One of my favorite things - sandhill cranes

The first time I heard sandhill cranes bugling from afar, I was out walking the dog. It was a sunny December day not too many years ago, and a strange, distant cooing seemed to be all around me. What was it? Where was it coming from? 

I finally figured out I was hearing the calls of the numerous large sedges (new vocab word for you) of birds flying in loose V formations high, high in the sky, their loud, rattling bugle unceasingly filling the airspace beneath them. Not long after that, I saw a newspaper article about the sandhill crane migration, which prompted some Googling and a Youtube video to confirm that these were the birds I'd witnessed. It was a lucky coincidence I was outside at the same time as so many of the cranes were flying by on their way south. I had never heard or seen these birds before -- how is that possible? Perhaps I had simply never noticed.

Now one of my favorite joys of winter is a chance encounter--from a very great distance--with these noisy travelers. I went outside for a few minutes yesterday to stir the compost, and a group of cranes just happened to be flying by. Their calls filter down to the ground from such heights, I have to look around for a minute before I can pinpoint the sedge in the air. In the late winter or very early spring, I also enjoy the luck of noticing their return north.

This past October, I had a close encounter for the first time. I was driving into a church camp in southeastern Wisconsin, and there were two sandhill cranes just standing around in a field by the gravel road. I've read these cranes are tall, and up close they are surprisingly so. The red cap over their forehead only makes their curious gaze more intense and mysterious.

I don't know why the sandhills delight me so much. Maybe it's because their call is different from the other more commonly heard birds in the area. Maybe it's because of the encounter's brevity and reliance on happenstance; it's like finding a penny on the sidewalk. No matter, really, other than I just wanted to share one of my favorite things in this season of favorite things.

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More food by mail

Almost a year ago, we ordered our first box from Misfits Market. We kept up our subscription for a short while, getting a new box of organic produce every other week, but then my excitement about the fruit and veggie selection began to wane, the delivery was sometimes inconvenient (if I felt I wasn't efficiently planning meals around it), and I thought I could get better prices just doing regular grocery shopping. I'll tell you something, though. There is still ginger in our freezer from that first ginormous bunch. I just used some the other day.

I haven't canceled our account; I just haven't ordered anything new in a while. Maybe I'll feel like it again in the new year, because sometimes facing an unexpected quantity of random ingredients inspires creativity in the kitchen. Other times, yeah, it exerts the pressure of "Do something with this before it goes to waste!"

In the meantime, I got sucked into a "come-back deal" from Hello Fresh. This is a meal kit service. It, too, costs more than regular groceries but less than dining out (or ordering in). You're paying for the convenience of not having to think too much about what's for dinner and then getting mostly pre-measured ingredients delivered to your doorstep. In some ways, it's more convenient than a produce box like Misfits, because the meal planning is done for me, and the amount of food that shows up is that exact amount we're going to eat. In that way, it does prevent food from going to waste, because every bit is consumed. 

However, unlike Misfits, Hello Fresh does not rescue food from the "reject" pile. And, it generates waste, as the pre-measured ingredients are often individually packaged. I concede that the company seems to  make a considerable effort to minimize the packaging, and most of the packaging is recyclable, with some even made from recycled materials. But, as I say on repeat, reducing is superior to recycling, which means throwing away even small wads of plastic with the preparation of each dinner does not sit well with me. I will likely discontinue this subscription at the conclusion of the discounted period. 

I have been saving some of the recipes, though. They're tasty, and some of them use things we typically have on hand. I'll also share a few tips I've learned through cooking with Hello Fresh and the like:

• I could be doing more delicious things with rice. It's a pantry staple on which I've seldom relied outside of a stir-fry accompaniment, but it's so much more versatile. Butter, herbs, spices, lemon zest... Rice does not need to be a bland filler in need of soy sauce but can make a flavorful bed 'neath any meat or vegetable entree.
• Gathering and prepping all equipment and ingredients, the well-known mis en place practice of chefs everywhere, is worth the the time upfront. Act like you're about to film a cooking show in your own kitchen -- they don't run to the pantry six different times during the recipe; they always have their ingredients ready to dump right into the mix. I don't go as far as measuring two tablespoons of flour into a tiny bowl, but I have the flour container and measuring spoon out on the counter. More important, I have the veggies washed and chopped.
• Don't underestimate how much a quick sauce can elevate a recipe. There are condiments we already stock in our fridge that I could just use more frequently to recreate some my favorite recipes -- mayonnaise, Thai sweet chili sauce, hoisin sauce, broth concentrate... One large container tends to be less wasteful than several single-serve packets.
• Season your food with a little salt (and maybe pepper, too) at each major step (in the water with the rice, when you add the veggies to the hot oil) instead of just once at the beginning or the end. But also, and here's what the meal kit won't tell you, taste it along the way! You may or may not want that final sprinkling of salt after everything comes together.

The moral of the story is you have to decide for yourself what conveniences are worth what cost to you, and what tradeoffs are acceptable to you when balancing time, effort, money, and sustainability.

What's next for us, then? I guess it's back to the usual meal planning based on what's in season, on sale, and/or already in our pantry or freezer at home, and trying to gather any needed ingredients in just one shopping trip, preferably combined with other errands in the vicinity. And don't you worry -- we always eat all our leftovers.

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Adventures in Cake Decorating #10 - Pineapple Cupcakes x 2

And another cake flashback. Why? Because I haven't been baking as much fun stuff during the pandemic. Over the last two years, I think the Raphael Ninja Turtle cake was the last full-sized cake I made (early March 2020), and since then there have been just a couple of outdoor birthday parties, for which I made the Paw Patrol and Fireman Sam cupcakes. I had designs on making a very small wedding cake for a few of us to share as we virtually attended a relative's wedding, but neither the Zoom nuptials (and therefore) nor the cake materialized.

Last time we flashed back, it was to remember Teddy Graham sunbathers on beach cupcakes. Let's stick with that warm, sunny theme and look back at the two different cupcakes I once made for a luau at church.

Pineapple Upside-down Cupcakes

These came from a Betty Crocker recipe, and you can always trust Betty for a delicious time. Between the pineapple juice in the batter and the sugary syrup on the bottom (which becomes the top), these cupcakes are soaking in goodness. Don't let the photo mislead you -- these do not bake in cupcake wrappers. After flipping over the muffin tin to release these pineapple delights, I moved each into its own paper wrapper for easier individual servings at the luau party.

Pineapple Coconut Cupcakes

I'm disappointed in the trendy cupcake shops that decorate their baked goods so cutely but fail to deliver any oomph in flavor. A so-called salted caramel cupcake that has a stylized drizzle and tiny cookie atop its frosting but otherwise is a plain vanilla cake underneath -- not worth the hype (or money). Even Hostess cupcakes have a creamy filling! A so-called gourmet cupcake should at least have a caramel-flavored sponge if not also ooze liquid caramel once you bite into it. So, of course, I'm proud of these fully flavored cupcakes with a sweet surprise in the middle.

