandfather lived "in the country" for many years, they were more flower gardeners than vegetable gardeners. Yet, they did have some fruit trees.

Her later years

Even after my grandmother moved to a smaller house in a suburban neighborhood in 1970, she still preferred to shop in a particular grocery store that was smaller and gave her more personal attention. She was less concerned about finding the best deal than she was about buying higher quality. She had preferred brands from which she would not stray. She also chose to shop a couple of times per week in order to serve the freshest of produce and meat products. I don't think she ever stocked her freezer with meat. The refrigerator section had a meat bin/drawer, where she would keep 2 or 3 days worth of fresh meat. 

In her later years, my step-grandfather and she would shop together. He would do the driving, push the cart, and keep up his end of the conversation, and she would select items, ask him questions about meals and preferences, and interact with the butcher in the meat department and the cashier at the check-out. Grocery shopping had become a "date" of sorts for this sweet, elderly couple. 

Return to some grocery delivery

My grandmother did begin to have milk delivery at some point in these later years. After my step-grandfather passed, the milk delivery order grew, and she shopped in-person less. The dairy service offered milk, cream, cheese, butter, bread, jello salads, eggs, and other foods. My grandmother would shop in a store to buy canned and boxed foods plus some produce and meat every week to 10 days and supplement meals heavily with what would be delivered by the milk man. If there had been full-service grocery delivery at this point in my grandmother's life, I know she would have chosen that option to procure her food and household needs.

My grandmother was born just after the turn of the 20th century and lived until the early 1990s. For the majority of my grandmother's grocery shopping years, natural food stores were considered "fringe," Costco warehouse stores weren't everywhere, and there was certainly no internet shopping available. Yet, she witnessed many changes in grocery shopping, from in-city specialty markets (butchers, bakeries, and produce shops from her childhood years), to small grocery markets with home-delivery, to the introduction of large supermarkets. She may have thought she was living in "modern times." Little did she know what would be right around the corner, in regards to shopping for food and household items.

Stay tuned for my next set of recollections from my mother's grocery shopping years.

Does anybody here celebrate Epiphany or Three Kings' Day?

a bit overdone --
I'm still learning with my new shortbread pan

In our family, the Christmas season goes until January 6, Epiphany (Three Kings' Day). We keep the tree and other Christmas decorations up until then. On or around the 6th (usually the Sunday following Jan. 6), we have a nice meal together. 

In recent years, we've made this meal a winter tea. This Sunday my family will enjoy another winter tea in the afternoon. Here's my planned menu so far:

• homemade scones with an assortment of spreads
• cookies (perhaps finishing off the Christmas cookies or more of the above-pictured shortbread cookies)
• cranberry-chicken salad on beds of greens
• tea cups of cream of broccoli soup
• lots of tea, of course
• there will also be some hidden chocolate coins (for "gold") tucked into each folded napkin

We have our tea at the dining room table, complete with Christmas tablecloth and the dining room decorations. We'll play instrumental Christmas music in the background on the Roku TV. We'll use an assortment of fine tea cups and dessert plates. And we'll have our best manners during tea. This will be our last Christmas meal using Christmas table linens and dishes for the season. And then the tree can finally come down and decorations put away.

The shortbread above was made with another gift to me, this shortbread pan. My family knows I like to bake. I overdid the first batch. I know now to move the oven rack up one slot and bake for a minute or two less. But I do think the cookies are pretty anyway.

Do you do anything for Epiphany or Three Kings' Day?

"These Are a Few of My Favorite Things": The Beginnings of My New Pajamas

I absolutely love it when one of my family members saves some money when buying a gift for me. I love it even more when I can put this gift to use in a way that saves me money.

Every couple of years, I sew myself a new pair of flannel pajama pants. 

Christmas of 2021 one daughter bought me this beautiful grey and white flannel fabric for the pajama pants that I have worn for the last 2 years. 

It's now time for me to add a new pair of pajama bottoms to the rotation. This time I mentioned that I'd like a pink print in flannel and actually picked one out online and showed it my daughters. I also mentioned that they could save some money by shopping that week, if this was a gift they wanted to buy for me. The fabric was on sale for $3.99/yd, and my daughters now know that I always need 2 yards of fabric for pj pants. They saved themselves about $12 total compared to the regular price. So they bought a gift for me that was exactly what I would like, and by shopping at the right time, they saved themselves some money on the gift.

