It's Tea Time - Sun Tea Time

I'm a devoted tea drinker. I can't get my morning properly started without it. I know the difference between a teapot and a tea kettle, and I know that hot tea will not brew in a paper cup with kinda hot water. Most of the year, a couple of blisteringly hot cups of tea are welcome in the morning. But right now, I'm waking up to temperatures in the high 70s Fahrenheit (mid 20s Celsius), and the mercury only rises through the day.

So I made my first annual batch of sun tea a few days ago. The process is simple: just put teabags or loose tea in a large glass jar and put the jar somewhere where it'll get a strong blast of sunlight for several hours. The heat of the sun warms the water and brews your tea for you. After that, you put the jar in your refrigerator and enjoy the tea chilled. It keeps for several days and you don't even need to strain it if you don't want to.

Sun tea is one of those tiny tips that I employ to save money. But it's a little unusual in that it saves me tiny amounts of money in several ways. The first and most obvious is that I don't have to pay for any energy to boil water. Not a huge savings, granted. But in the summer months, I also save a little because the heat of that boiling water would make my house warmer too. So if I'm running any fans or air conditioning, I get a tiny savings that way. Thirdly, it seems that I get more tea out of the same amount of loose tea or tea bags when compared to brewing it in a pot. Maybe it's the slow and steady brewing done by the sun, but I can get more than a gallon of sun tea from just three tea bags or a generous tablespoon of loose tea. Ratchet up another savings by making my ingredients stretch farther. Finally, I save (potentially) another tiny amount on cooling by keeping myself cool with a cold drink instead of a hot one.

I have two large glass containers for sun tea. One is specifically a sun tea jug, which I got for 75 cents at a charity thrift store. The other is just a very large (1 1/2 gallon) glass jar with a screw top lid. I picked it up in a bulk foods store for less than $3. I don't need anything else, other than tap water and tea leaves to make the most necessary of morning beverages.

Shrub

No, this post isn't going to be a stab at our Glorious Leader. It's about a quaint but refreshing beverage that was commonly prepared and drunk in colonial times. Shrub is a vinegary fruit syrup. It is sweetened with sugar, but still retains a sour punch even when diluted in ice water. If that sounds a little odd to you, it is, but I can assure you that it is also tasty and strangely addicting after a while.

Shrub can be made from nearly any fruit that you have in abundance. It was usually made from delicate summertime fruits like berries or stone fruits, which could not be stored without some sort of processing. Apples and pears, both late fall crops, could be kept for months in cold storage. So these were not commonly converted into shrub, though they were often made into cider, the cooler temperatures being ideal for slow fermentation.

So shrub was prepared in summertime, and also consumed in summertime, though it may have been stored from one year to the next. The most strenuous farm labor, harvesting the hay, had to be performed during the hottest months of the year. Shrub, which contained both sugar and vinegar, cooled and refreshed the men during this difficult work, and it also replenished their electrolytes so that they didn't get heat stroke.

The basic process for making shrub is this: Wash any excess dirt off your fruit, and if it contains pits or large seeds remove these. Put the fruit into a large glass or ceramic bowl and cover it with vinegar. Distilled white vinegar is cheapest and works fine. In the colonies apple cider vinegar would probably have been used. If the fruit floats in the vinegar, put a plate on top of it to weigh it down and keep it submerged. Cover the bowl with a towel or plastic wrap and let it soak for 24 hours at room temperature.

The next day, mash the fruit gently with a potato masher or a wooden spoon. Then pass the fruit and vinegar through the fine plate of a food mill and into a large soup pot. Bring the liquid and pulp to a simmer and add a good quantity of sugar. You will probably want at least 1 cup of sugar for every 2 cups of liquid, but it will depend on how sweet your fruit was. Heat the liquid until the sugar is dissolved. Now you can take a sample and dilute about 3 tablespoons in a pint glass full of water and ice. If it's far too sour, add a little more sugar and taste again until you're pleased with the tangy-sweet flavor. If you wish, you may strain the solids out of the syrup.

