Thursday, October 22, 2009 by Hodding.

I don’t know about the rest of you but I just realized we already have a hefty amount of free advice and wonderful stories at this site–and not from me.  You are leaving such thoughtful and helpful comments.  A friend–OK, it was Mike Ross, the guy who helped shape my site this past few weeks, commented that there’s so much good stuff here.  I said, yeah, yeah, just thinking he was being a surfing-for-frugality neophyte BUT THEN I  READ ALL OF YOUR COMMENTS!  I hope the rest of you take the time to read them too.  I like so many of these helpful tidbits but am especially psyched about clf’s advice and information on canning without all the extra boiling.   And then there was the post correcting me about fougasse and explaining how to make it properly (still haven’t broken out the cracklings but looking forward to it).

All I’m trying to say here is: let’s keep the information and ideas flowing.  This is a good thing.  A great thing, even.  Thank you.

It turns out there are thousands of you checking in on a regular basis so my guess is there’s still a great need to share stories about coping with less.  Equally pertinent, despite the fabulous, newfound wealth of the very banks that helped get many of us into our current mess, we’re still in a recession.  Friends and neighbors are losing jobs.   Most of our elected officials are not getting the big picture: We need to change.  Live more consciously.  We need to make sure this past year’s flirtation with frugality wasn’t merely a fad.  It’s time to refocus our energy–spend less time reaching for the Almighty Plastic and more time reaching for tiny, long-forgotten crab apples so we can make our own food.  So we can spend more time with our families.  So we can feel good.  Whole.

Well, I’m not too sure what just got into me but I do want to brag in closing.  My Uncle Philip just had his 70th birthday and we decided to give him a few of the things we’d been making at home.  These are items and foods that we worked long and hard to produce but had so much fun in the doing–way more fun than I’ve ever had buying something.  The picture accompanying this entry is of his birthday basket which is holding homemade jelly, applesauce, mead, bread, leeks, eggs, turnips, squash and sweat.

Posted in fougasse, Frugal presents, Making jelly, Hens | 16 Comments »

Sunday, October 18, 2009 by Hodding.

 I wasn’t really feeling like I had anything to write about until a friend of mine (Peter Nichols, in town promoting his new book, Final Voyage: A Story of Arctic Disaster and One Fateful Whaling Season, an engaging history of our original oil business–whale oil, that is–and the storm that killed it) grabbed the last cheese stick I’d made our kids yesterday morning, explaining between bites:  “You made these?  I eat them every day for lunch in Paris along with a bit of cheese.  They cost me one Euro!  Mmmm.”

Yes, I wanted to kill him for dropping the “P” word and especially for acting as if living there is a hardship.  He’s teaching two weekly writing classes, one for screenplays and the other for fiction.  It sounds so 1920’s–except for the screenplay stuff.  At least he’s only making enough to cover his rent.  He’ll be starving in no time, I hope.

But back to those “cheese sticks.”  I think they might be called fougasse* in French but maybe fougasse are crisp and more like a crunchy Italian breadstick?  Either way, his eating more than his share while not-so-subtly bragging about Paris made me realize I definitely wanted to toss out this idea and recipe (hope I didn’t do so while writing for Gourmet?).

It’s nothing tricky and in fact, that’s why I make them–a last minute, “oh, chicken poop (yes, I step in it every day and use the word poop along with an occasional shit even though Lisa says my saying poop sounds childish)” I’ve-got-to-fill-the-kids-up-with-something fallback.

So, pretend like it’s Friday morning.  The alarm has failed to wake me at 5:30 am and it’s now 6:15.  I clean yesterday’s coffee filter which has been used only six times, turn the over to 375, make the coffee and then throw together our version of the internet-sensation, no-knead bread dough (3 1/2 cups bread flour, 1 1/2 cups water from our well (no chemicals!), 2 1/2 teaspoons salt, and since it’s last minute stuff, 2 teaspoons yeast.