On my end, I won't need to spend a single cent to sew these up. I have thread and elastic in my stash and the needed sewing pattern. I've been using this same McCall's pattern for 23 years. This will be my 8th pair of pajama pants made with this pattern. I like to get my money's worth out of patterns (ha ha). 

I've made long flannel pajamas, long lightweight cotton pajamas, and summer pajama shorts with this same pattern, some pairs for me and some pairs for both of my daughters. I know this pattern very well, now. It's an easy one to begin with, but also, being so familiar with it, I can sew up a pair of pjs in one afternoon. One day next week (after we've taken the Christmas tablecloth off the table), I'll get out my sewing machine.

When I was looking at flannel fabric with my daughters in early December, they asked what I was looking for. I mentioned I wanted something bright and cheerful that would feel spring-y to me. I wear flannel pajama bottoms until late May -- it's that chilly at night where I live. So something that looked less like "winter," but would still keep me warm at night was top of mind this time. I love that there are tiny tulips throughout this print. I think these pjs will say "spring."

I don't mind not being completely surprised when it comes to gifts that I receive. And I don't mind having to put in some work with the gift to "finish" the gift. I treasure the knowledge that my family members want to please me. In our family, we each come up with suggestions for the rest of the members to consider. Our family seems to prefer this method as opposed to trying to guess what everyone would like.

How do you feel about gifts? Do you like to be completely surprised, or are you okay with having a general idea what close family might give to you? As the gift-shopper, do you prefer to surprise someone, or do you appreciate a "wish list"?

"These Are a Few of My Favorite Things": 3-Ingredient Dark Chocolate Honey Mint Patties

Three ingredients, that's it. Just unsweetened dark chocolate, honey, and peppermint oil.

I like a piece of chocolate candy now and then ("now" meaning today after lunch, "then" meaning tomorrow after lunch -- so not as rare as "now and then" sounds). But I also am mindful of ingredients that my body could reject and make me sick. With just three ingredients, I knew these would be okay for me.

My daughter-in-law brought the non-mint version of these patties when they came over one evening in 2020. I thought they were amazing, especially considering the chocolate is unsweetened. I wanted to try the mint patties, as I'm a big chocolate mint patty devotee. I mentioned to my daughters that I would greatly appreciate some of these as a gift. My daughters made sure I received a bag of these from Santa on Christmas.

The mint version did not disappoint. They are so rich and delicious, and yet are a good choice when wanting a sweet candy treat. The brand is Heavenly Organics. They are not easy to find in stores, but my daughters did find them on Amazon. They are kind of pricey. But hey, maybe that will make them feel even more special to me as I indulge. 

Anyway, I know others here struggle with food ingredient issues. I wanted to share that there is a brand of chocolate candy that contains very few ingredients, in case that is helpful.

"A Few of My Favorite Things": A Dishwashing Brush and Solid Soap

On to another of my favorite gifts this Christmas, things that some folks may be curious about.

A dishwashing brush and bar of dishwashing soap

This is another one of those things I wanted to try but didn't want to spend the initial investment on, a dishwashing brush with bar dish soap. 

For a while now, I've wanted to get away from the plastic waste of bottled dish soap (the kind for hand washing dishes, pots, and pans). I really wish that the bulk section of stores would carry non-food liquids, such as dish soap, shampoo, cleaning solutions. Years ago, we had a co-op near us that did carry some of these non-food essentials. You would bring your own container in to the store, the clerk would weigh the empty container and give it a tare weight, marking the bottom of the continuer. Then after filling your container and doing your shopping, you'd take it to the register and the clerk would be able to deduct the tare weight from the total weight and calculate the price based solely on the product you bought. This store didn't last long in our area, sadly. Perhaps closer to the city, the same co-op chain's stores do better.

Even with not adding to plastic waste, shipping diluted liquids adds to the fuel consumption part of transporting items to market. A better solution, in my opinion, might be to use more dry or highly concentrated ingredients or cleaners.