At this point you may can the syrup as you would any jam or vegetable. Alternatively, you can pour the syrup into cleaned glass condiment jars and freeze it. Once you have opened the jar again, store it in the refrigerator where it will keep for at least six months. When you're ready to serve shrub, shake up the jar to include some of the fine fruit solids in each drink. They're good for you!

A few notes on the recipe...If you use apple cider vinegar in shrub, keep in mind that apple cider vinegar - or apple cider - was commonly prescribed for constipation. Too much apple cider in any form will give you a case of the trots, though it won't hurt you or your digestion in any significant way. You'd probably have to drink an awful lot of shrub to get this effect, but I thought I'd mention this in case you prepare it this way and then think you're ill due to poor processing. It's just a natural attribute of apple cider. Also, if you are diabetic, shrub can be made with the vinegar alone and then sweetened serving by serving with artificial sweetener. It won't form a proper syrup without the sugar, but it can be canned just the same as the sweetened form.

I made shrub late last summer from home grown watermelon, and have been drinking it this year as I do the heavy planting in the garden. It is a very refreshing beverage. I love the peppy feeling I get from drinking it. It's also far better for me than soda, and almost certainly cheaper too. Even if the raw materials cost is equal to what I have paid for store-brand soda on sale, there's the transportation cost of getting all that soda home. With shrub I only pay to transport the vinegar and sugar, both of which get diluted significantly and go into many, many servings. Soda is mostly water, which is very heavy and therefore expensive to transport. With shrub, the water comes very nearly free out of my tap. (We have a well.)

This year I have both watermelon and cantaloupe planted in the garden, both good candidates for a batch of shrub. We won't get anywhere near enough raspberries to store any. But if that decrepit plum tree on our property produces an edible crop of fruit, I may be making shrub from plums this year.

If you have access to free or very cheap fruit this summer, consider making your own batch of shrub. Consider gleaning fruits if your neighbors have fruit trees or bushes that they do not harvest from. It will be a novelty beverage to serve to company, but I suspect you'll end up enjoying most of it yourself. Given our $50 per month grocery challenge, I'm very glad to have stored this beverage last year. It means that cutting out my most costly food vice (soda) from the budget isn't much of a hardship.

If you should wish to try a commercially prepared shrub before deciding whether to invest the time preparing it for yourself, the Tait Farm in Pennsylvania markets their delicious varieties of shrub online. They also have recipes for using shrub syrup in other ways than as a beverage.

Bibendum est!

So Many Eggs

About a month and a half ago, we had some new additions to our mini modern homestead. Four Red Star hens, at the retirement age of just two years. We got them from a small farmer not too far away who needed to reduce her flock size. From talking to other poultry farmers, I knew that the eggs from mature hens would be large - much larger than normal grade AA large eggs from the supermarket. I'd also been told that two-year-old laying hens wouldn't produce as many eggs per week as younger hens. That sounded just fine by me as I like to have an egg for breakfast and I didn't think I'd mind having one slightly larger than usual.

We built a mobile coop for the girls, along with a mobile pen, just 5'x6'. We used a great deal of material pulled from dumpsters at residential building sites, which still exist here in southeastern Pennsylvania. (The housing bust isn't as bad here as many places.) The coop is small but contains a roosting bar and a single nesting box, lined with hay, where the girls can lay their eggs. Each morning I move the pen to a fresh patch of our untreated lawn, refill their feeder and waterer, and then move the coop into place alongside it. I release the coop door with a drawstring and the girls rush out for their breakfast. The pen offers shelter from rain and too much sun, but the partial mesh siding also allows sunlight and cooling breezes.

