It has been a bit since we ventured to Georgia to visit Jules' people. He moved from Georgia up here to the Pacific Northwest a few years ago and now we go back every year to see family. To write about the experience is a difficult thing because of how very dichotomous the state is. The same is true for here. Mindsets run from completely conservative Republican in parts to "bleeding-heart" liberal (as my father says) in others. This dichotomy is not something only true to Georgia, but perhaps due to living here I don't notice it as much.

We always begin at Jules' parents in extremely rural north Georgia. Young Harris has only one stoplight and it is a blinking four way stop. According to the 2000 census 604 people lived in the town, completing 74 families. We are talking tiny!
Set up in mountains filled with National Forest, the area is beautiful in a way that only the Appalachians can be. The green "mountains" are so much more elegant and graceful. Here there are jagged peaks which are stunning and majestic, but not soft in any way. Ours are beautiful in their snow capped regality which demands a form of awe. The awe from the Appalachians is a much more storybook.

With Jules' mother experiencing some health concerns, and the desire from both of us to move into the middle of nowhere, moving to Georgia's mountains became a topic of some serious discussion. For one, the land is cheap. Land there is only about 10-20 thousand dollars an acre. That would be an outhouse here! There is a lot of land which buts up to, or is surrounded by, National Forest where logging isn't an issue and recreation is incredible. For not much we could buy a few acres and homestead with contact to other "back-to-the-landers." Secondly, the land is incredibly arable. The Appalachians are some of the best farmland around. Everywhere you drive out in north Georgia you will see people with farms growing and fruit stands propped up. Lastly, with a couple of Mennonite communities, a few Amish farther North in Tennessee, and the wealth of resources provided by people coming to exhibit at the Georgia Mountain Fair, finding others who are knowledgeable about many of the areas we wish our life to venture into would be easy to find. The Foxfire series we have slowly been accumulating originated in Ruban County. Small pockets of the area still teach old world skills to younger generations. The oral history is beginning to completely die out, but small amounts are being preserved by older generations which are seeing life change in negative ways. Quilting guilds, knitters circles, canning displays and soap making are still common in some places in these rural areas. Most importantly, the desire to teach such skills to younger people who are wanting to learn still seems to be desirable. The Barracuda got to use a corn shucker, watch the water wheel spin to move an old grind stone and transform the corn into grits, meal, and flour. He sat with four other boys on an old cider press as a man explained how he had done the same thing when he was their age and continued to talk to them about apple cider, apple sauce, and apple mash. A teenage boy, in a Bruce Lee T-shirt and designer jeans bashfully answered our questions about shingle making the way his grandfather had taught him. He used a froe and deftly split the wood into exceptionally thin sheets. We flew home with much to think about and a stack of real-estate books.

The problem became three fold: 1) we LOVE our house and the area we live in 2) just as there are pockets of Georgia where it is beautiful and such activity is supported, there are those who live in the same places excited that Wal-Mart, Lowes, and a Chick-fil-A are going to open in less than a month devastating the local small town businesses and 3) The Spicy Barracuda is not normal; sporting a blue mohawk and enjoying rap music, dancing, and sparkly purple are not appropriate boy/child behaviors in a rather judgmental area. Like or not, the cultural acceptance of our son is a primary concern. Jules and I both know the brutality of being different in a small town.

The entire situation was bothering me to a large degree. I am a muller, a planner, and have an obsessive need to begin setting out an orderly route for things even if they are about three to five years in the future. It doesn't matter to me if we necessarily follow the plan laid out, but more that a plan exists should we need one. My mind doesn't like to stop until such a logical, reasonable plan exists. So many a furrowed brow and much befuddlement ensued. This seemed to be a place where there was no win: Great liberal area, no space or Great space, no liberal area. That is until in the middle of making a pizza at work the light dawned in my head! The main reason to move to Georgia would be to have enough land to be able to really grow our food, have small stock (chickens, a goat or two, bees), some wooded areas for firewood collection, and to remove ourselves from the grid. Honestly, the issue with staying was that it didn't seem we would have enough space on our 1/10th of a acre to be able to accomplish what we wished to.

Everything else is amazing. We love the area here. The Barracuda fits right in when you first see him (after a discussion or two he is still not normal, but people find it fun and cool here not something to be ostracized about). Jules has a job in a district with seniority at a school he has found a place. Most importantly, we would get to keep our house that we both adore and might later regret selling.

