Food Waste Friday, September 30, 2011

It's time for Food Waste Friday, when the Frugalgirl encourages us to post pictures from the previous week of wasted food from our household. This accountability hopefully will help us to be more careful with our food and maybe save some money.    

Here it goes for this week.

No Waste! We cleaned our plates and bowls. 

A Second Look--September 28, 2011

If the garden shoe fits, snap it.

Bottle trees

I don't know everything. I know that. Then why is it when I learn something new, I can't believe that I didn't already know it?

This happened a couple of years ago when we visited a small museum that had a display on bottle trees. It was the first time that I had heard of bottle trees and I was fascinated. They have a long history (maybe thousands of years) so there are a lot of variations on their origins and how they work. The general idea is that the bottles capture evil spirits before they can enter your house. In other words, they are a good luck charm. There is also a general consensus that they were part of the African heritage that slaves brought to this country. They are popular in the southern US and blue is the favorite color for the bottles. Besides being a good luck charm, today they are used as garden art.

After I first learned about them, I discovered they were not as rare as I thought. I began to notice references to them in various places, and a few months later, one popped up in my neighborhood. So as I always do, I wondered how something that many others knew about had slipped under my radar.

But maybe they weren't as far removed from my experiences as I thought they were. Customs change and the bottle trees have had many variations including putting blue bottles in your window for luck. Now here's the interesting part. I had had a blue bottle in my window for several years. It came from my grandmother's house where she had it in her front window. I put it in my window just because I thought it was pretty. Who knew that maybe it was really a good luck charm based on a bottle tree. So I almost knew about them. I feel better.

Decorated bottles from the exhibit that first introduced me to bottle trees.

Neighborhood bottle tree. They have been slowly adding bottles.

My blue bottle from my grandmother.

Information from the exhibit we saw.

Food Waste Friday, September 23, 2011

It's time for Food Waste Friday, when the Frugalgirl encourages us to post pictures from the previous week of wasted food from our household. This accountability hopefully will help us to be more careful with our food and maybe save some money.    

Here it goes for this week.

Salsa: Good and better

We had a little bit of salsa left in a jar that has started to mold. It was good, but the salsa we made this summer with fresh tomatoes was better. Thus, the store-bought salsa got shoved to the back and forgotten.

Also, I recently harvested all of the green tomatoes off of a cherry tomato plant before I pulled the vine. Some of them did not ripen well (spots and mealy taste), so they're going out with the salsa.

Meet Lucky

Lucky

(so named after surviving an unfortunate

encounter with a slamming door as a kitten.)

L-Lucy's litter mate

U-Unusual coloring--black-tipped gray fur

C-Calm, except when the vet is involved

K-King of our four cats

Y-You'll love him.

A Second Look, September 21, 2011

This week, it really started to feel like fall with cool evenings and warm afternoons.The moderate weather, along with the rain we have been having, has started a new round of blooming. Some are plants that went dormant during the hot weather of August and others are fall bloomers only.

Also, this week's Second Look had a second look. Wally asked if I had walked around the yard yet and had I seen the big mushrooms. Well, I thought I had looked all over the yard, but I missed what he had seen. I guess that's why we need to do a second look sometimes. So after my pictures, you will see what Wally found interesting this week.

Sternbergia lutea
At first, I thought they were fall crocus.

The newly blooming sedum was teeming with bees and common buckeye butterflies.
(Thanks to Aunt Martha for the butterfly identification.)

Blanket flower. Another flower from this plant won a blue ribbon at the fair last week.

Four stages of black walnuts from freshly fallen to already eaten by squirrels.

The tree that the walnuts fell from.

Wally's Second Look--The Fungus Among Us

Book club

This month, my book club* read The Guinea Pig Diaries by A. J. Jacobs. Jacobs, who is known for his immersion journalism, does a series of life experiments and reports about them in this book. They range from outsourcing his life to India (they're making a movie out of it) to radical honesty to living by George Washington's 110 laws of civility. The book has been on the best seller list and even the critics liked it.

Here are what some "real people" (my club) thought about it.

• Everyone thought it was an easy, enjoyable read.
• Some thought that it was evident that the author's day job (writer and editor at Esquire magazine) was writing for men. Others did not get that impression.
• Some were pleased that the book was not as gimmicky as they thought it was going to be, but that Jacobs also thought about how he was changed by the experiments.
• We liked the fact that Jacobs did a coda at the end of each chapter to discuss what resulted from that particular experiment in the months following it.
• Everyone thought his wife was a saint for putting up with him. He doesn't tell her ahead of time what goofy (my word) thing he is trying to do.
• We thought that the experiments provided interesting jumping-off points for discussions. 
• Two of our jumping-off points were whether or not we have standards today for what is considered good or great things in culture, and whether or not the message of "be happy with yourself" is hindering people in a quest to better themselves.
• We also discussed how they award ribbons at the local fair, but we were a bit off topic at that point 

*A brief background of the club members. We are all women, but we vary in ages and political and religious beliefs. Some members are married and some are not. Some have children and some do not. Some have grandchildren.  Some are working full time, some are working part time, and others are retired. And the important thing is that we all enjoy discussing the books we read which if you are going to believe TV sitcoms, doesn't always happen.
 