Any cupcake with a filling deserves bonus points, and this filling is so easy to execute... if you follow my tip here and not the original recipe. This recipe from The Little Epicurean is almost everything I want it to be -- coconut milk both in the batter and in the frosting, yes! But, with a fruit filling like pineapple, there is no need to find a 1-inch cookie cutter (who has that?) to punch the center out of each cupcake after they're baked. This isn't a custard or buttercream filling that can't go in until the cupcakes are cooled. 

Instead, I say, you just plop a spoonful of crushed pineapple into the center of the batter in each muffin cup. It will sink just a little bit, and then as the cupcakes bake, the batter will rise up and over it, hiding the pineapple filling for you. Voila!

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Cider update, late fall

We've some catching up to do.

I promised in my previous cider update that we'd next talk about what I'll call the "regular" cider; i.e. the juice from what are technically crab apples because they're growing rogue in the suburban wild but look and taste pretty much like regular apples, as opposed to the small, puckery, dark pink crab apples.

So, in early September, we gleaned 191 pounds of various apples from public parking lots and easements. Using our Breville juicer, we juiced 147 pounds of these into fresh cider and mixed in three quarts of the pink crab apple cider we'd saved plus 6 cups of honey dissolved into 6 cups of water, to nearly fill two 5-gallon buckets. The remaining 44 pounds of apples became a little more than 2 gallons of fresh cider for the fridge.

After 1 week, we siphoned the fermenting cider into second buckets, leaving their sediment behind. They continued fermenting for another week, at which time we bottled the cider -- about 34 liters of it. Even though all 9 or so gallons came from one batch, each of the two separate 5-gallon buckets resulted in a slightly different fermentation, one slightly sweeter and less alcoholic than the other, although both have a mild flavor with a hint of honey. The hydrometer results for alcohol by volume were 6.2% and 5.5%

Just like the crab apple bottles, we let these sit out for a couple of days to recarbonate naturally, and then we cold crashed them all in the new used fridge we bought from some guy online.

Now, in late fall, we think the regular cider tastes even better having conditioned in the bottles for several weeks, and several of our family members and friends have enjoyed how easy it goes down. The tart crab apple cider is not for everyone, but good for lovers of sour farmhouse ales.

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Leaf mulching

You know we love our compost, and we've always added some autumn leaves to the mix, but our yard collects far more leaves than we could possibly fit into our one average-sized home compost bin. I usually add light piles of leaves to some planted areas of the yard to serve as winter protection and later spring nutrients, but even still, there is an excess

The remaining options, then, are bagging the leaves for city pickup, which is fine. Those'll be composted somewhere. Or, I've seen people compress leaves into fire-starter bricks, which is project I'd maybe try. Maybe. Or, we could just leave the leaves be like a natural forest floor, but I think there are so many that our yard would indeed look like a forest floor--i.e., mossy dirt and leaves, because the heavy cover of leaves would kill the grass by smothering it or harboring mold. 

But there is yet another option. 

This year, we mulched the leaves. The smaller pieces will break down faster and mix more easily with  soil and other compostables, so we can add more of them to the compost bin and plant beds than we would have with whole leaves. Many of the chopped-up leaves can also be left to spread around the yard, because they can nestle down between blades of grass to the soil level, where they will break down faster while letting the grass grow through.

Some of the leaf bits will just blow away, sure, but because they are smaller, they can blow all over and disintegrate sooner rather than getting caught in a big pile along the curb where whole leaves tend to clog the storm drains.

Converting the thick carpet of maple leaves in our backyard into fall confetti.

We accomplished our mulching with our two electric leaf blowers that, handily, also work as leaf vacuums and mulchers. Guess where we got them.

Go on, guess!

All together now: Someone was throwing them out!

Actually, I think one of them may have been a Goodwill find. Regardless, here we are again with our second-hand lawn equipment, which may have required a little duct tape but worked out great. We attached a bag to one blower to collect some of the mulch for the compost bin and flower beds. The rest, we just let fly into the air and settle all across the lawn. (And in our hair and down the backs of our shirts...)

The yard looks messy by immaculate suburbanite standards, what with the mulched leaf bits all over the place, but there aren't piles of leaves anymore, and the grass shows through. My hope is that these chopped leaves will provide a little insulation to my bedded plants over the winter and then decompose into leaf mold (a.k.a. composted leaves, not to be confused with fuzzy mold that grows in damp places) where they sit, thereby feeding the grass and flower beds throughout the spring thaw.

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Photo Showcase: Steps toward home improvement

Len spent several weeknights preparing us for the second winter in our new old house. With kits of sheet plastic and double-sided tape, he has insulated most of our windows from the inside. True, disposable plastic is not the most sustainable approach to weather-proofing a house; however, most things in life require compromise. Here, the tradeoff is generating future garbage (when we remove and dispose of the temporary insulation in spring) in order to use less natural gas (because our furnace won't have to work so hard if the windows aren't letting cold air in and warm air out). You know the insulation kits are working, by the way, when the plastic breathes with the wind outside. Some of our windows are so drafty, the plastic sheeting bulges with pockets of the cold air that would otherwise be whooshing through our dining room.

We have long-term plans for restoring our 111-year-old windows back to perfect functionality and for replacing our dilapidated aluminum storm windows with historically accurate wooden ones that fit properly. News flash: Whole-house window restoration is a big, expensive project.

We knew of this eventual expense going in. We bought the old house knowing that its maintenance would be our new major "hobby." Some people save up their money to spend it on a motorcycle, or travel, or horses, or raising kids. We have prepared to spend ours on this house. And now, it's all about what projects to put money toward and when.

The city of Aurora has in the past offered a historical preservation grant for homeowners in the historic districts. We can apply for grant assistance to get some work done on our home, as long as it is exterior work that helps preserve the historical architecture and character of the neighborhood. We applied for the grant last year to tackle the windows. We were not one of the awardees. However, we listened to the grant committee meeting and garnered useful information about what else they'd like to see restored/repaired on our house.

One of those items was correcting the railing on our front porch steps. It was iron and losing some structural integrity, but it should be wooden and sound. Well, we can get that project done without grant assistance! Let's do it now as proof of our commitment to historical preservation, and we'll live with the crummy windows another year in the hopes of applying for the grant again.

So the saga of the front porch steps began. I'll sum it up briefly.

In June, Len finally found a carpenter who was willing to work within the historic district and obtain the appropriate permits. The steps would be entirely rebuilt, including lovely wooden railings. 

With drawings finally approved and permits obtained, in October, the carpenters made quick work of removing the old stairs... 

Then they were gone for awhile. 

They brought back supplies. And left again for awhile.

Eventually they came back to cut and install the stringers.

At this point, the city inspector had to approve the installation so far. He didn't. 