Having hens has changed our household routine a little. The care of the chickens takes very little of my time. Ten minutes in the morning and just two or three at night when I secure them in the coop against predators. Certainly keeping the hens takes us much less time than walking a dog would. What has changed is that many of our kitchen scraps now go directly to the girls instead of the compost bin. Some things that we wouldn't have composted are happily devoured by the hens, like cheese rinds and fish skins. The hens love many sorts of fresh greens. So I now am in the daily habit of picking dandelion greens for them. They also enjoy another weed, prickly lettuce. And they adore the leafy parts of some parsnips that have gone to seed in my old garden bed. There's also an old and sickly plum tree that is bearing some fruit this year but dropping much of it before it ripens. The girls are happy to peck at this still-green fruit. They even eat some of the grass they are on each day and happily scratch away at the ground, looking for bugs and insect grubs. They're helping to keep the Japanese beetle population in check. I've found that I only need to offer the hens a very small amount of store bought feed. One fifty pound bag ($14) lasted us about 7 weeks.

What I didn't expect was to get SO many eggs. Despite what I was told, my more than two year old hens are producing very nearly one egg per chicken per day. That's four eggs per day at least 6 days a week, and never fewer than three eggs per day. In other words, 28 eggs a week. This led to a minor panic attack on my part. At first I gave eggs away as a goodwill gesture to the neighbors; an attempt to forestall any possible complaints even though we are within the letter of the zoning codes and don't have a rooster. But soon I started casting about for recipes that use up eggs.

We had Monte Cristo sandwiches, which are sort of like French toast, sort of like grilled cheese, and sort of like a deli sandwich. The Monte Cristo typically has cheese, ham and turkey inside, with jam on one piece of bread and mustard on the other. Then it's dunked in beaten egg and cooked in a skillet. Some people dust the cooked sandwich with powdered sugar. These were better than we expected them to be and used egg up nicely.

I tried Asian Tea Eggs, which are hard-cooked eggs simmered again in a mixture of soy sauce, sake, tea leaves, water, and other seasonings. I wasn't crazy enough about the results to eat them eagerly.

Bread pudding has been a hit, with Marie Simmons' recipe from her cookbook, The Good Egg. She makes Strawberry Jam Bread Pudding with Almond Streusel, and it is delicious. I tweaked her version just a bit to work with what we had on hand as well as my own preferences. I made it with a mixed berry jam and cardamom in the streusel instead of her recommended cinnamon. I think it would be great with nearly any jam.

Strata, the savory version of bread pudding, is a great solution to the too many egg "problem" as well. I like strata because it doesn't require a pie crust like quiche does, and I often have heels from loaves of homemade bread lying around. Strata is great too because it's great for using up whatever leftovers you have in the kitchen. Half a can of stewed tomatoes is great, as is any cheese that isn't getting readily used for other purposes. I like to add sauteed onions to my strata, and also toast the bread and then rub it with a clove of garlic for extra flavor.

I don't worry about the dietary dangers of eating so many eggs. Our cholesterol levels are fine and the link between blood cholesterol and dietary cholesterol has largely been debunked anyway. Since our hens eat copious amounts of leafy greens, our eggs would be considered pastured eggs. Nutritional studies have shown that compared with conventionally produced eggs, pastured eggs are lower in total fat and cholesterol, higher in "good" cholesterol, higher in vitamins A, B, D and E, higher in folic acid and higher in omega-3 fatty acids. The yolks of our eggs are a beautiful dark orangish-yellow, indicating that they are packed with beta carotene.

I'm sure we wouldn't be eating so many eggs if we weren't keeping laying hens. But as we have the eggs, it makes sense to use as many as we can and sell a few for ready cash. By and large, the meals we make with eggs are extremely economical. Even if you're not getting "free" eggs, as we are, eggs can form the basis of a great many cheap and meatless meals. I recently heard that some farmers markets in the San Francisco bay area offer premium farm fresh eggs at $6 per dozen. This sounds outrageous on the face of it. Yet if you had two eggs for a breakfast made at home, the cost would only be $1 for the eggs. Throw in a cup of coffee or tea and some buttered toast and your total cost might be as high as $2. A $2 breakfast is a good deal. A serving of strata made with those super expensive eggs and lots of other ingredients might set you back as much as $3 or $4. A dinner costing $3 or $4 is a great deal.