It’s now 6:30 and while it’s being stirred together in the mixer, I grate whatever cheese we have handy but preferably some low-rent parmesan or asiago.  When the dough is ready, I grab a sticky handful and somehow get it to roll into a log shape by doing this on top of a 2-3 tablespoons of the grated cheese.  The cheese covers the stickiness making the dough pliable–or at least able to be shaped into the foot-long pieces we like.  One no-knead recipe makes about a dozen of these cheese breadsticks.

The oven is usually ready by this point (6:40 to 6:50, depending on whether or not the coffee has taken effect and how many arguments Lisa and I have had with the kids and each other–the latter almost always occurring only because of the former) and then they bake until 7:00-7:10, about 20 minutes.

After taking them out of the oven in a mad rush, I toss them at the girls (Angus gets to eat his at the table since his bus comes later) as we’re pushing these surly she-devils that used to be our little angels out the house.

So, if you too have a house full of fledgling teens, give these cheese sticks a try. They don’t always make the kids nicer but they do taste good.

*Postscript: A wonderful person (see first comment under this posting) just wrote in explaining what a real fougasse is.  So, clearly, what I’m making is not fougasse but I hope some of you will try anyway.  Her fougasse sounds divine, however.  She had me at  “anchovies, pork/duck cracklings” by the way.  We’ll just stick to calling the things we make cheese sticks.

Posted in breadsticks, Frugal dish, Peter Nichols, fougasse, Frugal Meals, cheese sticks, Outwitting Children | 14 Comments »

Wednesday, October 14, 2009 by Hodding.

I’m afraid this is going to be a bit rambling.  I started out last week all excited.  Lisa and I madly created this site and I wrote my first blog until 1 am Tuesday–putting aside everything else on hearing of Gourmet’s demise.  I was swept up in the euphoria one gets from doing something new, but as the week progressed I grew ever more morose and decidedly less euphoric:  I was out of a job.  In fact, I was out of the only real job I’d had all year.  Writing about being frugal–and getting paid for it–had been a lifeline and a focal point.  No more.  (Making matters worse was the fact that two software/website-designing friends, Mike Ross and Carl Trapani, took hours out of their non-spare time to help make the site look better.  Mike, in fact, loaded all my old columns/blogs from the old Gourmet site, even.)

Yes, we were being frugal because we had to be.  And I was writing about being frugal because I often/almost always write about the big undertakings in my life.  And, deciding to stop eating out and doing things like reusing a coffee filter 42 (43?) times and eating roadkill and raising chickens and going twenty-something days without spending any money (beyond paying old bills) is definitely a big undertaking.  But now what?  If I’m not getting paid for this and don’t feel right about trying to turn this into a commercial blog/website because I’d rather contribute to your frugality then what am I left with?

Being frugal.

That’s why I found myself bending 18-foot tall crab apple trees to eye-level so Lisa could snatch off as many crab apples as possible in the limited amount of time I could hold the trees down.  No, we’re not so desperate that we’re feeding the kids  crab apples but instead, we’re making jelly and canning it for our own consumption and to give away as presents.  Bending the trees down, therefore, was filling two needs at once: being frugal and keeping physically toned.  In fact, given how hard it was to hold them down after a minute or so, I’d recommend the exercise to anyone whose triceps need a little firming up.

It’s amazing how good crab apple jelly is.  I hadn’t bothered tasting it since I was a kid because I’d always been more than happy to shell out for store-made or farm-made jam, jelly and preserves.  There’d been no need.  What a shame.  It’s so good even my non-preserve-eating teenage girls like it.