This bowl used to be a lot fuller.

Disclaimer: This is my interpretation of what we discussed. Other members may have different ideas because they didn't get up as often as I did to get more M&Ms.

Food Waste Friday, September 16, 2011

It's time for Food Waste Friday, when the Frugalgirl encourages us to post pictures from the previous week of wasted food from our household. This accountability hopefully will help us to be more careful with our food and maybe save some money.  

Calamity 

Sometime in the last week, our chest freezer failed unbeknownst to us-- that is until the smell finally got strong enough to send us searching to find the very stinky, gross mess. Ward and Theodore, heroically, did most of the clean up of the many pounds of rotten meat and various other decaying things. They were on the front line because I had to go to work and Wally couldn't stomach the whole thing. He promptly volunteered to mow the grass.

Needless to say, much food went to waste. I don't have an inventory or really even want to know how much food went bad. It's sort of the "bury your head in the sand" ostrich response.

Until next time, when I hope for a boring post of maybe a tomato that got lost in the veggie drawer.

A Second Look--September 14, 2011

September is National Mushroom Month, so I'm focusing on mushrooms and other fungi this week in the Second Look around the yard. It's curious that in one area, where there were several white mushrooms, all of them were knocked over. I'm not sure how that happened, but in earlier days, I would have suspected Wally and Theodore. Also, I know essentially nothing about fungi, so I welcome any help in identifying things.

Here's what I found.

One of the white mushrooms that was knocked over. I've heard that squirrels and deer like mushrooms.

I don't know if these are little mushrooms are somehow related to the moss they're in.

Little fungi growing on mulch.

Orange, wavy fungus on stump.

White-edged fungus on rotting stump

Tan, flat-topped mushrooms

White fungus on rotting stump

Cluster of orange mushrooms

Hat Tip: A Place to Reside

We went to the Fair!

The Fair

Neighbors and friends

Ribbons and prizes

Chickens and goats 

Rain and mud

Hay rides and tractor pulls

Hot dogs and fried chicken

Pumpkins and tomatoes

Fun and excitement for all!

Food Waste Friday, September 9, 2011

It's time for Food Waste Friday, when the Frugalgirl encourages us to post pictures from the previous week of wasted food from our household. This accountability hopefully will help us to be more careful with our food and maybe save some money. 


Here it goes for this week.
Playing with my food (waste) again.

We're barely managing to keep ahead of our everyday food waste, but we are--almost. This week's waste consisted of another peanut butter sandwich that got lost in my desk at work. Gotta pay more attention to this.

Also, I decided it was time to get rid of some old jelly beans and gum drops that we've had for months. As you will notice, there are only black jelly beans and yellow and purple gum drops. Guess which flavors we don't like? Once again, I'm guilty of hanging onto food that is good, but no one has any intention of eating.  Gotta get over this.

Peanut butter and black jelly beans. I wonder how this combination would taste if they were fresh (and if you liked black jelly beans.)

A Second Look--Sept. 7, 2011

It has been raining the last couple of days from the remnants of Tropical Storm Lee, so I had to go out between showers this week for a Second Look around the yard. I found a few surprises. First I found berries from a Jack-in-the-Pulpit wild flower. I had no idea that we had one of these and am looking forward to  Spring when I can see it in bloom. Next, I actually saw a cherry on one of our wild cherry trees. These trees produce very small, inconspicuous fruit that are a favorite of birds. Therefore, I don't remember ever seeing a ripe wild cherry.

In  addition, we are starting to get some colorful gold finches on our bird feeder. Mostly they are in our front yard where they are eating seeds from our dried coneflower blooms. However occasionally, they venture to the back to the feeder.

Here's a few sights from this week.

Jack-in-the-Pulpit berries

Seed pods on Japanese maple tree.

Geranium,"Rozanne"

Lone cherry on wild cherry tree.

Goldfinch

Juniper berries. These immature berries are actually modified cones.

Dogwood tree berries. Notice one of them has a drop of rain on it.

Food Waste Friday, September 2, 2011

It's time for Food Waste Friday, when the Frugalgirl encourages us to post pictures from the previous week of wasted food from our household. This accountability hopefully will help us to be more careful with our food and maybe save some money. 


Here it goes for this week.
(You will see that I had a little fun with my food waste before it went in the trash this week.)

What went bad:
Bread: Someone gave us a loaf of day-old bread. We ate a little, but didn't like it all that much. I thought I might make some croutons out of it, but it molded before I got to it. Oh, well.

Cilantro: I had a bunch of cilantro out that I had used to make salsa. I left it on the counter as I was contemplating whether or not I was going to freeze it. In the meantime, one of the cats feasted on the tasty greens making my decision for me. And yes, the cat was not supposed to be on the counter. They have very carefully learned not to do it if anyone is watching. I guess that means, "When the people are away, the cats will play."

An Onion: I reached into the bag of onions and found a rotten one. The others were still good, so one just got away from us.

Moldy bread and chewed on cilantro.

This rotten onion was not as tempting to the cat as the cilantro was.