In addition to the soap bar, I also wanted a brush that was made of natural materials and had a replaceable brush head. Surprisingly, there are dish brushes that don't have replaceable heads. So when the head wears out, you throw the whole brush away. This was something I wanted to avoid. And honestly, I think vegetable cleaning brushes should be made the same way. Our current vegetable cleaning brush is one plastic piece plus individual bristles. When bristles give out, I'll have to throw the whole brush away. For my next vegetable cleaning brush, I'll buy something like this dish brush that has replaceable heads.

To wash dishes, pots, or pans with a bar of soap, you need specific dish soap or all-purpose soap, not bath soap. You also need a brush, a sponge, or a rag. And you need a water-holding dish or container to keep the soap bar and brush between uses, preferably something without a lid, so the soap can dry out

How I wash dishes with a brush and bar soap

I do a quick rinse of the individual items to be washed, just before wiping with a soapy brush. I wet the brush head under the tap, then brush the head across the bar of soap a couple of times. I drip about 2 to 3 teaspoons of tap water onto the specific dish, pot, or pan, then clean it with the soapy brush. I stack the soapy items in the sink until the sink is about full. then I rinse it all quickly and place the items in a dish drainer.

It doesn't take much soap to clean most items. If a particular pot or pan is especially greasy, instead of loading a lot of soap onto the brush to begin, I will wash it with a small amount of soap, quick rinse, then rewash with a bit more soap. In addition, some pots or pans need additional scrubbing with a scrubby sponge to remove cooked on bits. The brush can "miss" cooked on spots on these pieces. Also, the brush head doesn't fit inside slim juice glasses. I still need to ash those out with a sponge or rag.

With silverware, we place all of the pieces in the dishpan with about 1 inch of water. We allow them to soak until enough accumulate to wash with the bar soap and brush in one go. Rinsing a handful of silverware at a time wastes less water than rinsing each fork and spoon separately.

It's important to allow the soap bar to dry well between washings. If the soap stays wet it will get soggy and too much soap will be applied onto the brush, wasting the soap. I keep the soap bar on a small plate next to the sink, with the brush lying to the side on the plate and not on the soap bar itself. When soapy water has puddled on the plate, I've used that liquid like I would conventional liquid dish soap, pouring a little of it off into a large skillet, mixing bowl, or pot for washing.

Some folks wash with bar soap differently that I do. They fill a sink or dish pan with hot water, briskly wave the bar soap through the hot water until the water looks a bit cloudy and is slightly bubbly. Then they wash dishes as one would usually do with liquid dish soap. This seems to work for them very well. For me, I prefer being able to wash a couple of dishes at a time as we use them and not fill the dish pan with soapy water. It also means my hands have less contact with the soapy water, which dries my skin. I still need to find some good cleaning gloves that won't irritate my skin (latex allergy).

Besides all of the above, here's a difference between bar soap and liquid soap. Liquid soap has been made to be gentle on hands and often contains moisturizers. These bar soaps clean really, really well, leaving plates squeaky clean. However, they can be a little bit drying to skin. It seems like I'm using more moisturizers on my hands these days. As I said, I need to find some gloves.

We've been using the soap bar and brush for about 1 week now. My verdict -- I really like this set-up. We are all more likely to wash up our own dishes throughout the day instead of leaving a huge pile for the end of the day. The process feels simpler, too. Wet, swish against soap bar, swish on dish, rinse. And the dishes feel really clean.

Will I continue when the bar soap is gone? That depends on how long a soap bar lasts us and how important it is to me that we reduce plastic waste. So, we shall see. What I do know is that there are less expensive bar soaps that work for dishwashing, such as castille soap bars and olive oil soap bars. The bar soap that I received was made locally by a small business. I like that this purchase supported someone running a business out of her home. So that's another consideration for me -- less plastic waste, less fuel used in transport to store, and on top of all of that, supporting a small, local home-based business.

Eventually I will need to replace the brush head. That's a simple job. There's a metal band just below the base of the brush head. I used a flathead screwdriver to move the band to just above the wood handle. This allowed the prongs to loosen enough to take the head out. Easy-peasy.

Those tan flat things in the top photo were also part of the gift. These are natural cellulose sponges that have been compressed. When you get one wet for the first time, it expands to regular sponge size and stays that way. I think they would make a fun housecleaning/housewarming gift, with or without a bar of dish soap and/or brush.

A side aspect of this gift that I learned -- this old dog can learn a new trick or two.

