Crap Roads = Night at the Office

 So you know how the weather people always ALWAYS panic with the first winter storm and over predict the snow and the ensuing chaos?

Well, this year they tried something new.  UNDER predicting.  We were TOLD (and I obsessively check weather and road type predictions) that the bad snow would start at my house at 1pm.  At Dr. Cowboy/BreadSourceTown at 5pm  FIVE pm.  I had an appointment (turns out my knee has arthritis and I need to do more squats...Dr. Cowboy ALWAYS tells you to do more exercise.  I was thinking less) at 1:30pm.  I was picking up bread for 3 people  It's always like those stupid story problems in jr high math class...how do you get 40$ of artisanal bread to 3 people around a webinar and a Dr. appt?

Well, do the webinar until 11am, time departure from the office, where you did the webinar, to leave 20 min before the Dr. appt which is time for a) a tourist to slow you down on the scenic windy road and b) pick up the bread and park at the office without turning off the car because the battery isn't charging right and it's not worth fixing wiring on a car that old.

So, I take off at 12:32pm.  ALL IS WELL>

I get to Dr.CowboyBreadTown about the time planned.   But it's snowing.  Just a little scenic pretty snow.  Seems fine.  Get bread, park at Dr. Cowboy and I'm 10min early because no tourist.  I wait in the car sorting through my "Master List" (more on that in a different blog).

I go in.  Have the appt.  Get told I'm old and that's just the deal and do more exercises.

30min or 40min and I'm on the road at 2:13.  Now it's like REALLY snowing.  It started 4 hours early.

BUT Sol the Subaru has that thermometer thingy in the dash and it says 34degs. So the road SHOULD BE FINE just like when I drove over.  I have the bread orders sorted for easy delivery.

I get 2 or 3 miles back out of town, it's 17 back to the office.  I have noticed that the road is F*$^ING SLIPPERY.  I have my winter tires on.  I tested the brakes when the rig in front of me fishtailed.  I HAVE brakes.  But they had very little effect on speed.  1 mile more and traffic is STOPPED. Flashers on.  I do get stopped (that's due to being headed slightly up hill and doing 10mph).  I text people waiting for bread that it's going to be more of a wait.  A cop tries to drive up and turns around. He eventually walks up.  Later we see him sliding, on foot, sideways toward the inside of a banked curve.  The curve where the cable-guy van had, before my eyes, slid sideways until it was completely in the ditch.  Bummer for him but at least we still had 1 lane open.

Eventually cars come from the otherway.  Until now I'd thought this was like just a vehicle blocking the lane. NOPE.  The entire road was glazed with ice and that was glazed with water and slush.  Everyone coming my way was doing 5mph or so and had BIG EYES.  Eventually enough cops got on scene to start trying to move traffic.  People who tried to turn around slid into the ditch nose first instead of sideways.  I figured I might as well keep pointing forward as I had more of a chance of continuing than if I tried to turn around on the banked/sloped road where I was stopped.  

We were stopped about a half hour.  I had plenty of gas but super needed to pee.  Oh well.  Work on the kegels and hope for the best.

When we did go, it was 5mph.  I drove in 1st or 2nd gear (thanks sport shift automatic!) because braking downhill was not going to be a thing.  It took 75 minutes of actual rolling time to do the 17 miles to my office.

I counted over 20 people in the ditch and watched many of them go into the ditch.  

I heard from folks on the highway headed to my house, that much the same situation was on the highway toward home.  I have a camping mattress and blanket at the office and had done laundry which was still in the car, along with snow shoes and water.  So I stayed at the office.  Just grabbed my gym bag so I could wear gym pants as jammie pants.  Settled in with some youtubes and my bread and the office pantry and called it a night.  Pulled chicken (from a chicken I butchered) with local hot peppers I'd put in the office freezer, and a fresh baguette.  It was a good supper.

Now I'm having my morning coffee, and waiting an hour for the sun to hit the road. There is a road camera a mile from my house that shows the pavement.  It used to have a thermometer reading too but that is conveniently broken.  Damn.  Oh well.  Last night I checked it and could see vehicles leaving wiggly tracks in slush and figured "no."  Today I see all pavement. I bet there is enough brine on that to dissolve my undercarriage before I hit the driveway.

As for the bread.  Both people had final trips to make and had also listened to and trusted the weather people...so they came by the office to pick it up and that was that.  Both also texted later that driving was CRAP in all directions.   The highway back to Dr.Cowboy/BreadTown was blocked by multiple jack knifed log trucks all night.  Part of the interstate north was as well.  Downed powerlines took out another road.  Here at the office, I had heat, food, entertainment, power, and a working toilet.   I've spent worse nights.  Much worse. The camping mattress though is utter crap!  I had tried to return it to Cabela's but they told me covid prevented them from taking returns at that time. It was warmer than the concrete floor, but otherwise not better.