Eureka! We would just begin to change our perceptions of space! More than anything, we needed to re-think our ideas about space. The average square footage of an American house in 1950 was 983 square feet. Basically the size of our 1950's house. It is more than enough for us, yet to many it seems so tiny. The same might be possible for land, I was just thinking about it in the wrong way.
The city ordinances here declare no more than three chickens, rabbits, or pygmy goats. We could have chickens and we don't want a rooster. Our shed outback now houses an abundance of tools (junk) we really don't need and could easily be converted to a chicken coop. The garden could be doubled without much yard loss if we just utilized the space, and our far corner is perfect for a house of bees. The flat top roof could be converted into a solar dehydrator and is ideal for photovoltaic cells (if we dramatically cut our electricity usage). Next year's tax return will bring a solar water heater which almost pays for itself in state, NGO, and federal rebates.

Our city has also declared no swine, no roosters, no livestock within 50 feet of a residence and that includes goats. So goats are out of the question right now because we are surrounded on all sides by other residences. However, if we don't sell our house, it allows us to increase the amount of land we own around us as the nieghborhood changes. Goats may not be out of the question forever.

It is possible to stay here and still remove ourselves from the grid in a slow methodical fashion. It is possible within the urban setting to do much which I have always been considering "country behavior." When I look around at what we have already accomplished, it is so funny to think I retained prejudices about city life being restrictive. It is true that we cannot own acres of land and wide open spaces in our current status. We will always be surrounded by people by living in an urban area, but this can also be seen as a major plus to staying. Community means support. There are so many organizations and non-profit groups around this area to foster not only knowledge, but helpful monetary incentives to increase our abilities. Not only this, but it provides an area for The Spicy Barracuda to grow up seeing that we are not necessarily weird, un-normal, or isolated. The community outreach and local social support is an aspect of the urban area which we haven't experimented too much with, but will definitely be branching out into this next year.

So, for now, we are staying. The potential for our very own space merely needed to be seen. I will still dabble at looking for land in the middle of nowhere, (who knows I might stumble onto something which just couldn't be passed up) but more so as a fun pastime than anything serious. There will always be greener grass on the other side of the fence, we have decided to stop worrying about it and put our energy into our own lawn.

Work, to many in our society, is a four letter word. It is dirty, exhausting, and something to be avoided at most any cost. In many respects, the idea pushed to children is that you put in your time so that in the end you won't have to work anymore. You either study your way out of it with college and a larger salary, or you labor your way out of it in a job you dislike so that you can retire. Things like chopping wood, culturing milk, or hanging wash are directly worse than flipping on the furnace, buying dairy products at Walmart, and using the dryer. Somehow, it has become that the idea of many activities I now participate in most every week are thought of to be gruelingly laborious. The funniest part of all this is that when I ask many of the people who voice these concerns to me, they have never participated in anything other than furnace switches, store bought food, and dryers. "So how would you know?" is my first thought, though I don't say it.

The fact is, turning on the furnace is much easier than chopping and splitting wood. However, I would like to argue it isn't simpler. I have no idea how my furnace works. I wouldn't have a clue how to fix it and legally cannot fix many of the processes that go into getting the power to my furnace. However, the schematics I have seen and the small amount which has been explained to me clearly shows that the steps of creating the electricity (hydro power here), storing the electricity, wiring it to my house, then the furnace, and finally somehow conducting it into heat is not simple. In fact, it is incredibly diverse and complicated. Now, the person who just has to flip that switch may never know any of the background of how their house magically becomes warm (never did), but ignorance does not make something simple.

I know how a tree grows. I know how it stores its electricity in the form of densely laid carbon molecules. I know the difference between a ceder, a hemlock, and a Douglas fir; why they burn differently; and what conditions they need to grow. Part of this is because I am/was and environmental studies major, but much of it is also because I participate in the process of these cycles and the natural systems of their creation, destruction, and the succession which follows. This is in no way easy (though it really isn't as hard as many seem to think), but it is incredibly simple.

The last time Jules and I went to go chop wood, he pointed out the immense sense of personal connection which comes from knowing where our wood came from. We have seen the home the tree once had which will heat our spaces this winter. We have intimate contact with the life it once lived and thus a reverence for all it will give us to continue our lives.

The garden is very similar. There is no commercial production filled with large industrial equipment, no pesticide or chemical development which had to go into our food. There is no way I could begin to describe the chemical complexity of pesticide or what it does to the soil structure and the biogeochemistry of a watershed. Not to mention the multitude of high-tech gadgetry which now constitutes large scale farming. Our garden is literally as simple as seed, soil, and water. By creating and spreading our own compost we are reminded of our waste in ways we won't see for many years with pesticide production. We have collected the rain water, transferred, harvested, and dispersed it even as it fell from the sky all over us. We planted the seeds, watched their development, and have begun collecting the seed to have the cycle come full circle. Yes, it means more labor from building boxes, hand planting, weeding, and such, but it also means I know everything that goes into my food. It is simply food.