"These Are a Few of My Favorite Things": Christmas Gift Edition

Happy New Year, Friends!🥳

Sometimes the gifts we receive are wonderful and just what we needed, but don't have a lot of appeal as a conversation topic. Other times, the gifts have a bit of novelty to many of us. We find ourselves with a natural curiosity about these gifts that others receive. 

So this week (and next if I'm slow), I'll post a little about some of the gifts I received that may have interest to some of you.

A shiitake mushroom growing kit

For a couple of decades, I have wanted to try growing mushrooms indoors. I could never justify the cost of the kit as part of my grocery budget. Earlier this fall, I thought perhaps I might mention this sort of kit to my family members as a gift possibility. My family seemed to think this would be a perfect gift for me, as I'm constantly trying to grow more varied foods for my family.

My son and daughter-in-law bought this at a local farmer's market the weekend before Christmas and kept it in their fridge (to keep it from starting) until Christmas Day. It came packaged in a large plastic bag with a ventilation patch (like sometimes found on fresh produce bags). 

I started the kit on Tuesday. I  removed the block with spores from the plastic bag and rinsed it as recommended, then sprayed it all over using spring water (no chlorine). I set the block on a make-shift rack of canning jar lids (one of the recommendations from the kit company) set on a large plastic bin lid as a tray. The rack ensures good ventilation all around.

I placed a large plastic bag loosely over the top and have been spraying once per day since. (The kit company suggested either a large plastic bag or a cardboard box.) The company suggested to place the covered kit in bright, but indirect light. I put it about 8-10 feet away from a large window in one of the sunniest rooms in the house. Just note, a sunny room in the maritime NW in a house surrounded by tall evergreens is really not all that sunny for very long each day.

Above is what the kit looked like the first day, with one mushroom protruding from a side and lots of small white bumps all over.

And here's what it looked like Thursday afternoon. Until today, I didn't realize those white bumps were beginning mushrooms. But now I can see that's what these are. I should have a lunch sack full of shiitake mushrooms in a week or two.

Whoa! I guess I underestimated the growth speed of these little jewels. Here's Saturday's photo! I'll be harvesting a bunch in just a couple of days. The company recommends storing the harvested mushrooms in a paper bag in the fridge. The paper allows a good balance of moisture retention while minimizing mold growth. Stored this way, the mushrooms will keep for up to 2 weeks.

The kit company has a website which offered info on starting it, when to harvest the mushrooms, how to store harvested ones, and how to get the kit to produce additional flushes. The website was very informative and helped give me the confidence to get the kit started. I was a little nervous that I would botch the kit. Evidently, those mushrooms were ready and waiting, just needing a bit of moisture and room temperatures.

While my son and daughter-in-law bought this kit from a local company, mushroom growing kits are also available online to be shipped. I've seen indoor home consumer kits priced for as little as $13 on Amazon. I don't know if growing mushrooms indoors is a bargain or not compared to buying mushrooms from the store. However, the outdoor kits, also sold online, will recolonize and last for many, many years and may be a better "deal" for growing mushrooms than indoor kits. I specifically wanted an indoor kit, though, so I could grow mushrooms for our meals this winter. But I'll be thinking on the possibility of starting an outdoor colony someplace near my vegetable garden.

This is one very tasty Christmas gift!

My Daughters' Invention for Christmas Dessert: Peppermint-Chocolate Tofu Silk

 

I wanted to show what my daughters created for our Christmas dinner dessert. They basically followed this recipe that I blogged about in 2015. It's a melted-chocolate-chip-blended-with-pureed-tofu recipe. 

My daughters, however, made this into a layered parfait dessert, with about 2/3 of it a white chocolate-peppermint base layer, subbing some white chocolate chips and peppermint extract for the semi-sweet chocolate chips and vanilla extract, then swirling into the white chocolate-tofu some crushed candy canes. They topped the base layer with a small batch of chocolate-tofu silk, using silken tofu for both layers. For additional color on the chocolate, they sprinkled some red cookie decor sugars and added a peppermint-vanilla swirl cookie to each serving.

The desserts were creamy and delicious. Plus they looked pretty sitting on the buffet during our dinner. I served the parfaits with a large bowl of tangerines in the center of the table. The combination of eating something fresh like fruit with the creamy and sweet tofu silk was just the right kind of balance for us.