In a few days, the carpenters fixed the way the header board and stringers were attached to the house and got approval, but they didn't continue building right away.

Halloween loomed near.

On a cold misty day in late October, the carpenters came back and quickly affixed the treads and toe kicks (no railings yet), so at least we could host trick-or-treaters.

In early November, they finished the build. Looks nice, huh? They requested final inspection.

More than two weeks later, the city inspector finally came out and... did not approve the steps.

It's now mid-November, and we're waiting for the carpenters to return, to re-do stuff, and to re-request inspection.

All this to show the Historic Preservation Commission, "See? We're doing the stuff you think we should do! Please give us money to do more of it." We don't even know yet if they will continue the grant program in 2022.

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Water Update

I was excited to report back in June that we had lowered our own water usage by about 750 gallons (over 2 months). Well, we kept at it -- from little things like shutting off the faucet during those proscribed 20 seconds we're soaping our hands, to medium things like taking shorter or less frequent showers, to the bigger things like watering our outdoor (and indoor) plants solely from the rain barrels -- until they ran dry; I admit to hauling out the hose a few times. And, the results are in.

Our water bill for our May and June usage was down to just 2 CCFs! That means we cut our average water usage in half. How about that? 

Such reduction doesn't cut our water bill in half, mind you. There's a flat fee for service, but each CCF used or not used will add or subtract, respectively, about $5. The separate sewer bill is also a little bit lower, because it is also based on water usage. Over a year, those few monthly dollars add up, sure, but this is less about the money savings (where you'd typically see a higher return by reducing your gas and electric usage) than it is about the environmental impact.

It's easier to think about water conservation in the warm months, when gardens need to be watered, and pools "need" to be swum in. However, our consumption awareness must continue through the winter. The western United States is still, today, experiencing extreme and excessive drought. Even here in northern Illinois, despite the seemingly abundant gray skies of November, things are "abnormally dry." Again, I refer you to the U.S. Drought Monitor.

Back to our record 2-CCFs water bill. During May and June 2021, we used approximately 750 gallons per month, or roughly 180-190 gallons per week, or 25 gallons per day. In some ways that number seems low, but imagine having 25 gallon-size jugs, some of them sitting on your kitchen counter and several others hanging out in your bathroom. And you're going to go through all 25 of those in just one day. It seems like a crazy amount of water!

We easily use less than that per day when we're camping, but when we're roughing it, we naturally use water very conservatively. Based on that observation, clearly showers, toilets, and laundry make the biggest impact. Dish-washing is also a potential area for improvement.

Our next water bill, for July and August, was back up to 3 CCFs -- higher than our lowest usage, but still lower than our original average. We're happy about that, but the drive for self-competition inspires me to keep trying to be even more conservative -- when it comes to water usage, that is.

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Garden Shutdown

 Chilly but sunny, this past weekend was perfect for some yardwork, as in closing down the garden for the season. We've already had a few mornings of frost, so the tomatoes are done anyway. Most of the trees around us have yet to drop their leaves, though, so that other big cleanup awaits.

We emptied the rain barrels and turned them upside down for the winter. They were both full, but we have little watering to do now. We used several gallons to give our perennials the scraggliest patches of lawn one last soak, and set some aside for the indoor plants, but most of it went into the street, to the storm sewers, where rain water naturally goes when you're not catching as much of it as you can.

We emptied the container garden -- the cut tin troughs of herbs, the large pots of tomatoes, the smaller pots of ornamentals. I have uprooted and potted two begonias to try to overwinter them indoors. If you know me, I am notoriously deadly to flowering houseplants... we'll see.

We also needed to make room in the compost bin for winter's kitchen scraps. I did my best to pull out all the "unfinished" compost, that is, the still-identifiable plant matter -- grass clippings, corn husks, dog fur from the vacuum, recently tossed romaine cores. You know, all the stuff that hasn't broken down all the way. I piled it onto a tarp so I could put back the bin later. 

For now, what we wanted was the stuff filling the bottom half of our bin, the rich, dark compost that looks quite like potting soil. It's full of worms, too. Nice, healthy food for the garden.

So, we spread this finished (or near finished) compost around our fruit trees, hostas, perennial flowers and herbs, strawberries, raspberries, onions, and rhubarb. My hope is that it will sit there on top and then, as the snow melts in the spring, it will slowly leech its way into the soil and provide a boost of nutrients to these plants' roots. Meanwhile, all the unfinished compost goes back into the bin, but now there is room for some of those fall leaves and a winter's worth of kitchen scraps before we stir it again in the spring.

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Some bites (bytes?) of food

Popular Science has been spending September relearning how to eat. Is it because it's Food Safety Education Month? I don't know. And, I didn't notice they were writing to this theme until this week, when I saw this article in my inbox: How to Forage Your Way Through Your Neighborhood. It's a cursory overview of how to take advantage of the free and plentiful (hello, crab apples!) produce of the natural world.

Peruse the PopSci site and you'll find tons of other fun food nuggets they've published recently. A few that grabbed my attention talk about:

• How to start eating bugs (they're the sustainable protein of the future),
• A closer look at the environmental impact of reusable kitchen items vs. their disposable counterparts,
• The taste of color,
• And, of course there is also an article on the food waste in our own homes.

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Cider Update, late August

Just under three weeks from first press, 19 days to be exact, on August 21, we bottled 22 liters of the crab apple cider. Final gravity (after adjusting for temperature) was 1.024, giving us a 6.4% ABV. 

Now, here's the thing. These small, bright pink crab apples already have a high sugar content on their own, and the addition of honey pushes that to a potential alcohol content of 9%. What I'm saying is, at this stage, the wild yeasts have not yet consumed all the available sugar. If we allow the cider to continue fermenting, it will result in not only higher ABV but also higher pressure as the process produces carbon dioxide. (That's right, yeast farts.) Too high a pressure, and we get bottle bombs. Not a fun surprise. Very difficult to clean up. Also, longer fermentation means less sugar, but we really like the sweet-tart taste right now.

So. Moving the liquid from the fermentation bucket to the bottles aerates the cider enough that all the carbon dioxide dissipates. Flat soda. Because we like our cider to sparkle, we let the bottles sit at room temperature another three days, when we can see a ring of bubbles in the neck of every bottle. Then, we cold crash them.

Cold crash! I.e., refrigerate. Chilling the cider pauses -- or at least slows down -- the fermentation. I say "pause" and not "stop" because refrigeration does not kill this wild apple yeast; rather, it forces it into dormancy. We must now keep the cider chilled or else the yeast will wake up, and fermentation will resume. (We bought a used wine fridge for this very purpose.) Even in the fridge, the yeast may very slowly continue their work, and over the months, the cider may grow slowly stronger, drier, and fizzier. We will monitor any changes as we drink through our inventory.

The next update will focus on our second batch of cider, made with a variety of wild apples from around the area. It includes three quarts of pink crab apple cider; you may remember my passing mention of Experiment #1, for which we pressed a second load of the pink crab apples.