Lisa found about six, conflicting recipes from various sources, including, among other places, the back of the box the jars came in, online, and the old Joy of Cooking (we couldn’t find canning in the new one but I bet if they were to release an all new version now like they did in 1997 [yes, it’s been that long] they’d include it; our local hardware store said they’d hadn’t sold anywhere near this year’s amount of canning supplies in many, many years).  Some recipes said you didn’t need to sterilize the jars, others suggested 20 minutes and yet others demanded 15 minutes before filling and 10 more after to seal them properly.  So, after trial and error and doing enough research to understand what each step was for, she went with sterilizing the jars for 10 minutes, washing the lids and not dipping them in the boiling water so as not to harm the rubbery seal, and then finishing them off in a boiling water bath for 10 more minutes–or long enough to have a vacuum seal.  You can tell if they’re properly sealed, we now understand, by pushing on the lid with your finger.  If you can’t depress it, then it’s probably properly sealed.  That’s just for making jelly.  It’s different for jams and preserves.  Of course.

Making the jelly was the easy part.  She boiled the crab apples (8 cups with enough water to cover the apples), for 10 minutes and then strained the juice through cheesecloth, being careful not to mush it or it will be cloudy.  Next, she brought this juice, about 4 cups, to a boil, added 3 cups sugar and reheated it to between 222 and 225 degrees over a medium high heat.  You can just stop at this point, like we did, but then you’ll have some jelled jelly and some liquid jelly, which, I guess, isn’t really jelly.  If you simmer it at this heat for a while longer, say 5-10 minutes for 4 cups of crab apple pre-jelly liquid, then nearly all of it ends up being jelly when cooled.  It also gets darker and tastier the longer you’re willing to cook it.  The cool/frugal thing about making crab apple jelly is that you don’t need to add pectin to thicken it.  In fact, some people make their own pectin from crab apples to use in other preserves.

I still can’t get over how tasty it is.  Here… smell.  Taste.  Good, huh?  And Lisa’s jelly looks so wonderful because she simmered it much longer than she had to, making it darker red and stronger tasting than it might otherwise have been.

Of course, it’d be a whole lot better if other members of our family besides Angus and me used jelly, jam, etc.,  but it’ll make beautiful presents in the short, wide jars Lisa recently found on sale.  Which brings me to the point of this blog (finally, some might say): one of the great things about being frugal is all the wonderful, low-cost, hand-crafted presents you come up with.

And here’s a boast for the ages:

Frugal people make great lovers (if you define a lover as someone who gives thoughtful, homemade presents to his/her friends, that is).

Posted in Frugal presents, Making jelly | 18 Comments »

Tuesday, October 13, 2009 by Hodding.

I can’t post the blog I wrote this morning because I want to load a photo with it and I can’t take the photo until my rechargeable batteries are ready.  Sorry.  But, I can take this moment to thank all of you for checking in and seeing what we have to offer this past week.  I also appreciate all the comments–encouraging and critical alike.

Anyway, the batteries should be ready in a couple of hours and I’ll upload everything then.  But don’t get your hopes up–although we did make something really cheap and yummy.

Posted in Extreme Frugality | 6 Comments »

Tuesday, October 6, 2009 by Hodding.

It makes sense, of course, that a person writing about being frugal in these hard times would lose his platform for financial reasons, but it doesn’t make it any easier–especially since said loss was the result of the unnecessary demise of an excellent publication.  Gourmet of 2009 had changed and adapted itself to the times so well that pulling the plug on it only highlights the desperate decision-making currently running amok in the publishing world.  I’m sure Bon Appetit, Conde Nast’s remaining culinary magazine, is a decent publication, but I know Gourmet and Bon Appetit is no Gourmet magazine.   I’m sad to see the old lady go.

Under Ruth Reichl’s leadership Gourmet maintained an enviable level of dignity and integrity while carefully shedding its stodgy, upper-class past, publishing articles that those who were aware of its reboot actually wanted to read.  Again and again, it both whetted and sated our appetite for culinary knowledge and delicious food.  Perhaps the general public may not have realized this because the covers didn’t catch up with the new content and Gourmet subscribers who focused only on the recipes may have remained oblivious, but for the last ten years, Gourmet magazine published some damn fine writing (except the few articles by me, of course).  I particularly enjoyed the food-politics stories brought in by editor Jane Daniels Lear that other culinary magazines wouldn’t have touched with triple-insulated Teflon oven mitts.  I will miss both reading and writing for it.