Our Christmas Cup Game and How We Modified It

Merry Christmastide, friends! 

How was your Christmas? I hope you and your family were blessed by the activities on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.

We enjoyed both days immensely. I made even more changes to our Christmas Day meal plans, simplifying my actual day-of work significantly. We skipped the steaks for dinner altogether. Instead, I pre-made some curried chicken salad, opened our box of smoked salmon, pre-cooked roasted carrots with thyme, pre-roasted tri-colored potatoes with garlic and rosemary, pre-baked honey-mustard glazed onions, thawed some scratch dinner rolls, used a coupon for a free salad kit from Fred Meyer, and my daughters made a dessert. About 30 minutes before eating dinner, I tossed the salad, microwave-heated the carrots, potato, onion dishes and dinner rolls, plated the smoked salmon, and placed everything on the table. This was one of the easiest Christmas dinners I've ever made and will consider doing something along these lines again in the future. Our brunch meal plan was simplified as well. My daughters made a batch of deviled eggs the day before, I heated the pre-baked breads and muffins, I cooked a package of bacon, one daughter made a salad of fresh blueberries and sliced bananas, I thawed some homemade frozen eggnog, and we set out 2 types of juice. Again, super easy on the day-of an event. BTW, frozen eggnog made with heavy cream separates into whipped cream and the rest of the beverage. Once thawed, I ran it through the blender and served it fro the blender pitcher.

On to our game. . .

As you might recall, Alice gave me the idea to do this cup game with our family. I set 50 red and green plastic Solo-type cups upside down on the kitchen table and decorated each cup with a star bow from our stash. I had enough small prizes for each cup. 

The prizes ranged in value from a kitchen sponge at the low end to a full-sized bottle of Bath & Body Works shower gel (free with a coupon). I also had lots of edible prizes, such as chocolates, tiny containers of jam, a mini bottle of cajun spices, a small tin of breath mints, small packs of nuts, individual packets of cookies, and individually-packaged tea bags. For non-food prizes, I bought the mentioned kitchen sponge, a rechargeable mini-flashlight, a couple of small puzzles, chip clips, hand warmers, travel-sized toiletries, a bath bomb, some fingernail clippers, a couple of votive candles, and perhaps a couple of other things that escape my memory right now. The "big" prizes (meaning desirable) were $5 gift cards to McDonalds, See's Chocolates, and Starbucks. 

WinCo's bulk bin section was a great place to shop for small amounts of candies, cookies, or tea bags. The best price on Solo-type cups was Dollar Tree. I bought the green cups there. I had previously bought the red cups at Target, but at least I bought the Up and Up brand of those. I used coupons wherever I could and raided my gift closet for small gift-ables. 

I did as Alice had recalled from her family playing this game, and when a prize was too big to fit under the cup, I put a number under the cup and tagged the corresponding item with the same number. I then placed these all in a cabinet out of sight. I didn't mention to the "contestants" that there were some cups with numbers underneath. So when the first number was found, there was a lot of buzz and excitement over what this meant. Once they realized that some prizes were stored in the cupboard, and I had to retrieve them, everyone wanted to get a number.

Once all of the cups had been removed, we added an extra level of play to the game. At this point, everyone had 10 prizes. I told them that they could choose to keep all of their prizes, or they could return some of them to the table, exchanging each for a token. The tokens could then be used to choose from the returned prizes from other contestants. Everyone had some prizes they wanted to exchange. As with the first level, the contestants took turns choosing from the returned prizes, which were out in the open at this point. By adding this extra part to the game, everyone had a second chance at some of the prizes.

Everyone loved the game and said it was a lot of fun. Lots of laughter, smiles, and giggles. This game was a winner.

Had to Nix the Takeout Chinese Meal for Christmas Eve . . .

 . . . but its all good, we'll still be having an Asian dinner that doesn't take much of my time. As it turned out, both daughters will be out with the car in the early evening on Sunday. If I waited for them to come home and then go get the takeout, we'd be eating dinner around 7:30. I think I've got this covered.