See the quarts of fresh pink crab apple cider we froze, now thawing here three weeks later to be mixed with the apple cider. For contrast, on the right is a glass of the original pink cider after fermentation and bottling. It lost its rosy color but kept that sweet pucker--and made an excellent refreshment to accompany the full-day's work of processing our next round cider Labor Day weekend.

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Summer 2021 Garden Update

Once again, someone was throwing something out. Some things. Several of these galvanized windowsill planters, originally sold with seeds and peat pellets for themed herb and vegetable gardens, were in the trash, seemingly unused, now just empty little troughs. Len had some length of chain left over from a project or some long-ago dismantled item, so he made for me this cute, hanging herb garden. We faced the planters backward to hide the labels "Cocktail Garden," "Italian Garden," and "Taco Garden," since those do not accurately describe what's growing in the containers—and, yeah, for a cleaner, unified look. 

I'm certain the Italian and taco gardens would have come with tomato seeds, and I just don't believe a tomato plant would grow very heartily from such a small container. Maybe that's why they were thrown out. I'm sticking to herbs, small hot peppers, and edible flowers.

I have been enjoying this herb garden, which includes my hopeful perennials on the ground (marjoram, tarragon, thyme, rosemary that I will try overwintering indoors, oregano, parsley, and a probably dead sage) and some annuals in the cute hanging arrangement (marigolds, chamomile, cilantro, basil, and a late-arrival tabasco pepper plant that is only just now getting buds). I find reasons to use fresh herbs in most recipes these days, and almost daily I pick 5 or so chamomile blossoms and lay them on a newspaper in the basement, where they can dry out before I store them in a little glass container (for making chamomile tea later, if you couldn't guess).

Spearmint and lemon balm are sequestered elsewhere in the yard, since the mint family tends to hardily take over any space within reach. 

The herbs are probably my best performers in the garden this year. At last, in late summer, our tomatoes are beginning to ripen.

Meanwhile, the strawberry plants have not spread as vigorously as I'd hoped and even seem to be dying back. It's hard to tell. I see new leaves grow and other sections go brown. Same with the rhubarb. We didn't eat any this year, as the shock of transplant stunted its growth and spurred flowering, but I do see new stalks appearing while others seem to be dying off. I don't know what's normal. As usual with my haphazard gardening, I'm keeping my fingers crossed for a strong reemergence next spring.

In the category of fun stuff, we got some volunteer sunflowers from seeds left behind by last year's sunflower patch. They were conveniently growing on the edge of our now-designated apple tree space, so I let them stay. None of them seem to be the mammoth variety, at least not in flower head size, but they are taller than last year! (And there, below them, our espaliered apple trees are beginning to take shape. I need to fix those guide wires, which are all loose and wonky after someone bent one of our posts! Can you believe it?)

Speaking of trees, I've been spraying a homemade concoction weekly on the cherry and apple trees to combat what is either a fungus or an insect putting holes in the cherry leaves and potentially affecting future growth. I guess I'm not seeing further damage, but observations are ongoing.

Our other gardening of late has been toward ornamental goals. When the nursery/greenhouse near us put flowering perennials on discount, I bought some cone flowers, larkspur, asclepias, and coreopsis to add to the previously "installed" dianthus and creeping phlox. I also transplanted some tiger lilies from my aunt's yard, which she originally transplanted from my great-grandmother's yard. Then, Len found free hostas on an online marketplace, so we drove to the neighboring town to dig up some plants from a generous stranger's yard and further beautified the bare soil around our back patio.

All of this, including the still-fragile grass we planted in our lawn months ago, I've been diligently watering solely from our rain barrels. It takes more time and effort (especially time) than just using the hose, and as a result, I'm certainly giving the plants less water than the people who soak their gardens daily with a heavy stream from their spigot. I'm sure that's why they have such lush gardens comparatively, but my plants are alive (mostly), and I'm happy to know we can enhance our green space without the toll on natural resources. 

The rain barrels have reached near empty during a couple of especially hot, dry spells, after which we audibly cheered on the rain storms that broke the temporary drought (and watched some neighbor kids danced in the downpour). Here's to the bursts of rain that offset the heat these past couple of weeks. Maybe we can enjoy an actual tomato and pepper harvest before cool weather comes. Say it with me: Fingers crossed!

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Viva la Sostenibilidad!

Here's a cheer you don't hear every day, but we recently received it, with an emphatic fist pump, too: "Sustainable living!" 

Let me clarify that I did not just translate this post's title, although the words are similar. "Viva la sostenibilidad" is Spanish for "Long live sustainability," which is actually redundant when you think about it. Anyway.

I'm going to mention crab apples. Again. It's that time of year. We were picking that second harvest, when a passerby shouted from his truck. (At least one passerby stops to talk to us every time; the trees are along a busy road.)

Guy: "What kind of apples are those?"

Me: "Just crab apples!"

Guy: "Are they sweet?"

Me: "Yes, they kind of are!"

Guy, giving two thumbs up: "I never noticed them here before!"

Me, spreading my arms like, well, here they are.

Guy: "What do you do with them?"

 Me: "Make cider!"

 Guy, giving a viva-style fist pump: "Sustainable living!"

Me, a thumbs up back.

You can argue that we didn't save these crab apples from going to waste, because they weren't somebody's leftover food, and they weren't headed for the landfill, but I will argue back that they're an example of the world's imbalanced abundance, an example of eating locally and seasonally, and an example of our making use of existing resources so that even something that's purely just for fun (cider!) has minimal negative impact on the environment and community.

And then, a recent Goodwill email was titled "How Thrifting Helps Support a Low Waste Lifestyle." It linked to this guest blog post by Sustainable Kay. I've never heard of her (and I disagree with her non-hyphenation of "low-waste"), but I like what she has to say, including:

A huge environmental benefit of thrifting is that it does not require new materials. When you purchase things that already exist, new resources are not used to create that item. This is especially big when it comes to items that cannot be properly recycled, such as certain types of plastic.

The blog post is, essentially, an ad for Goodwill, but it still makes a valid point. Before we try to recycle, we should first reduce and reuse, and the easiest way to do both at once is not to buy new. You can avoid brand new purchases by acquiring second-hand goods (Hello, garage sales and hand-me-downs!) or borrowing, whether it's a book from the library, a tool from a neighbor, or rental equipment.  

The Kindness Factor. Activist Rob Greenfield suggests you ask yourself, "Why buy when you can borrow? Why hold on to goods you don’t need when you can lend them to others?" Our own major example of this is being a one-car household. Thanks to bikes and trains and working from home, owning only one car works well for us most of the time. On the few occasions when we need a second vehicle or just one with larger capacity, we don't go buy a second car. We have the blessing of relying on the kindness of others, who give us a ride or lend us their car for a few hours. It's only fair that we should extend the same kindness and generosity with whatever resource we have. Books, tools, specialty kitchen gadgets, camping gear -- we're not using these things all day, every day, so someone else could use them when we're not (and you trust, of course, that they'll take good care of and return the items). You can also lend your time and energy.