Oh For Pete's Sake!

 

Really people?  You break my window out?  Honestly?

Really?

I guess, yes, really.  Same day the windshield on the subaru cracked all the way across.  I knew it had a little ding, but couldn't find it.  It was way at the bottom.  The crack is below eyeline so I should be able to drive with it until the rig croaks. 

The truck though, have to replace that.  The deputy showed up in a timely fashion and gave me a case number but said that honestly, unless someone comes in and says "hey, I broke out a window on a truck with plate number..." they won't get the person.

I don't carry comprehensive on a 21 year old vehicle but I do keep a bit of $$ to the side for BS.  I guess it's time to dip into the BS fund.  200$ or so to get it replaced.  Cheaper if  I took time to find a window at a salvage yard but I don't have the time to go do that so just paying up. I don't want to be without the second rig in the winter and it's an hour to the closest salvage yard, 15$ worth of gas to get there and back.  Time to just fix it.  Hence the BS fund.  I am waiting on the motor for the driver's window until I find it cheap because I can do that myself and it's not needed until spring when I get too hot.

Sigh.

First Retrospective on the 10 Day Local Challenge

So, a few days have passed since I finished up the local food challenge.  I did go out to breakfast with a friend or two to mark the end.  That was nice, and of course started a sugar spiral.   

Locally there is no "sugar".  There is honey and I went through most of a pint of honey during the 10 days.  That was spendy.  But also apparently healthier.  It was in the berry puddings.  I did not then go sugar binge so apparently sugar-sugar makes me binge-y and honey not so much.  I might try the berry pudding with some of the stevia I have around. I think I could grow my own stevia and some day I might have bees that produce enough honey to harvest so local sweetener is totally doable. So is living with  much much less sweetener.  The minute I eat sugary crap, fruit tastes less sweet.

I also found out that eating locally is not that hard for me if I focus.  Now that I'm not focused it's easy to just stop at the store and grab something.   I think the focus is better.

It made me appreciate the local food a bit more. I do appreciate it in general. This took it up a half a notch.  If I lived in an apartment in a city, I probably would not know farmers or have good access to so many gardeners.  Certainly wouldn't have chickens and eggs.  Or my giant garden just steps out of the door and a couple of apple trees.

This also pointed out that without sugar and convenience foods, cooking from scratch with actual ingredients and not too much flour...it's hard to overeat. It can be done, but there were days I was putting extra honey in the berries to keep the calories up because I was tired of eating.  This is not something that happens when I am not doing a local challenge or other challenge that makes me cook at home.

I think I will try to focus more and more on local.  Reading the book Plenty is eye opening. I knew about "local washing" (making things seem local but still shipping them hither and yon...like the fake eco stuff that is 'green washed').  E.g. the honey at walmart or costco that says "from the northwest"!  BUT it is actually gathered from many beekeepers who travel their bees and then the raw honey is SHIPPED to Colorado for processing and SHIPPED back!!! Cripes. I got the honey for the local challenge from a local bee keeper, though through a local grocery store, who spins the frames himself and didn't travel his bees this year.  

The book also pointed out that if you are buying local beef or local eggs but the producer is buying feed from god knows where, often other continents, then you're not getting the full localness.  Often there are thousands of miles, fossil fueled carbon dumping miles, in the feed.  Buying local pastured beef, yes.  Local feedlot beef, probably not much carbon/fuel savings but some contribution to the local food economy.  It might be a transitional move if the farmer is moving toward finding local feed.

I'm lucky to have a local non-gmo feed supplier for my chicken feed, and the free range means I feed less.  Since the hens are molting right now they need more protein and the cheapest supplement seemed to be cat kibble. OOPS!  Hardly local. It's a small portion of the intake, but looking at the added miles...hmmm.  Better to trap some local mice.  Also, I checked on the protein levels in my feed supplier's chick grower feed and it's high enough.  About 6cents more per lb of feed (so 6cents more per chicken per week...including roosters since I'm not trying to segregate them from the food bowl).  Not bad.  Not much more than the cat kibble and one 40lb bag should do it.  Might donate the cat food to the lady down the way and put the kibble to a better use or keep feeding it to the hens since it's getting cold and they will need more food in general to stay warm. I only have a a couple of week's supply.  But seriously...DOH!   Missed a trick there.

