Frugal

I have a produce bin full of pomegranates. This would probably be great if I was a Middle Eastern pasha but I’m just a gal who always puts her lunch together in a rush in the morning. I’d love to eat pomegranate seeds as a steady part of my diet but…they take too much time. Oh, now that we’ve been working our way through them, I’m getting faster but until they are bred so that the seeds just pop out in neat groups, this beautiful fruit is a lot of work.

As I try to live more sustainably I keep learning about how far I have to go. Case in point - Sustainable Meat Eating. I'm an omnivore and I have learned a lot about the negative health and environmental impacts of Factory farmed meats. I'm shifting my diet away from CAFO produced meats, but I still want to eat some meat. My options are to choose animals which are raised in a more humane way, wild-caught meats, and hunting wild game myself. This fall I found out how difficult it is to catch your own four-footed meal.

This past weekend, we found out how the neighborhood tastes...to a bee. I finished my fine beekeeping class series at EcoVersity and started thinking about how to wrap up the beekeeping season on my hives. That meant it was time to deal with honey.

Are you a fungophobe or a fungophile? I love mushrooms, well the edible ones anyway. Mushrooms are great on pizza, in a pasta sauce, grilled, stuffed, in a soup or nearly any dish. Have you ever wanted to taste something beyond the ordinary button / Portobello mushrooms that most grocery stores carry? Some grocers carry more expensive varieties like oyster, shitake and enoki. A great way to find more interesting species of mushroom is to hunt them in the wild.

It's Labor Day weekend and summer has begun winding down. I can only hope that it won't be winding down too quickly because it was just in the past few days that I noticed little proto-green beans on the vine. However, people are back in school, it is cool in the morning, and the scent of roasting green chile has permeated the northern New Mexico air. As the days get shorter, I feel this mad desperation coming over me to preserve what I can of summer.

Ladies and gentlemen, I have canned. It was a hot, sticky, dirty dish producing business. However, I have two lovely sealed jars of apricot butter waiting for my use some time this fall or winter. It better be this fall or winter, because I did not go through the processing step and hope that I kept everything clean enough to avoid botulism for awhile.

Carbon Footprint. Peak Oil. Energy Independence. All of these are different ways to talk about how fossil fuels are a finite resource and supplies are running out, quickly*. Given that crude oil, dirty coal and natural (methane) gas reserves are at, or near, peak production how will you prepare for short supplies and high prices? In other words - Do you move off the grid or stick it out in town? Doug Fine has staked his claim on the Funky Butte Ranch in the backwoods of southwestern New Mexico while I'm here in suburban Santa Fe, NM.