So think about the mighty, humble egg as a cornerstone of your at-home, frugal and healthy meal preparation.

Frugality Creep

Frugality became an important issue for me about a year and a half ago when my husband and I took on two mortgages (one for 50 acres of farmland, the other for the home we live in) totaling about $400k. Suddenly I felt the need to start saving money everywhere I could. I read blogs and books about getting out of debt, doing it yourself, voluntary simplicity, and modern homesteading. At this point the smaller of the two mortgages is completely paid off; we own that farmland free and clear. But we still owe the bank for the roof over our heads.

I'm still looking for ways to save money. But I've incorporated many more ideas and techniques than I ever imagined I would when I first started thinking hard about ways to save money. All the suggestions and recommendations you get from frugality websites and books can be overwhelming at times, no matter how willing you are to change. We're creatures of habit, and change is easiest to take - or to make - in small doses.

I started first with simple household things, like hanging up every single load of laundry to dry inside, installing compact fluorescent lightbulbs, and turning off the hottub. We stopped eating out and cooked all our meals at home. But after all the easy and obvious changes were made, I was still looking for more ways to save money.

I took Amy Daczyczyn's advice and tackled a new skill at the beginning of 2007: baking bread. I didn't expect world class bread, but I was hoping to beat what's available in the stores near us. Truth is, after a few so-so results, I learned fast. I found it easier and more enjoyable than I expected to. So now I not only make all of the bread we eat, I barter it too. That's not a situation I would have predicted when I started looking for ways to save money. I thought that I'd make some of the bread we eat, but continue to buy some from the store.

We gardened on a small scale last year, and cleared another enormous garden bed this spring. Given how quickly food prices are going up, I'm glad I had this planned out already and that the seeds and seedlings are already in the ground. The garden plot takes up a very significant chunk of our backyard, and reduces the amount of grass we have to cut: savings in groceries, gasoline, and time spent on a boring chore. I imagine that we'll buy very little produce for the remainder of the year. Depending on the yields I get, I may even sell some produce to local restaurants or at a roadside stand, after I've canned what I think we'll use over the winter. Again, this expanded food production wasn't something I had envisioned when my attitude began to change.

Another unforeseen change is that we now have four Red Star laying hens. We built a mobile pen and a mobile coop for them, mostly out of materials salvaged from dumpsters on building sites. We started dumpster diving for wood and other items without any specific building projects in mind. But I built sawhorses for ourselves and for friends as a Christmas gift with 2x4's pulled out of various dumpsters. The hens now get moved every morning in the rotational grazing system popularized by Joel Salatin. We move them around the perimeter of the garden and in the fall we'll probably put them in the garden itself where they'll help fertilize and work the cover crop into the soil. The four hens we got were scheduled for "retirement" (the stock pot) earlier this year at two years of age. Our girls apparently never got that memo, because they still pump out eggs at the rate of one egg per hen per day. The eggs are huge, fresh, nutritious, and so abundant that I can sell a dozen now and then. The girls eat dandelions, purslane, prickly lettuce, and other weeds quite happily, along with our table scraps, and they return that to us in eggs! The grazing system we use means even less of the lawn gets cut on a regular basis. Really, it's hardly a lawn any more. It's now our "pasture in training." The kicker is that I bartered for these four hens and a bale of hay with just two of my organic loaves of bread.