The Money Factor. Obviously, you can spend less. Borrowing and curbside treasure-hunting cost you nothing, with the loose exception being a trade of goods or favors (say, neighbors exchanging vacation lawn care coverage), while renting and thrift-shopping certainly cost less than buying new. But, you can also make money in this second-hand system. Len has become our household's Director of Acquisitions and Sales. He finds things people are just throwing out, some of which don't require any fixing up, and we either keep it for ourselves (see patio furnishings, our game room, and winter goods), or Len sells it. While there are still plenty of yard sales around, online marketplaces like OfferUp and Facebook Marketplace have been great for buying and selling one item at a time. There's no setup, no signs to make, no sitting around in your driveway for hours. You'll encounter the occasional weirdo or no-show, but overall these have been successful avenues for us. (This outside post fairly reviews the sites.) Len lists an occasional freebie but mostly sells household items and makes $5 here, $20 there, even $100 on something big. He has also hunted down items we wanted for free or cheap: paver stones to redo our patio, a wine fridge for cold-crashing our bottles of apple cider, and so on.

I guess all this is to say that sustainable living doesn't mean eschewing all material goods but rather maximizing the usefulness of existing material goods instead of producing and buying unnecessary new goods. Just because you're done with something doesn't mean it's reached the end of its life. Someone else can use it. And, someone else out there is done with something you can now use.

Crab Apple Pie

The crab apple cider is bubbling away and tastes great so far. This weekend we will taste again and measure its alcohol content with the hydrometer. Because we like this pink cider sweet and bubbly, we will likely siphon it into bottles then. Maybe we'll put a portion of it into a second ferment to see how it does as a dryer, more potent libation, more like our regular hard cider.

We've decided to take further advantage of the short crab apple season. Not quite two weeks after our first crab apple harvest, we went back to a couple of the trees, where the fruits were now even riper -- deep, dark pink, with a good number having dropped to the ground (patrolled by a good number of yellow jackets), but still plenty on the tree. We harvested a modest amount of these riper fruits for a couple of experiments.

Experiment #1: Sweet crab apple cider for blending with the planned Labor Day harvest of wild apples. We shredded a bunch of these very ripe crab apples and packed our small fruit press full. We froze three quarts of this fresh crab apple cider, with plans to thaw it and blend with the apple cider in a couple of weeks.

Experiment #2: Crab apple pie. Unlike my failed Valentine Lollipies, made with crab apple butter, this is an actual apple pie, made with chopped fresh crap apples, and I'll classify it as a success. That isn't to say there aren't things I'd do differently next time around, so I've noted those below in the recipe, which I got from here, although the same Maine grandmother's recipe can be found on other websites.

Crab Apple Pie

Double pie crust 

8 cups or so large pink crabapples to steam and quarter (Note: ultimately you want 6 cups chopped crab apples; I didn't measure how many I started with, so I'm guessing it was at least 8 cups, based on the yield of cores left over.)

1 cup white sugar

1 tablespoons flour (I say bump this up to 2 Tbsp)

1 1/2 tablespoons lemon juice

1 1/2 tablespoons butter, chopped into small pieces

1/ 4 (heaping) cup brown sugar

Milk and sugar for glazing

Prepare the bottom pie crust and affix in a 9-inch pie dish. Refrigerate until needed. Have the pastry dough for the top crust handy in the fridge as well.

Steam the crab apples by putting them in a metal colander over a large pot in which several inches of water are boiling. Cover the colander and steam the crab apples for 3 minutes. Drain and let cool enough to handle. 

Why? Steaming the crab apples parcooks and softens them just enough to make them easier to chop, because they are so small and hard. You will not be attempting to peel them. 1) The skins will lend a beautiful rosy color to your pie; 2) Crab apples' natural pectin is more concentrated in the skin, so it helps serve as a preservative and thickening agent; and 3) It's impossible to peel crab apples.

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees.

Prepare the steamed apples by cutting them into sort-of-quarters to remove the seeds, core and stem. See the photo -- you cut two sides off, like you're cutting the apple in half off-center on either side of the core (like cutting mango halves). Then you cut the two remaining shorter sides off. 

Your goal is 6 cups of crab apple chunks. Note: If you prefer a mushier apple pie filling, it would be worth sautéing these crab apple chunks at this point to cook them even further before assembling the pie. Put them into a large mixing bowl and mix with the white sugar, butter, flour and lemon juice.

Transfer to the prepared shell, mounding up the apples. Sprinkle the top with the light-brown sugar.

Affix the top crust, making a decorative edge and cut small slits in the dough to allow steam to escape. Brush the pastry lightly with milk and sprinkle the top with sugar.

Put the pie in the oven, with a baking sheet on the rack below it to catch overflowing juices (or else they hit the floor of the oven and caramelize-burn into a smoky, sugary crust that is very difficult to clean up. 

Bake for 15 minutes at 450 degrees. Then, lower the temperature to 350 degrees and bake for another 45 minutes, (rotating the pan halfway through) or until the juices inside are bubbling and the crust is a rich golden brown. If the crust starts to brown too much during baking, loosely cover it with foil. Note: Next time I'd try lowering the oven only to 375 and/or letting the pie go longer so the juices have more time to bubble and thicken up. Even though crab apple skins are naturally high in pectin, the filling was still very liquidy when I pulled the pie out.

Serve warm with vanilla ice cream.

It's sweet and tart and brilliant pink. It's the rhubarb pie of apple pies.

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Photo Showcase: A two-bench summer

Len made two benches this summer. How about that? One for us, and one for his mom.

The first bench was already a bench. Someone was throwing it out. (Yes, this is the most common answer to anyone's asking how we acquired a patio furnishing.) 

Len took it apart, repainted the iron bits, cut new wooden slats, and put it back together again.

We wrote in blue crayon the many places we've hiked, biked, or camped. Len finished it with marine varnish, and it sits on our front patio. Our adventure bench. Our adbenchure.

The second bench used to be a bed.

This old wooden frame once held a twin bed for "Busia," Len's great-grandmother. It served as a little-used guest bed for awhile but has spent more recent years stored in a basement.

Len gave this old furniture new life with a few cuts and some rearranging of its original boards.

A little paint completed the antique-chic restoration, and now this family heirloom is functional once again, providing additional seating at Len's parents' house.

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Summer Cider

Monday evening's haul of crab apples was 110 pounds. These are the pink, oblong crab apples that range in size from large grape to golf ball and taste quite sweet despite their astringency.

So, Tuesday was summer cider day! Actually, it was summer cider afternoon, which of course lengthened into summer cider night. But, we finished pressing and even cleaned up before midnight -- hooray!