My garden fertilizer is pretty local.  I get manure the same place I help butcher chickens.  With my new turd unloader on the pick up, and the friend's use of a bobcat to load the truck, I only hand move the poop ONE TIME!  It's a bit more fossil fuel for the bobcat.  The turd unloader is manual but so much easier than a pitchfork.  Compared to bagged fertilizer (plastic bagged of course) shipped from godknows where and probably from feedlot cattle, my fertilizer has traveled very few miles and cost very little carbon.  The sheep are pooping out local hay and feed from about 100 miles away.  I'm also using my chicken poop which is mixed with their bedding straw, which while not organic, is local AND recycled.  I've already used it elsewhere.

My diatomaceous earth is not local.  It's a small input in the garden to control some bugs and into the coop in the winter when the hens can't dust bath outside.  Keeps the mites down.  I will watch my quantities.  

The other chicken input that is non-local is the oyster shells.  Chickens that lay a lot, and my hens are bred to lay even if they are off casts and freebies, need more calcium than their usual diet gives them.  I tried drying and grinding the egg shell and giving those back, but of course it's a losing game, not a 100% efficient closed loop.  Once I started giving ground oyster shells on the side, the eggs hardened right up.  Soft shelled eggs break and turn  your hens into egg peckers, no production there.  It's also a sign that their calcium is too low and their bones go next, bending and breaking. I do think one hen looks like a banty size egg, is eating too much calcium.  Her eggs are pimpled with gritty protuberances.  But the banties are old so she probably can't manager her calcium anyway. 

I'm looking for a local source of calcium or perhaps a source of recycled oyster shells...like friends who eat such things or a restaurant with a seafood night.  I'm also wondering about roasting bones from my own meat consumption or road kill, what could be more local?, and grinding those for a calcium supplement.  Archaeologically we find lots of burnt bone in old fire pits and we call it "calcined bone".  Might work.  Might stink.  I'd just put them in the wood stove in a little cast iron pan I have hanging on the wall.  I should be able to get enough road kill and bone scraps to make it work if it is a calcium they can digest. 

Back to my diet...kind of off the rails local-wise for the last few days.  Too much sugar and crap.  For a longer term more local focus I think I will start smaller and keep adding things in a bit at a time. Need to adjust habits like sugar intake.  

The experiment has made me more alert to local food sources.  Last night on the way home from work I saw two of the cutest little kids ever by the side of the road, sitting at a card table with a sign saying "Fresh Plums".  So I doubled back and got some.  The kids were young, maybe 6 or 7 years old tops.  One had a walkie-talkie and seemed to report into someone that a customer had arrived.  They did indeed have fresh local plums. Big sugary sweet ones.  5$ for a gallon zip-type bag full, or a solo cup full for a dollar.  I took the gallon.  The kids were quite pleased.  Apparently they are making a killing.  Good for them.  They weren't there today so maybe sold out.  Anyway, I might not have done that in the past but I don't have plums producing yet and what the heck.  I'm spitting the pits in a cup and will plant them.  I did make the mistake of absentmindedly eating plums this morning.  20 of them.  With 3 cups of coffee...thanks immodium!  OOPS.  I told people at the office to just go to a different department if they needed the bathroom today.  I still have MOST Of the bag!  I think I will cook up a bit of plum sauce maybe tomorrow night and put it in the freezer at work.  It might be nice on some of the canned chicken and duck I've got in my work pantry cupboard.

I also made the effort last night to pick more of the apples off my own trees.  Upper Deer Poop tree had about 3 apples left on it and zero on the ground.  The deer must have eaten everything including those that fell.  Lower deer poop still had lots. I got about 8 gallons in 20 minutes.  I didn't get them all but I got plenty.  The rest will be for the other creatures.  Wish I could can some of these.  Once I have a kitchen I will get back to canning.  Some years I don't bother as much with the apples but the timing of my local challenge made me more aware right now.  And we're getting a couple of nights in the teens later this week.  That could make the apples unstorable. Better to get them now.  I already had 3 or 4 gallons from a previous harvest on Upper Deer Poop so I'm set for fruit for quite a while.

That's enough of this now.   More will occur to me.

Handy Calculator for CovidRisk...based on "science"...who knew?

 https://mycovidrisk.app/

I found that this morning.  HANDY.  

10 Day Local Food Challenge: Only Hours Left

 So, the hardest part was telling a colleague that I didn't want to eat his home smoked salmon today.  It's killing me and it was rude.  I have some he gave me last week in the freezer at work.  It's a mini-fridge. It's full.