My ambitions are not yet satisfied in terms of self-sufficiency or frugality. I've started building a solar cooker now that the days are getting hot again. I'd also like to start a vermiculture trench (earthworm "farming") to improve our composting system and enrich our garden soil on the cheap. I liked both of these ideas when I first read about them, but there were many other more immediate changes to be attended to. Now that keeping hens, hanging up laundry, and baking bread have become routine for me, I can tackle a little bit more change. That's what I call "frugality creep." Incremental changes over time seem to work best for me. If I had tried to make too many radical changes too quickly, I would have failed. I look forward to seeing where the creep has taken me by this time next year.

If you're new to frugality, balance the need to make serious money-saving changes with an awareness of what's feasible for you and your family right now. Make the common sense changes immediately, especially those things that are once and done, like switching to CF lightbulbs. Then start with the daily, weekly, or monthly tasks that save money without needing skills you don't have, such as hanging laundry and making sure the tires of your car are properly inflated at least once per month. After those are part of your routine, follow your own interests for acquiring a skill that helps you save money. In my case baking was the obvious first skill. For you it might be sewing or auto maintenance. Try to pick a skill that interests you, that you are otherwise paying someone else to perform, and also one that won't require you to invest in expensive tools (borrowing them is okay). Stick with it a while even if you see only mediocre results at first. These skills are worth money for a reason: they're difficult to acquire. From there you'll likely see your own frugality creep.

$50 a Month for Groceries

Food prices have been going up, and everyone who's paying attention has felt the pinch. We're foodies in my house, and we cook from scratch most of the time. We also have a very well stocked pantry, a large garden just getting started outside, four laying hens, and a chest freezer that's so full it's difficult to navigate. So at the beginning of May I decided that we would have an experiment this month: $50 for groceries, for two people, for the whole month.

I figured we would still need to buy milk, other dairy products, and a few cooking staples such as onions and garlic. (We've got garlic in the ground, but it's not mature yet.) Aside from these few things that we can't provide for ourselves and we can't do without, we'd be eating from our reserves and the current usufruct of our mini-homestead. Despite a few missteps, I'd say it's worked pretty well. But I should explain all the exceptions and wheretofores.

First of all, I bake all the bread we eat and I also sell breads. It so happened that I ran out of flour this month. I bought 100 pounds of flour wholesale and did not charge this against our grocery bill. Why not? you may fairly ask. Because the money came out of my egg and bread money, the funds I get for these items that I sell occasionally. I keep the money in an envelope, and pay for chicken feed and baking supplies out of it. In other words, our eggs and bread supplies pay for themselves, with a little of my labor thrown into the bargain. I had the cash on hand and will replace it with a few more bread sales.

Secondly, my husband travels almost half time for work. He was home more than gone in May, but even so he had some grocery expenditures that are simply too difficult to incorporate into our grocery experiment. I pack a great deal of homemade food for him so that he's not tempted to eat out much. He has my baked goods and fruit for breakfast every morning, and I send frozen homemade dinners along with him too. So those meals do count as coming out of our stored food assets.

Thirdly, when I do buy groceries, I buy organic or at farmers markets. This means that my food dollars are buying smaller quantities of more nutrient-rich foods. But I didn't count any non-food grocery store purchases against my $50 limit. Toilet paper and soaps don't come out of the freezer.

Here are some meals I've put together this month out of foods we have on hand:

Mirin-glazed salmon with sushi rice and garden lettuce salad
















Tomato and spinach strata with garlic toasts















Thin crust pizza with bacon and fresh sage from the garden











Homemade bagels


























Chard, frozen spinach and roasted potatoes with cream and Indian spices, served with basmati rice or sourdough crepes



















Pasta arrabbiata with peas and parmesan
Sushi rolls with leftover mirin-glazed salmon
Smoked whitefish chowder with bacon and peas
Pad see ew (Thai rice noodles with pork cutlet, cabbage, egg and hoisin sauce)
Sushi rolls with garden lettuce and tamago (sweet egg omelet)
Peach sourdough pancakes
Kheer (milky Indian dessert with leftover basmati rice)
Chocolate-hazelnut sourdough crepes
"Cheater's" huevos rancheros (eggs fried/cooked in salsa)
Roesti potato cakes
Scrambled eggs with caramelized onion and shredded zucchini

As you can see, we're eating pretty well and I haven't busted out many of the frozen roasts yet. We're working on the salmon first.