Here's my plan:

On Monday I cooked up some stir-fry beef and onions. When it finished cooking, I could tell it was way more than the 4 of us would eat, so I froze about third of the cooked meat. Today I bought frozen egg rolls, ready to heat and eat, some Asian stir-fry veggies, a tub of tofu, and some whole wheat spaghetti pasta. I'll make a beef and tofu chow mien-type main dish with the noodles, meat, tofu, and frozen veggies, then have egg rolls on the side. It should be quick and easy to throw together. Not including the cost of the already cooked meat, I spent $11.50. That's not bad compared to what I was prepared to spend for takeout Chinese. So, I'm happy with it.

Have you needed to modify any of your holiday plans somewhat last-minute this year? Wishing you well as your finalize all of your work ahead of Christmas!

The White Chocolate-Covered Snowflake/Star Pretzels

I made the chocolate-covered snowflake pretzels today. I sprinkled them with light blue coarse sugar after dipping. I think my son and daughter-in-law will enjoy these.

I was a bit disappointed in the amount of broken pretzels in the bag. But no worries -- I turned all of those bits into some semi-sweet chocolate pretzel bark for my husband and daughters. I know they'll love this. The 4 of us have been enjoying all of the leftovers from my cookie and treat baking this week and last. 

There's always some sprinkles or coarse sugar that ends up on the waxed paper instead of the pretzels. I saved all of that in a small bowl to stir into oatmeal, cocoa, tea, or something like that. It's just sitting out for anyone in the family to use. So, nothing was wasted. That's always a good feeling.

My Non-Complicated Way to Divide One Egg for Cutting Recipes in Half

I went to bake a half-batch of caramel nutty bars today and needed only 1/2 egg to do so. I've had mixed success dividing eggs equally. Even after beating well, the whites always want to slide out of the measuring spoon when I try dividing by measure. So I came up with this technique. It's super simple and most of us have the "equipment" needed.

I used 2 identical custard cups, a fork and a spoon.

After breaking the egg into one of the cups, I beat it well with a fork.

I then spooned half of the beaten egg into the other cup, eye-balling the equal levels between the two cups.

This has worked for me with every recipe that I've needed to split a single egg in the last two years. I don't know why I didn't think of this sooner, as I've had a set of custard cups for decades and this was easily do-able.

Anyway, the caramel nutty bars look delicious. I now have half an egg set aside in the fridge to use soon. FYI, an egg out of the shell, or an egg yolk, or egg white will keep in the fridge, covered, for about 3 days. I'll have to come up with another use for this leftover 1/2 egg.

Stretching Liquid Dish Soap (For Hand-Washing Dishes) With Baking Soda

My grandmother was full of wisdom for me in my early years of marriage. She had all kinds of tips, especially tips that would help me save money. She lived about 5 minutes from where my husband and I set up our first home together. One afternoon when I was visiting, I was drying lunch dishes while she washed. (My grandmother never had an automatic dishwasher.) She and I were talking about how much easier life was now/then than when she first married, mere months before the stock market crash of 1929. I asked for details about how she did ordinary things in the home. Here's what she shared with me:

"Take this dish soap," pointing to the bottle of Ivory. "I had nothing like this then." 

"I used to take a bar of soap and grate it and store it in a jar. After meals, when it was time for me to clean up, I put a spoonful of it [grated soap] into a tea cup and added boiling water from the stove. I stirred until all of the soap was dissolved. I stirred in a heaping spoon of bicarbonate [baking soda], too. When it was ready, I poured this into the dishpan and added the boiling water for washing."

Me, incredulous, responded something like this, "really? Grated bar soap and baking soda is what you used for dishwashing?"

"Yes, dear. Where we lived, this is what we all used in those days to wash dishes. Sometimes I ran out of bar soap and couldn't buy more for a while. In those days I used just bicarb to clean dishes and a lot of elbow grease to scrub pots. Bicarbonite was always cheap. Bar soap was more precious during the Depression."

I've held this little homemaking tidbit in the back of mind all of these years, meaning to try this out someday. 

One day in early November (around the time I had a dental infection and was desperate to get my surgery), our dishwasher went kaput. The part we need is no longer available, wouldn't you know. So we've been hand-washing all of our dishes since. The only bright spot in my dental ordeal is I was not expected to wash dishes for about a week. 

I've been surprised by how quickly we go through a bottle of liquid dish detergent. One evening last week, as I was filling the washpan with hot water, I noticed we were nearly out of dish soap. That's when my memories of my grandmother's stories and wisdom came to the surface. I wondered if I could use just a little dish soap and a very heaping spoonful of baking soda to wash the dishes that night.