Yesterday friends dropped off some garden overage that they couldn't eat.  Tomatoes, and onion, a little head of cabbage, and a squash.  I used the tomatoes with peppers from a different friend to make a veggie stew.  Augmented it with some sliced up kale, chard, chives, sage and tarragon from the garden.  Perked it up with salt and pepper (the exotics) and fried the peppers in coconut oil (another exotic on the list).

With one full meal left to go, I have not used the sugar.  Had I enjoyed some of the kombucha I'm making, I would have but alas it has not gotten tart enough for me to bother.  I like it when it's almost vinegar.

Last night I also made a blackberry pudding.  3cups fresh blackberries from some friends, 1/2cup local whole wheat pastry flour, 3T honey, a tsp of cinnamon and a 1/4tsp of baking soda (last 2 are on the exotics list).  It was fine.  The baking soda cuts some of the acid from the honey and berries.  I'd eaten too many tomatoes and didn't want to over-acid my stomach.  Anyway, heat and mash the berries in a sauce pan.  Mix the rest of the stuff up.  Mix the flour stuff into the hot berry mash and cook until it looks like a thick porridge.  It was delicious.  Another 1/2 cup of flour and it would have gotten cakey, but I didn't want that much food and need to get through the berries before they mold!  MORE tonight.  It's not a chore, it's a challenge.  I can tell I've boosted the fiber in the diet by eating locally.

I found a book at the library:

In the introduction to the time the authors spent on a local diet, one says something like "I see a lot of potatoes in my future."  She was right.  I've eaten potatoes every day.  They are available locally.  I've also eaten a lot of apples.  They are extremely local.  From my land.  Also, delicious.

That popped out immediately:  I'm very willing to eat what is there if there is some phony rule in place.  Why not everyday?  

I don't do like some friends who decide what to eat randomly, go to the store, get stuff, make one meal.  That is a peachy way to go.  Not my current way.  In general I try to  look at what I have anyway.  The local challenge is a small boost to the effort to start, and now finish, with what I already have.  

A side effect is cutting the non-food budget.  No stop at the store meant I actually ran to town the other day and didn't spend any money.  I do "no spend" days, about 10 a month is the usual goal.  Often I end up spending when I run in to town because I go ahead and hit the grocery store for sales as long as I'm there.  It was a bit of a challenge to break the habit.

Part of it is, I have a TON of food.  Since starting this and without putting out the word, I've gotten a lot of free food:

The aforementioned smoked salmon

3gallons of blackberries

about 15lbs of squash

an onion

5lbs or so of tomatoes

a small cabbage (which will get eaten tonight!)

jam...to be eaten later as not local enough

I'm sure there is more.  I've been offered more but can't store anything else!  Crazy!

I like having my jars of chicken from the day of butchery.  I get 2 or 3 meals worth of meat out of a half pint.  I could eat more in a sitting but I'm getting plenty of protein so might as well stretch it out and eat the fresh veg that will go off sooner.

The book, Plenty, is aptly named.  I have plenty.  It is the tail end of harvest season so that is much of the picture but not all of it.  More anon.

10 Day Local Food Challenge: Day 7

 Well past the midpoint now.

Today I was home and THOUGHT I would have more time to cook.  I did not.  

1) it was raining much of the day and  my outdoor stove doesn't do rain.  This meant no onion frying.  No stinky food making in the house.  

2) the woodstove wasn't needed.  This means no slow cooked stew or sizable baking or roasted potatoes (roasted inside the firebox).

3) I was super busy.

Hence, apple pancakes for breakfast with coffee and water.

Lunch was late because the neighbor was helping me get the truck window back UP.  Why don't window motors break when the window is up?

I got back to the wee shed about 45 minutes before the next thing had to start so I fried up zucchini slices, zucchini from the friends' garden, and scrambled a couple of eggs, then made a vinegar-baking soda raised cake thing with a bit of honey and cinnamon for flavor.  I used vinegar I was soaking local blackberries in.  I didn't taste any black berry but the bannock was sort of pink.  Next time I will put the honey in warm water, there is also water in the recipe, so it is mixed throughout more easily.  It was 45 degrees inside the shed at that point and the honey was a bit hard.

That did take about 20 min to cook so used up a bit of butane.  Bummer.

Supper...more scrambled eggs and stewed apples with a cinnamon bannock on top as a dumpling.  I could have boiled a potato but I forgot.   

I've used all the exotics I picked except sugar. To review...the exotics:

1 coffee

2 tea

3 sugar 

4 baking soda

5 cocoa

6 coconut oil

7 salt

8 pepper

9 vinegar

10 mustard seeds

If I drink my kombucha, that will cover the sugar.