When I watch our sour cream and cottage cheese culture, or our butter transform from cream, I am personally taking part in the processes of our food. There are no industrial food plants, no long transportation stops from one venue to the next, no commercial advertising and packaging steps involved. It is as simple as the dairy products which go into it.

So many of these thoughts have been culminating in not only my brain, but also Jules'. It wasn't until our recent trip to Georgia that many of them found the common ground to all fit cohesively together. Jules' long time mentor and friend, Jeff Hanson, owns The Book Nook and recommended Eric Brende's Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology. It is the story of Eric's adventure with is wife living in an Amish-style community for a year and a half.

Now we are not going anywhere near as hardcore as they were. They had no running motors, no electricity, no running water, the works. We are reasonably happy with our small scale simplicity. However, what struck me as so wonderful about the book was the way Eric described the culture of the people whom he lived with and around. Work and labor are the functions which kept the society going. The central focus of their social interactions and their community is combined labor to survive. You help your neighbors for the sheer factor that they need help and will then reciprocate the help later. This is just as much a cultural currency and nothing was expected in return for helping. "Many hands make light work," was a common saying and practice. This communal helping, communal work, made the tasks so much easier in that it provided social interactions and shared knowledge. The community was bound together by shared labor, experience, and all the interconnections which come with the two.

There were many times when reading that Jules and I found ourselves silently nodding and relating to the life Eric and his wife were sharing. We have experienced many of the same struggles, culture shock, and learning curve which they did. The largest example came just recently, however. With canning season in full swing, there was much to be done around our kitchen. As the cans all began to pile up, it became apparent we had no where left to put them. The Hole wasn't finished, and with so much time being spent canning there was not time to finish it. If we stopped the canning to finish The Hole, the short season for fruit would be over. If we didn't finish The Hole, we would have no where to place the cans from the fruit season. We were rather stuck.

Until one day I came home from work to find Jules' head poking out of The Hole, covered in dirt. Up until this point, The Hole had primarily been my task with occasional help from The Barracuda. In true supportive fashion, Jules had jump started my lack luster feelings about the work involved in finishing our root cellar. He approached the entire process in a completely different way with large scale excavation and then later finishing work. This monumental moving of dirt helped re-energize me into doing whatever finishing work needed and the hole was completed in over one long weekend. Together, the daunting task was significantly more manageable and actually kinda fun. Without us joining forces, and his different approach, The Hole still wouldn't be done.

With the dirt removed it was time for shelves and I was once again removed from The Hole, only to watch from the entrance. With such close quarters and large shelving, it would be virtually impossible for two people to have completed the task without a head wound. Being accident prone and not very visual, it would have been me with the head would. So Jules grumbled, man-handled, cursed a bit, and eventually constructed three sturdy, significant shelves for all our cans to sit through the winter.

The enormous task of moving all our cans down into the completed root cellar was more than I thought it would be, but now I don't know how we have managed without it. It will still take a bit more excavation for us to be able to store all of our bins of dry goods in the most ideal places, and still a bit more when our apple tree, pumpkins, potatoes, and carrots begin producing enough to warrant storage in containers other than cans, but for now we've completed one of the most major projects for our home. I know Jules thought I was crazy when I proposed the idea. I know my father (an architect) thought I had completely lost it when I had him come look at the space to discuss how to structurally pull it off. But, in the end, hand digging the root cellar with only a five gallon bucket or two was pretty cool.

Charlotte's Web is long gone, but not a bit forgotten. Though his lip began to quiver a bit at Charolett's passing, no tears were shed. A sniffle or two perhaps, but no tears. He laughed and snickered with Templeton the rat and was delighted with the goose's stuttering speech (my favorite character personally). He thought Mrs. Arable quite wrong about a barnyard being a terrible place for young children and thought slops sounded just atrocious. The smashing of Templeton's spoiled egg caused a turned in face all scrunched up at the smell and the fair made him ask about three or four times (in that chapter alone) if we could go to one of those. Now small spiders are gracing his hands as he finds them all over the garden and carries them about. (He still exclaims panic over large spiders though.) All in all, rave reviews and quite a quick read. I think this one took less than two weeks. So we are on to the next book: Winnie-the-Pooh.