It's May 26th and so far I've overspent my monthly food budget by about $2.50. I still have plenty of food to eat, but I will probably need to buy milk before the month is out. Yet this month-long experiment has been good for me. My meal planning has shifted quite a bit. Rather than simply following my whimsical foodie moods, I start by taking stock of what's on hand. What's out there growing in the garden that needs to get used? What can I make with what I've got? How long can I go between runs to the grocery store? What's at the bottom of that freezer? And what am I going to do with all these eggs? It's not unusual for me to eat an egg as part of two meals in a day now. Good thing our pastured eggs are lower in fat and cholesterol than the ones from the store. The pantry is looking a little less chaotic, and the refrigerator a lot less so, but the freezer is still almost full. (Partly that's due to me stockpiling bread so that I needn't bake so much over the summer.) I've made fewer trips this month to the grocery store and a lot more to the garden. And the bottom line is I've eaten extremely well.

True, we're not really surviving on just $50 of groceries. We're eating out of previous purchases and what we're producing right now. But using up what we have is the point. Even in a non-cycling chest freezer food will eventually go off. I don't want one bite of that food to go to waste, which means we need to get serious about using it up. I recognize that what we're doing, or trying to do, isn't feasible for everyone. Not everyone has a big pantry, space for a big garden and laying hens, or a freezer full of food. But maybe you have a few things tucked away that you've forgotten about. Why not see what meals you can make of them. Think of it as an opportunity to get creative. Necessity is, as they say, the mother of invention.

I've been so impressed with my own changed mindset and very near achievement of my goal that I'm going to set the same challenge for myself for next month. This time I won't be lured into buying even the cheap store-brand soda that seemed like a frugal deal. I do regret that this experiment leaves me feeling tightfisted even when it comes to local farmers markets. I like to support local and sustainable producers. But nothing is more local than my own substantial garden. It should produce a good deal more for us in June than it has so far in May.

Related Posts

June Report
July-August Report
Four Cornerstone Meals for Frugal Living

Dirt Under My Fingernails

I love gardening. It fills me with a peace I find in no other activity. On perfect days like today, with a light breeze, hardly a cloud in the sky and the thermometer at 70 degrees, it feels like a crime to be sitting inside typing on the computer. But I've earned my little break.

This morning I planted 28 row feet of seed potatoes. I still have almost that much more to plant this afternoon. But since this is work I voluntarily undertake for my own benefit, I answer to no one for the rate I work at. After digging the first row and planting it, I sat down in a lawn chair, just under the shade of our apple tree to contemplate my work, and the rest of the garden as well. My cat came and joined me, writhing on the grass in contentment with the glorious day.

Over the last week, I've planted a few dozen chard transplants and celeriac seedlings, moved a few volunteer sunflower seedlings from the area where I fed the birds this winter, planted pumpkin and melon seeds in nine mounded earth piles, seeded another 13' row of mixed lettuces, planted all our popcorn and six bush zucchini seedlings, about a dozen sunflower seeds, and a fair number number of Cherokee Trail of Tears beans. This lineup includes several types of plant that I've never grown before. It should be an interesting year for the garden.

I'm working mostly in an enormous new bed we cleared this spring, about 45' x 37'. It's ambitious of me, but I wanted to see what we can manage to do on our modest 2/3 acre lot. I'm also approaching it as a test of how much gardening work I can sustain without too much grumpiness or exhaustion. I want the garden to remain a source of pleasure and peace for me, and not become a dreaded task. We'll see if keeping up with the cultivating, and putting up much of the produce for winter, proves that I've bitten off more than I can chew.