[Warning: shameless segue] I did want to take this opportunity, however, to announce the rebirth of my old column/blog, Extreme Frugality, that I was doing for www.gourmet.com. I’ve changed the name to The Frugal Guy for now but am definitely open to suggestions.  I’d like to come up with something fun and enticing that both includes my whole family and helps attract more miser-wannabes to our site.  I’ll send a bottle of Hod’s Mead Batch #2 (the first batch was a failure–remember?) to the person who comes up with the winning name.  Lisa and the kids will be the judges.  On second thought, I might also toss in a live rooster. They’ve been driving me crazy.

As some of you may know, we birthed a dozen or so chicks last May in Angus’s kindergarten class.  A fox (a real one) got 3 or so and we ended up with 8 chickens by the end of this past summer.  Five of these turned out to be roosters.  While I’ve become a huge fan of these creatures and find them adorable even, our neighbors aren’t too amused by all the crowing.  A full grown rooster’s cock-a-doodle-do is difficult to take on account of its volume, repetition and timing (they DO NOT wait until daylight to crow; in fact they seem to crow 24/7; very interesting, huh?) but a rooster-in-training, on the other hand, is intolerable.  It’s a waffling, warbling irritating cacophony that will drive you batty–and I’m not exaggerating.

Since our 6-year-old Angus has grown rather attached to the birds, the “fox”, not me, got three of them last weekend.  The unamusing irony hidden within these timely deaths, though, is that only two young roosters had started to practice crowing.  One would think it would be the bigger, bolder birds doing such practicing and one would really think that the “fox” would have killed at least one of the crowers-in-training, if not both, when he carefully selected his prey late last Tuesday after all the kids were asleep.  But no, come Wednesday morning, there were still two cackling roosters, firing up earlier than usual at 3:30 am.  What are the odds (really–what are the odds.  somebody write in. please.)?  Somehow, we recovered the birds from the “fox” and I hung the headless silenced ones in the basement knowing the kids wouldn’t happen upon them because they’re all a little afraid of that dank, dark, moldy dungeon.  I was only planning on hanging them for a day–two at the most since they were so young and relatively skinny.  I say relatively–sorry about all the asides and parentheticals but I no longer have an editor, hee-hee–because about 2 weeks ago my friend Adam gave us a 10-pound rooster he’d recently raised.  It was Costello to our bird’s Abbott and had been so genetically programed to stuff itself silly that it couldn’t even walk to the food bowl, let alone out in the yard, its last few weeks because it was so fat.  In comparison, our birds were winged Don Knotts, they were so skinny.

Back to their being hanged in the basement: I couldn’t get to them the second day and then on the third I scratched my eye so badly while clearing brush to triple the size of our vegetable plot that I couldn’t dress them then either.  Now, I hate relating this, but I believe in full disclosure, epecially when it comes to my own failings. Wish I didn’t, in fact, but be that as it is, the morning of the fourth day I was planning on throwing them away without Lisa knowing it–but with a guilty heart. However, we’ve been together 17 years.  She was on to me.  Fast–like Snowflake (our rooster for all you new readers) on his lovely henfolk.

“Hodding, you have to do something about those roosters.  Today!  It would be plain wrong if you just let them rot.  You can’t do it.”

I wanted to be mean and respond, “Why don’t you do it, smarty pants?” but I knew she’d do it if she had the time.  I kept my mouth shut and got to work.