And you know what? It turned out that I could. All of the dishes came out sparkling clean. Even the pots and skillet cleaned up without the addition of more soap. And this is what we used for the rest of last week and all of the weekend.

Wanting to see if other folks had tried this in recent years, I went online and discovered that, yes, a little baking soda is a great way to amplify soap's cleaning abilities. A small amount of soap can clean more dishes with baking soda added than just the same amount of soap by itself.

From RusticWise.com:

"Wash dishes for a sparkling clean: Washing dishes with baking soda and dish soap is an easy way to boost cleaning power. To use baking soda for washing dishes, simply fill your sink with hot or warm soapy water. Then add 2 heaping tablesoons of baking soda to the water. Soak any greasy pots or pans with stuck-on food in the solution for several minutes. This lets the powerful duo work their magic. Then scrub away! Another way is to simply sprinkle baking soda onto a damp sponge with a bit of dish soap to use as a gentle scour."  

We've also found it extremely helpful to pre-rinse all greasy dishes or pots before adding them to the soda/soap water.

I have yet to try this with just baking soda, as my grandmother said she had to do. I will let you know if baking soda alone will clean dirty dishes when I perform that experiment. For the meantime, I now know how to stretch small amounts of liquid dish detergent. Thanks, Nana.

Christmas Menus

I've been slowly whittling away at the Christmas menus over this last week. I simply don't have the energy to do as much as usual.

I started with lasagna, vegetables, and homemade cookies for Christmas Eve. Then that was simplified to homemade pizza, veggies, and cookies. And now we're leaning toward take-out Chinese for Christmas Eve.

For Christmas Day breakfast, we began with a sausage and pepper egg casserole, bacon, almond bread, muffins, fruit salad, juice, and coffee/tea/cocoa. This meal too needed to be simplified. We're now planning on ham slices, deviled breakfast eggs made the day before (bacon bits mixed in with mayo and egg yolk to stuff the whites), a fruit bowl from the produce department (probably watermelon chunks), almond bread (already baked and in the freezer), muffins, juice, coffee/tea/cocoa. My husband will be in charge of the hot drinks, I'll bake and freeze a batch of muffins in the next couple of days, my daughters will do the deviled eggs, and I'll heat the ham slices.

We had planned on doing a Christmas lunch a few hours after the breakfast, but really, who are we kidding? None of us will be eating our Christmas breakfast at a usual breakfast hour. My son keeps late hours as a software engineer, and they often don't arrive for a breakfast at breakfast hours. So, we'll skip the lunch idea, do brunch using the breakfast menu, and somewhere around 1 or 2 in the afternoon I'll add a bowl of chicken salad (made the day before) and some rolls (already baked and in the freezer) to the remains of the breakfast spread. If we happen to have tangerines on hand, I'll add those, too.

Christmas Day dinner -- this is the big meal of our celebrations, so I didn't want to cut back too much on my efforts for this meal. But this is also the most complex of our Christmas meals. Much of it needs to be done just before serving. So far, I have steaks in the freezer from our latest beef delivery. My plan is to make Steak Diane, which is done on the stove. My daughters have volunteered to make a dessert for us. I still need a starchy dish (perhaps popovers or potatoes au gratin) and 2 vegetable dishes. I have a coupon for a free bag of salad mix at Fred Meyer. I'll get that and perhaps some vegetables to roast in the oven. I would also like to make my mother's creamy jello salad in tiny wreath molds. I may be able to un-mold those onto individual plates the day before, allowing me to take my time with this part of preparation. Can you see any other aspects of my meal prep that can be done ahead of time?

How are your holiday meal plans coming? What's on your menus for both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day?

Just a gift-wrap reminder: diagonal for the win!

Many of us are wrapping gifts this week or next. I've talked about this tip before but wanted to remind you friends once again.

When your gift wrap is just short of the ends meeting on the backside when wrapping conventionally (paper ends are parallel to the boxes sides), turn the paper on the diagonal and see if the paper will fully cover your gift.

Here's a small box that I was wrapping with a scrap of paper. The paper was about 1/4-inch too short for the ends to meet on the back side. 

I tried turning the box 90 degrees in the other direction, and I just couldn't get it to work. 