Len cleaned and sanitized an area for us in the basement laundry room. The crab apples got a cold water rinse in the washtub -- just a rinse and not a scrub, because they have useful wild yeast on their skins.

Then we shredded the crab apples in batches in our food processor. A real cidery would have an apple grinder or fruit crusher for preparing the fruit for the press, but we just used (abused?) our regular everyday food processor from the kitchen.

This is the pulp of just half the crab apples.

The pulp went into our 1.6-gallon fruit press. 

This is our first time using the press, even though my sister and brother-in-law gave it to us two Christmases ago. Last year's apple harvest was just pitiful. We visited some trees too late, while other trees just didn't have a good year. And then, we got Covid. We decided we were too tired (and too contagious) to try processing and preserving what few apples we had picked. Instead, we made a few apple recipes for ourselves over the next couple of weeks -- pie, cake, the usual apple snacks, salads, and skillets -- and that was it.

In batches, we pressed about 6 gallons of rose-colored cider. 

Some notes on this particular fruit press, a small EJWOX model: First, it works! The post-pressing apple pulp was very compact and quite dry. Second, because the pulp is so compact after pressing, it's a chore to get it out. That chore on its own is no big deal, but all the pushing, pulling, and wiggling to extract the bag of pulp also jiggles the screws in the press's wooden slats. These small screws too easily strip their holes and pop out! We had to sift through our bin of pulp more than once to find a lost screw, and Len had to shim a couple of the screw holes with toothpicks.

For every almost-gallon of cider, we added 1 cup of honey dissolved in one cup of water (heated on the stove to dissolve, then cooled to room temperature).

For those keeping track of the science, here is our hyrdometer math:

Original gravity of the fresh cider = 1.060

Gravity of the fresh cider with honey added = 1.070

Temperature of the cider at the time of the readings was about 74-75 degrees, but the hyrdometer is calibrated for 60 degrees, so we need to make a correction to the gravity. We're adding .0015 based on the hydrometer's instruction page.

Let's call our original gravity 1.072.

Oh, what's a hydrometer, you ask? It's a simple, neat little brewer's tool. It looks like buoyant thermometer, and it floats in the cider, indicating the relative weight of that liquid compared to an equal volume of water. While plain water has a gravity of 1.000, liquids with sugar in them will have a higher gravity.

So what? So... when we measure the gravity of the cider again after a period of fermentation, the gravity will be lower because the yeasts will have eaten some of the sugar and turned it into alcohol. By subtracting the final gravity from the original gravity, thereby measuring how much sugar has been converted, we can calculate the cider's alcohol by volume. Fun, huh?

We'll check the cider's progress in a couple of weeks.

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Adventures in Cake Decorating #9 - Beach Cupcakes

Another cake flashback. Memorial Day 2018. A nephew's first birthday. A beach-themed backyard party.

The more I look back at these beach cupcakes, the more I think they are among the cutest I've made, and I think I'd like an excuse to make them again. 

Bonus points for the decorations made entirely of edible things (uh, paper cocktail umbrellas notwithstanding) -- blue frosting for the ocean of course, and graham cracker crumbs as the beach sand, plus Teddy Grahams as the sunbathers, Lifesavers Gummies as their rafts, and Fruit by the Foot as their beach towels. 

Although a cupcake would have served the purpose, there was also a separate, special "smash cake" for the 1-year-old birthday boy, per current trend -- see the slightly larger, more cake-shaped one on the left that incorporates all of the decorative topping elements, whereas each individual cupcake only had one or two. You can see we set up a few different scenes. 

There's the floating teddy on his raft, surrounded by water. There's the all-sand cupcake, with the sunbathing teddy. My favorite vignette is probably the half-beach, half-ocean, with teddy floating in the waves, his toes poking up out of the water. (Just break off the legs of the Teddy Graham.)

I see now, I enjoyed making these so much because the decorating process was really just playing with food. 

If I find that excuse to make them again, I'll up the ante by making the cupcakes tropical flavors -- no simple vanilla or chocolate, but instead maybe coconut with pineapple goo in the middle. Or lime. Oh, now wait. Coconut and pineapple, the cocktail umbrellas... the cupcakes should be tropical drink flavored. 

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Deconstructing the dog bed

Why are the undersides of these dog beds made of this crappy fabric with the mere strength of a dryer sheet? It falls apart too easily from normal wear and tear (i.e., lying on the floor). The topside, meanwhile, which gets all the real use as the dog circles and scratches and flops and turns, is holding up just fine. It's this underside. 

Once, while our family was dog-sitting for us, my sister-in-law called to ask if the dog bed was washable. "Yes, of course, go right ahead." Well, that wash was the final nail in that dog bed's coffin -- stuffing fluff everywhere when she opened the machine at the end of the cycle, as the underside practically disintegrated.

This latest dog bed has made it through a wash or two, but the underside is pilling badly and seems just threads away from being worthless. I had already sewn a replacement inner pillow case out of an old bed sheet, so the stuffing is not about to spill out, but this outer cover is showing its not-so-old age. Time to fix this problem.

Thankfully, replacing one side of a rectangular pillow-style dog bed is a simple project. I have my trusty seam ripper to separate the top and bottom rectangles of fabric as well as the zipper from the one side being replaced.

Oops. Pause the project for 20 minutes or so while I reattach the zipper tab I accidentally pulled all the way off!

Oh, and then this tangle resulting from my hasty bobbin-loading:

Some people -- most people -- would just cut the the thread at this point and move on. I, on the other hand, was determined to save what turned out to be at least 10 feet of good thread. It took another 15 minutes, but I got it.

This is why the seam ripper remains my best friend.

Aside from those complications, an easy project:

Spread out whatever fabric you're using to replace the disintegrating underside. I had a big blue piece of fabric leftover from some other thing. Lay the good rectangle of fabric from the dog bed (the topside we're keeping) on top of it as your pattern. Cut out a rectangle from the new fabric to match. 

Place the two rectangles together right sides facing in (i.e., their outsides against each other, so it will be inside-out when sewn together). Sew up three sides. Sew up the zipper side -- something I am no longer trepidatious about doing since the time I finally sewed one onto a bean bag chair I was making for my dad, after procrastinating for quite some time out of fear. (Hm, did I take pictures of that project? I will have to check and possibly add a post.)

Now, turn it right-side-out. Stuff the inner pillow back in. Happy dog!

Yes, that is a dog bed on top of a dog bed. He's a spoiled boy.

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Farming in the backyard (and side yard, and front yard...)

"You guys do a lot of farming," observed one of our eight-year-old neighbors.

Not as much as I'd like, was my first thought, and not nearly as much as the neighbors a few door down, who last summer put a basket of free cucumbers at the end of their driveway, from which we gratefully selected a couple for making cold cucumber-avocado soup. 