I butchered a fair number of birds while I was in the Peace Corps in Kenya in the mid-1980s but I still can’t claim it ever became a pleasant business–and especially after they’ve been hanging around for 4 days.   To be clear: they smelled.  For the life of me, as I carefully removed the bloated intestines, I couldn’t see why upper-crust Brits extol the virtues of multiple-day hung birds.  Ok, hanging may soften the meat but was it worth putrification, and more importantly, wouldn’t we get sick? (Apparently not.  We’ve eaten them for 3 days now.  I guess it’s just the feces you have to stay clear of.)  We love the 1/2 cow we bought last summer and it was hung for 4 days by the butcher but that was in a refrigerated room.  Our basement was probably 55 degrees–nowhere near cold enough to ward off bacteria. Anyway, after abusing the first bird so badly while plucking his feathers that I had to remove all his skin to cover my mistakes, I decided that although Hugh Fearnly-Whittingstall didn’t suggest dipping the birds in boiling water for a second or two, I was going to give it a try.  I had a faint memory of doing such a thing while plucking in Africa and it certainly couldn’t make things worse.  In fact, it didn’t.  The 10-second immersion in boiling water made the feathers almost fall off on their own.  (Hugh, it is my humble opinion that you definitely need to include this step in any future reprints of MEAT.  Ok–if you ever see this, that is?)

About an hour later, three slightly smelly, naked birds waited patiently on our kitchen counter for some sort of culinary rescue.

Well, thank God for the French.  It turns out Coq au Vin was developed explicitly for dealing with the unwanted, male offspring of laying hens.   For thousands of years farmers had no idea what to do with these miserable creatures, shunned on account of their skinniness and toughness, let alone their inability to lay an egg.  What to do.  What to do. What to do?”

“Mon dieu!” Pierre of the crooked nose and wart-infested face exclaimed one lazy afternoon.  ”What makes me more appealing to Mademoiselle Amiee?  Lots of brandy and red wine, of course.   They make anything appealing.  Bring me those coqs!”

And that, roughly speaking, is how the French saved civilization… or at least the unwanted rooster.  In MEAT, Hugh bemoans the falling-out-of-favor of this once indispensable dish much as we’re now saddened by the death of Gourmet (like how I’m tying it all back to the Evil Empire’s decision to murder the rebellious Gourmet?), but I’m guessing we’ll soon see a return-to-favor for this hearty meal considering how many people started raising laying hens this year, especially if they follow Hugh’s recipe.  It was divine.  Our three girls, in the know as to the chickens’ true provenance, have had many helpings and Angus likes it too.  The meat was moist, tender and since those birds were the free’est ranging things imaginable, quite healthy too.  Best of all, the booze, onions and garlic vanquished the unpleasant odor and so even I was able to enjoy them.

Since this is the first time on my own, I’m not positive I can include his recipe here,  but I’ll check out the legality and if possible, post tomorrow.

I hope you’ve enjoyed your time here today and I will do a much better job of reigning myself in in the future.  Promise.

Farewell, Gourmet!

By the way, Lisa found the cheapest host possible for this site which explains the picture of the stranger at the top of this page.  She came with this “literary” template provided by the hosting company.  I’m looking into replacing her with something frugal soon–although I have nothing against her.  I just don’t know if she’s a penny-pincher.

Posted in Uncategorized | 35 Comments »

Monday, October 5, 2009 by Hodding.

I’m writing this after I’ve written my second post so I can practice using the writing program for my website.  There seems to be problems with creating paragraphs when I use Safari as my browser so now I’m trying FireFox.

I’m hoping this sentence shows up as an entirely new paragraph.

Just so this isn’t a complete waste of time for you, I’ll announce this: I will attempt to post a video later today.  It’s a short “instructional” piece (I hope it will be clear why I’ve placed instructional in parentheses) on autumnal tilling, composting and farming.

Hope it works.  And thanks for checking us out.  Still feeling very weird about Gourmet.

Posted in Outwitting Children, Frugal Meals, Hens, Roosters, Butchering, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Thursday, October 1, 2009 by Hodding.