So I turned the paper on the diagonal and, presto, the box was thoroughly covered with the paper.

Diagonal for the win!

I baked the peppermint-vanilla swirl cookies

I baked the tiny gingerbread men last week. Yesterday I baked up the peppermint-vanilla swirl cookies. They're supposed to be pinwheel cookies, but I'm afraid my pinwheels lack all of the turns of the wheels. They are delicious, nonetheless. I always wonder why no manufacturer makes a peppermint cookie that doesn't also have chocolate. Peppermint and vanilla are a yummy combination, even without chocolate.

Anyway, these are impressive-looking for the low cost and relative ease. They are a refrigerator dough that is sliced after firming. I use my mother's chocolate and vanilla pinwheel cookie recipe, leaving out the chocolate in one portion of the dough and adding in red food coloring and peppermint oil until the dough tastes minty enough. I also add about 1 extra tablespoon of flour to compensate for the gel and oil added to color and flavor.

Baked refrigerator cookies freeze well. I froze my son and daughter-in-law's portion and a dozen for us. I also put out a dozen to eat this week and they're almost gone. I may have to make these again later this week.

I hope all of your cleaning, cooking/baking, wrapping, and other preparations are going well this week.

Playing Reindeer Games This Christmas

Last year after Christmas, Alice told us (in the comments) about playing a game with her family on Christmas. I recall she said it was a big hit with her family members. I tucked this info in the back of my mind and pulled it back up in early November. I think she called it a cup game. 

Anyway, I went online to see if I could find a cup game that might work with my family.

Here's a video that demonstrates how one family plays this game. One person sort of plays "game show host" and uses Solo cups to conceal different prizes. Then family members take turns picking cups to find their prize. The prizes don't need to be as extravagant as this family uses. Alice, I don't know if this is anything like what your family played last year.

https://www.facebook.com/100094676150373/videos/family-christmas-cup-game-/230933973221873/

So I was thinking this would work well for our 6 (or 5 would be playing, I'd be the host). While I've been out shopping, I've picked up some inexpensive prizes and a pack of Solo cups to use for our game. The plan is for us to play this after Christmas dinner.

What propelled me forward with this game plan was a conversation I had early last week. I was talking with the medical assistant at a doctor's appointment and he told me his family plays games after Christmas dinner each year. They take turns planning the games each year and all chip in for the prizes. His stories of their games were very entertaining and made me want to put together something similar for my own family. So that's the plan.

I'm curious, does your family play games on Christmas or other holidays? Give details if you can.

As for the reindeer games, the four of us watched this old version of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer this weekend and wanted to share the link in case you haven't seen it. This animated version was produced in 1948, long before the production of the stop-motion version that most of us knew in our younger years. It's not too long, about 8 & 1/2 minutes. Enjoy!

click here Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1948)

I wanted to show you what I found at Target

 

These are snowflake-shaped pretzels. I paid $3 for the 10-oz bag. Why would I be so excited about these?

Well, every Christmas I bake a bunch of treats to give to my son and daughter-in-law, so they can enjoy the holiday treat foods that the rest of us enjoy.

A popular (with them) sweet snack that I make is chocolate covered pretzels. My son loves these. I think it's the sweet combined with salt that is so appealing.

One year I coated the pretzels with white chocolate and crushed candy cane bits.

Another year I coated the pretzels in dark chocolate and drizzled white chocolate over the tops and sprinkled with candy cane bits.

And yet another year I coated the pretzels in white chocolate then sprinkled them with red and green cake/cookie decors.

I try to do something different with the pretzels each year, you know, just to mix things up. Anyways, this year I have snowflake-shaped pretzels to work with. I'm so excited about these. I hope they turn out really cute.

While I would never spend this much money on chocolate covered pretzels, here's what Hickory Farms sells their white chocolate covered snowflake pretzels for -- $21.99 for a 10-oz box.

They're cute, but not $22 cute. Mine will be just as cute, fresher tasting, and much less expensive to make. Plus, chocolate-covered pretzels are about the easiest holiday confection to make that I know of. Easy is a top priority for me this year.

Just wanted to share what I found. By the way, I didn't find them in-store, but added them to an order to be shipped. They were well-padded in the box with other items and seem to have about the same broken to whole ratio as regular pretzels bought in a store.