We're surely not suburban-homesteading to the max, but I guess what we do is impressive to the eight-year-olds next door. Together, we counted the edible things growing in the side flowerbeds and backyard (recognizing that many were not in their edible season):

1. Strawberries (recently finished)
2. Rhubarb
3. Raspberries (ripening daily now!)
4. Onions (Egyptian walking and green, always in season, really)
5. Sunflowers
6. Apple trees (maybe next year?)
7. Cherry tree (maybe next year?)
8. Tomatoes (possibly 4 kinds, but time will tell)
9. Marigolds (technically edible, but I have not tried)
10. Many herbs (generally in season all summer: cilantro, lemon balm, spearmint, oregano, basil, marjoram, and... parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme!)
11. And, newly planted (and therefore not previously counted) tabasco peppers and chamomile.

For not having any official "Square Foot Gardening" raised beds, we're cramming it in. I'm looking forward to our strawberry, rhubarb, and raspberry transplants spreading their roots and tubers and shoots this summer for a more productive crop next year. Fingers crossed. 

I wanted a more robust herb garden, so I spent money on it this year. But, I also like to at least pretend I'm self sufficient, so I'll be trying to save seeds from those herbs this fall.

I have been enjoying the blessing of time, thanks to working from home. Just a fraction of the time I used to spend on commuting is now spent tending the garden. I've realized that it isn't just an extra 10-15 hours a week I have -- it's extra energy. There's a momentum no longer interrupted by the commute. How many four o'clocks did I daydream at the office about some creative endeavor at home, only to find that energy sapped by 6:30? Motivation enough only to make and eat dinner, and maybe clean up after it. 

I'm still regularly a couch potato after 7 p.m., sure. But between signing off for the day and starting dinner, plus a lunch break in the backyard, there's time and energy aplenty for farming.

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Adventures in Cake Decorating #8 - Bowling Cake

This is the cake that started it all. 

Or, maybe the cake that continued it all? It was before any of the niblings were born, so I didn't have regular birthday cake "clientele" yet, but I had already made baby block cakes for a friend (so many things I have learned to do better since then!). Even before that, I'd had ambitions on making our wedding cake myself -- ambitions left unrealized, as getting a great deal at a traditional bakery coincided with starting a brand new, soul-sucking job less than a month before the wedding. 

It's definitely the cake that ignited my enthusiasm for using cookies as a part of the decoration. (See later the Word World cake and cookies, the Cookie monster cupcakes with ABC and 123 cookies, a dinosaur cake I haven't told you about yet, and some sort of woodland creature cake and cookie combo I'd like to make, inspired by an autumn issue of Woman's Day magazine.)

This bowling cake was early enough in my cake decorating hobby-career that I can see now what I could have done better. Nevertheless, I still think it was awesome.

It was a large sheet cake; i.e., two 13x9 cakes set next to each other.

The bowling bowl was a smaller cake baked in a bowl. Tip: Use as round a bowl as possible (you know, some have a flat bottom inside), but then sculpt and/or patch with cake scraps and frosting.

The wood grain of the bowling lane was watered down brown food coloring, painted onto the crusted buttercream base. (Crusted = the buttercream has been allowed to sit exposed to the air, so it sets (or dries or hardens) enough that you can touch it lightly without it sticking to you.)

I thought I was so clever, illustrating that it was a 30th birthday by piping on a score sheet with the beginnings of a perfect game. Three strikes in a row = 30 points for the first frame!

Then, of course, sugar cookie bowling pins. I didn't have a bowling pin cookie cutter but rather cut these by hand using a paper template -- easy enough to do when the cookie is large and symmetrical.

And, that's a look back at one of my first three-dimensional birthday cakes.

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You may try to be a fair-weather bicycle commuter

 Len has been biking to work lately -- 19 miles round trip. Most of the time, the weather has cooperated.

When your preferred transport is an open-air vehicle, you become obsessed with the weather. Did they say it would rain today? Does it look it will rain? How hot is supposed to be? How hot does it feel? Alexa, what's the hourly forecast?

Then I was reading a Bicycling Magazine article, "6 Cycling Mistakes I've Made So You Don't Have To," by Fit Chick Selene Yeager. Mistake #3: Believe the Weather.

"Why, oh why is it still so difficult to predict the weather in the 21st century? And why, oh, why do I still believe said forecasts? (And I have four weather apps that I check obsessively before any given event.)"

I second that! I don't have four weather apps, per se, but I watch the morning news, ask Alexa, and wander outside to look around. Sometimes I'll pull up a weather radar online.

Yeager's lament is more about stubbornly going forth and then not finishing an event due to severely inclement weather. I have been thoroughly soaked by unanticipated rain plenty of times -- on the way to work, on the way home, on our Katy Trail trip -- but I've also had the opposite problem -- deciding not to get on the bike, thinking it will storm on me, only to spend a gorgeous day wasting gas in the car instead. Sigh.

Getting caught in the rain can be refreshing in a way. It can also be miserable, let's be honest. At least it comes with a rugged sense of fortitude. There is no positive feeling haven driven the car out of fear only to realize you could have biked.

The past week has been very rainy, and even still, Len biked every day. He did have to slog through rain a couple of times -- thank goodness for locker rooms.

Moral of the story? Do or don't trust the weather, and kudos to you if you biked somewhere today!

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Scrapcooking

Just a few months ago, I posted about cooking with kitchen scraps, but the overarching theme had more to do with making the most of your leftovers than using actual scraps (stems, peels, cores) -- although James P. DeWan's column did touch on that. Well, I've just learned that IKEA came out with The ScrapsBook earlier this year. It's a cookbook based on using typically discarded parts of food and features other tips for reducing your food waste at home, including uses for inedible scraps like eggshells (besides simply composting them).

Skeptical as you may be about putting banana peels in a cake and apple pulp in a burger, you might be comforted to find within the cookbook some more familiar "waste not" tricks you already have up your sleeve -- or is it just me? Things like freestyle vegetable soup to clear random things out of the fridge, a stash of chicken bones in the freezer for making broth later, cheese rinds to enrich a sauce, and watermelon rind preserves.

Another thing the cookbook has going for it -- photos. You know you're more inclined to try a recipe when it comes with a beautiful picture of the finished product. Each recipe also has a real professional chef's name behind it, imbuing the incredible with some credibility.

And another thing. The e-book is free to download. No risk to flip through. Yes, IKEA products are identified throughout the book, but they're unobtrusive.

But, wait! There's more!

A few days later, I (coincidentally?) read a newspaper article titled "Think outside the banana" that featured two recipes using -- you guessed it -- banana peels. Apparently, these slippery characters have made news before:

• Food personality Nigella Lawson made headlines when she prepared a cauliflower and banana peel dish on TV.
• Nadiya Hussain (a Great British Bake Off winner who suddenly had a cooking show of her own) made whole-banana bread and also brought to light a savory way to prepare banana peels common in Bengali cuisine -- think pulled pork but with sliced banana peels -- which is essentially how vegans have been using banana peels for a while now, like a shredded meat substitute.
• And, there's an earlier cookbook: Cooking With Scraps by food writer Linsday-Jean Hard.