I like the Frugal Hodding better,” Lisa announced last night, with a slight smile and crooked frown. I’m not sure what prompted this opinion—the Gatorade I bought Angus to keep him quiet while I searched three stores for the cheapest peat moss*, the bag of candy corn bought on a spooky whim, or the box of discounted Capri Suns for the kids’ lunches. Oh, wait. Now I remember. She’d just discovered the cup of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee I’d carelessly left on the counter.

Honestly, I didn’t set out on a spending spree to celebrate our return to the capitalist fold. It just happened. By the end of the day—two days before the month was over, actually—I’d spent $270 on groceries, pet supplies, and a couple of “necessary” things for our mini-farm. There was just so much stuff out there, beckoning like free hooch to a booze hound.

The funny thing is, except for the dog food, we could have gotten by for at least another month without any of it, as long as we could barter.

Which brings me to my point: I like Frugal Hodding better, too. Out of all the things we’ve done during the past 12 months to make ends meet, this no-spending experiment was the most difficult, exacting aspect, as well as the one of the most rewarding, successful, and life-changing. As it turned out, we didn’t make it the whole month—we bought a tank of gas so our whole family could go to Helen’s soccer game 90 miles away, and then we chose not to miss the Common Ground Country Fair, an annual festival (and Carter Family ritual) celebrating Maine’s organic farmers and growers—but we went plenty long enough to make our whole family glow with pride and knowledge. We already knew there was a much better place than the Land of Excess, but now we felt it deep inside.

The kids kept telling me there was no difference between what we’ve been doing all year and this past month, besides my opportunistically coasting in neutral on every downhill. Their opinion, in itself, signaled success to me because it meant they didn’t feel deprived, but it wasn’t completely true, at least from my viewpoint. Although the kids have their own money, they didn’t spend any this month, either. Also, unlike most middle-class kids, they were made very aware of what it takes to not only get by but to feel satisfied. They took part in the scramble to pull this off, suggesting meals that could be made from the garden, baking cookies, and coming up with more things to barter. They even asked me to make more sumac tea.

To show my appreciation, I may have gone a little overboard on getting things I know they like, eliciting Lisa’s remark, and I purposefully bought a number of items that we had been bartering for because every time we barter using our eggs, we’re taking away the kids’ spending money. That said, after I stock up on a few more things—six gallons of milk (yes, we have an extra, smaller fridge), a gallon of half-and-half, and ten pounds of butter—I’m going to continue the “no money out” policy for a while longer. We still are getting plenty of vegetables from the garden. I’ve picked two bushels of apples from friends’ trees and plan on getting at least that much more, meaning that we will have fruit for months to come. I can’t seem to stop bartering, so who knows how stuffed the pantry is going to be? I’m also starting to forage. When I went on a two-hour wild-edibles walk at the fair, I discovered that wild mustard, a relative of broccoli, has many times more vitamins and tastes like a superior arugula. Better yet, Angus and Helen love the stuff.

*I just learned that I can grind up dried leaves to use in place of peat moss, and once fall has done its thing, I’ll never have to buy peat moss again.

Frugal Tip of the Week

Forgive me if you’ve seen this elsewhere or already thought of it yourself, but I only figured this out ten days ago: Reuse your paper coffee filters. I don’t use a metal mesh filter because it lets the oils through, and I’ve always mindlessly tossed out each filter after a single usage. Well, I ran out during our zero-spending experiment. “Just reuse it, Dad,” Anabel suggested. I shook the last filter over the compost tin, rinsed it off, and then after carefully setting it in the filter holder, filled it with more coffee. Eureka! It worked! I’ve now used the same filter 19 times and can complete the entire cleaning process faster than I can separate a fresh filter from its mates and put it in the coffee maker. Hey, it’s time for another pot of coffee. Let’s see … it worked—20 reuses and counting.

Posted in Extreme Frugality, Outwitting Children | 4 Comments »