10 Day Local Food Challenge: Day 6

 So far so good!  I had to explain my way out of a breakfast invitation today.  She's a good friend so took it well and after a nice porch visit, she and her Mrs sent me on my way with some gorgeous squash from their garden that I can have now and a jar of jam for after the challenge.   Cool!

I made spaetzle today to stretch the last of a soup (local squash, local onion, my garlic, my herbs, salt and pepper exotics, potato from a neighbor).  Spaetzle is going in my regular rotation!  I got a spaetzle maker from thrift a year ago and have finally figured out how thick the batter can be.  You put egg, water and flour in the tumbler shaped shaker, put on the lids, and little  metal balls mix it up as you shake.   Take off an outer lid to reveal the squeezy holes in the inner lid.  Squeeze into boiling water or broth and voila!  Spaetzle. Clean up is mostly shaking soapy water in there and a good rinse.  The local whole wheat pastry flour I had worked well.  We'll see if the freebie all purpose flour I got as a gift a while back also works.  But it's not local flour so will have to wait.

The soup also had the remnants of a jar of chicken.  Added some flavor.

I am finding I need the grain and honey inputs to keep the calories up.  A largely veggie and lean meat diet was meaning I had to eat more than I could hold to get a days worth of calories.  I don't need to lose weight at the moment so I'm boosting a bit with more carbs.  Honey doesn't seem to make me hungry, but flour does.  Interesting.

Anyway,  I also did a bannock type bread with some of my vinegar preserved berries and honey.  It was pretty good!  The berries and honey were in the bread, not on the bread.  Tomorrow possibly apple pancakes.  Pancakes made with water instead of fake milk (or real milk) are a bit tough textured but not terrible.  Growing some hazel nuts or other things to make a fake milk out of would be nice.  

I'm ending up with more local food than I'm going to be able to eat during this.  Good to know.

Since I bought food ahead and have brought my lunch to work consistently, even though the groceries were more expensive, I'm saving $$.  I don't run to the store for something which means I also don't impulse buy.  Candy is not locally grown so no candy.  The free garden produce really helps as do the things I've grown myself.  

I am spending a ton of time cooking compared to not trying to eat locally grown.  Convenience foods and even the local baked bread, are not made of local ingredients.  So they are out right now. 

Anyway, enough for today.  4 days left!  Tomorrow might be a lentil and wheatberry pilaf for the lunch and dinner options, with some summery squash fried up on the side.   Keeping up with dishes is a bit of a pain because the weather is crap right now and I can't use my little rocket stove to heat a bunch of water and wash dishes outside.  Oh well.  Just need to adjust to the winter routine of eating out of the same plate and washing it immediately after the meal in the pan I cooked in.  

10 Day Local Challenge: Day 3

 So far so good!

I had a work field trip and this motivated me to cook the night before.

Frankly, it was delicious.

I made mashed squash with onion, garlic and tarragon.  The garlic and tarragon were from my garden.  I chopped it up, boiled it together and called it a day.  Half was dinner last night and half went in to lunch.  Also boiled eggs from my chickens, homemade mustard (mustard seeds and vinegar are 2 of my exotics).  And, a sort of blackberry pudding cake thing.  I mashed berries, picked by me, into about a cup of juice and berry guts.  Added local flour, local honey, and a bit of baking soda (another exotic).  Baked it in a makeshift dutch oven on my butane stove.  It was DELICIOUS.  It may be a new standard recipe in full rotation.

For dinner tonight I picked the last of my green tomatoes and fried them in coconut oil (another exotic), local flour and egg wash (my hen's egg) and a bit of salt and pepper (2 more exotics).  Delicious.  I had a bit of egg and flour left after dipping all the tomato slices so I mixed it together and fried it up.  What the heck.

Breakfast today was a pancake made with one of my eggs (well, from a hen), local flour, coconut oil (exotic) and topped with a bit of honey.  I thinned the batter with water.  If I did dairy I could have used that, but I don't so I didn't.  It was fine.  Texture wasn't great but the taste was good.

Oh, also for dinner today, had my apples diced and stewed up a bit with local honey and a few elderberries I picked while on the field trip today.  Quite good. 

I'm not very hungry and this is forcing me to cut crap out of my diet as well.  

So, that's the update.

10 Local Food Challenge...morning, Day 1.

 Had breakfast:

Eggs from my chickens.  Potatoes and hot peppers from Farmer Dave.  Coffee (exotic #1), home made mustard (exotics 2 (mustard seed) and 3 (vinegar))

Current exotics list (remember...only 10 allowed):

1  Coffee

2  Mustard seed

3  Vinegar

Keeping it to 10 is the goal so I've planned some out and will keep a record in case I make a mistake and have to start dumping exotics on the list that I haven't had yet.