I guess the thing most foreign to me that I am also most likely (maybe?) to try in the near future will be one of several banana peel recipes out there, as we just so happen to have a plethora of ripening bananas at the moment. I'll keep you posted if I do... 

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Adventures in Cake Decorating #7 - Flame Cupcakes for Fireman Sam

Another nephew's birthday party, another cartoon character–inspired birthday cake. Cupcakes of course, in this era of serving food with as little touching as possible.

These Fireman Sam cupcakes were a simple job of using store-bought decorations -- see the toothpick toppers and edible wafers -- so the creative part was choosing icing colors. 

I did yellow and blue icing to sort of match the main character's hat and jacket. And then, the most fun part, flame icing!

I learned a new trick from another blogger's post, How to Make Multi-Colored Swirled Cupcakes, which you can read for more details, but here's a quick overview of what I did to make the tri-colored flames atop the Fireman Sam cupcakes:

1. Make three colors of buttercream. I made red, orange, and yellow.
2. Glob each colored icing onto its own sheet of wax paper and chill for a short while in the fridge, until you can touch the icing without it sticking to your fingers.
3. Use the wax paper to help you gently roll each color of icing into a thin log.
4. Now put all three logs together and slide them into an icing bag. Let the icing warm back up to room temperature, so it's again easily squeezable.
5. Have fun piping a tri-colored swirl!

Notes:

• Keeping your three icing colors individually wrapped inside the piping bag, as instructed in the aforementioned Beki Cook's Cake Blog, will help keep each color more defined. Skipping the individual wraps and just letting the three colored logs of icing touch inside the bag works fine, especially if your colors are analogous (like red, orange, and yellow), but toward the end, because you've been squeezing, the colors will start to blend together. My last flame cupcake, as I used up the rest of the icing in the bag, was not multi-colored but rather a solid red-orange. That worked fine for the Fireman Sam theme, but it may not be OK if your colors are opposites, like blue and orange, which mix together to make gross-colored icing.

• Edible pre-printed wafers are an easy way to decorate with precision -- no trying to draw the cartoon character yourself. The wafers taste like nothing, really. The kids may or may not believe you that they can actually eat them.

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And now, something fun - glass flowers

 Our garden is blooming with thrift-store glass, construction glue, and scrap rebar.

Inspired by the dozens of such lawn ornaments surrounding a house about a mile from ours, Len recently created seven of these glittering flowers that will be in bloom all summer long.

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Doom and gloom about water

Nine years ago, I wrote a post about conserving water and said, "while potable water may seem a constant to us Midwesterners, it is scarce in many parts of the world." Well, guess what? Even here, in the land of public drinking fountains (most of which have been covered and unused for more than a year because of the pandemic), unlimited free water in restaurants, indoor and outdoor waterparks, and the great fun of jumping through sprinklers until the lawn is soggy, even here in the land plenty, clean water is less reliable than it used to be.

And most of us don't know it. Yet.

I've already had water usage on my mind lately. A few weeks ago, a city crew was digging a giant hole in the street, repairing a water main. We had our water shut off for about half a day, and then we were under a precautionary boil order for 24 hours. It was a minor inconvenience but a reminder of how fragile some conveniences--like a constant supply of fresh water--can be. Remember when Texas froze this winter? Some people were without a water supply for more than week.

CCF = centum cubic feet = 100 cubic feet of water = 748 gallons

Also, we've been re-seeding sections of our lawn, watering from the rain barrels whenever possible, not only to be eco-friendly but also because last fall, when we were watering the lawn regularly (because our previously neglected lawn is undergoing resuscitation), we saw our water usage double from 4 CCF (almost 3,000 gallons) in a 2-month billing cycle to 8 CCF (5,984 gallons). Wow! But, get this. Apparently, the average household in our area uses 13 CCF (about 9,700 gallons) every two months, according this 2019 Chicago Tribune article. 

After that shocker of a water bill, our usage returned to 4 CCF on the next couple of cycles. We wondered, is 4 CCF the lowest we can possibly go, or can we lower our water consumption even more? The latest water bill just arrived. 3 CCF! That means we managed to use several hundred gallons less in March and April than our average. That's still over 1,000 gallons per month -- it takes a lot of water to live modern!

And then, just a couple of weeks ago, Ginger Zee on Good Morning America showed us the ruins of an old church, previously hidden underwater in a reservoir in Mexico, now regularly revealed by receding water levels, indicative of the megadrought affecting the western hemisphere.

Megadrought! An intense drought that lasts decades.

Here's the thing. That church isn't emerging from the deep for the first time just now. A quick Google to find the recent story brought me a story from 2015 about this same thing. Water levels in the reservoir have been fluctuating for quite some time, occasionally revealing the church and allowing people to canoe through the ruins. Even in 2002, water was low enough that people could walk through the church.

But that's Mexico, you think. Not us. Well, check out the U.S. Drought Monitor, and you'll see the entire southwestern United States is in a drought, most of it an extreme or exceptional drought on a scale that goes None, Abnormally Dry, Moderate Drought, Severe Drought, Extreme Drought, Exceptional Drought. In fact, half our country is abnormally dry or worse. I inevitably think of the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, or perhaps a future drought era as depicted in Interstellar.

So, what do we do?

Landscaping, for instance. Plant for your geography and climate so your garden will thrive in the natural amount of rain it gets. Supplement with collected rainwater. We easily use 12-20 gallons of water from the rain barrels daily just for our new-grass patches -- on days it doesn't rain, that is. You could also use rain barrel water for washing your car or your patio furniture or anything else outdoors.

According to the EPA, 70% of the average American's water usage happens indoors, though. Letting it mellow will save you, at most, a few gallons a day. It's better than nothing, but there are more impactful water conservation activities to consider. 

Get appliances that use water more efficiently, if you can -- whether it's a full-scale gray-water system, an HE washing machine, a WaterSense-labeled toilet, or a high-efficiency showerhead.

Working with the appliances you already have, number one priority: fix any leaks.

Then, just take shorter showers. My mom used to wash her hair at the kitchen sink instead of in the shower. Like at a salon, the water was off during the shampoo scrub and while the conditioner soaked in. So, think of those types of adjustments that might reduce your time standing under the running shower. 

Also, hand-washing. Shut the faucet off while you're soaping your hands for the recommended 20 seconds. And, for goodness' sake, don't let the water run while you're brushing your teeth -- that's two whole minutes if you're doing it right!

I'll also recommend paying attention to how companies use water, from the obvious (like water suppliers and the agricultural industry) to the less obvious but heavy hitters (like manufacturers of anything), and how the government regulates them. You have the power -- by how you purchase things and how you vote, to name just a couple of ways -- to influence how your community and we as a nation conserve (or waste) this precious resource.

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