Now I was a bit concerned with this due to which copy of Winnie the Pooh we own. You see, it is so old there is no ISBN number to get a picture from Google images. After much searching I stumbled onto it by adding the word "vintage." Moreover, it's copyright is 1926. There are no colored pictures except the solitary bear in yellow on the front. The red canvas book has long since lost, what I believe, was gold sparkly lines bordering the front and rear covers trying to make it appealing to young children. This is not Disney. The language is not contemporary at all. It is the sort of book that if taken to the Antiques Roadshow the expert looks at you in bewilderment and exclaims "Why were you handling this, let alone reading it to your child!?" It is one of those books that doesn't get to reside on the child's bookshelf and only gets to be read with Mommy taking it down from her bookshelf. But I don't care; I love it. I believe it was my grandparent's, and I know it was my mother's. In any case, what it has in sentimentality, it totally lacks in flash. Small Barracuda boys are a bit addicted to flash.

The greatest thing has happened though: he loves it. Since Saturday's beginning there hasn't been a night which goes by that a request for at least a chapter isn't sprinkled into conversation. Tonight, after getting in trouble for sneaking peas from the garden (I literally had to tell my child at dinner he must finish his strawberry shortcake before he could go eat our garden peas!) his quivering little voice asked, "Can we still read?" He adores Pooh's bewildered antics. He understands the complexity of language and comprehends the story line. No Disney, No color, Hardly any pictures....a hit! Whew! Take that flash! At this rate we are going to be moving on to Stuart Little by Monday of next week. Wow, so much for my dubious mothering.

For over a month now, sour cream has been created in our household with heavy cream, half and half, and vinegar. This was mainly due to me not being able to locate cultured buttermilk. But ah-ha! it was found late today at Cash and Carry tucked in with the rest of the buttermilk. Those sneaky stockers have been hiding it from me all along!

What is the significance of cultured buttermilk you might ask? Oh, let me tell you! Cultured buttermilk is currently something I'm very excited about! Most buttermilk purchased here in the States has been pasteurized or even ultra pasteurized. Though I am in great debt to old Pastuer there are just somethings that work, and culturing enzymes are one of those. The culture which is spoken of in buttermilk are pro-biotic bacteria which feed off the lactose (milk sugar) turning it into lactic acid. This ferments the milk and causes the milk proteins to thicken. This lactic acid gives buttermilk the incredible added quality of naturally fending off and inhibiting pathogenic bacteria. Yay good bacteria (probiotic); Boo bad bacteria (pathogenic).

This is all well and good, you might be thinking, but why is it important to your life? Using cultured buttermilk, you can add this bacteria into milk or cream and produce a "soured" product. (Don't confuse "soured" with spoiled because it is actually better for your body this way due to the lactose being broken down.) Thus sour cream! Way back when, this is how sour cream was created.

Enter the relevance to your current life: sour cream is no longer created this way. In 1973 the FDA repealed a law which wouldn't allow for imitation products to be placed into our food without appropriate labeling. This meant that anything could be substituted as long as the supposed nutritional content was not altered. Honestly, this was an attempt to reduce fat and lower costs. But, the result has become additives that are now added to milk in order to thicken it instead of probiotic bacteria. Things like hydrogenated oils, carageenan, guar gum, etc are now supplimented giving the sour cream a longer preservative time and a thicker texture for far, far cheaper than cultured product. Also, cultured product can wear out. The bacteria die. This doesn't taint the milk, but it means that the thickening characteristics of the culture are no longer present. That is highly costly on a commercial scale. Guar gum can hold up for quite some time along with carageenan and hydrogenated oil.

Information acquired from In Defense of Food:
An Eaters Manifestoby Micheal Pollen

The problem here is that these additives chemically alter our bodies ability to digest food. Though all are natural products, so is arsenic. Just because something comes from a plant does not mean it is a helpful component to add to your body. Secondly, I'm sure that very, very small does of these products (just like the aspertain which is in NutraSweet) aren't harmful. The problem has become that they are now in EVERYTHING! We are eating far more than we even realize.

So what exactly is the problem? Well hydrogenated oils are transfats. They have been linked to excessive free radicals, which are believed to be cancer causing agents. Carageenan is derived from red algea via alkali and has been shown to coat the inside of the stomach. This dramatically inhibits digestion causing the foods which venture to your intestine to not be properly broken down. Since most of the nutrient absorption from your body occurs in the intestine, when food isn't broken down, you cannot digest the nutrients. Carageenan is such a powerful coating agent it is what airlines use to de-ice the plane's wings. Guar Gum comes from the Guar plant and is basically a ground up grain, much like wheat. Do not be fooled however, Guar Gum is such an effective thickener that when combined with water it can swell in size 20 fold. This swelling is produced by a chemical action in reaction to the water and has been shown to dramatically reduce the ability of the intestines to process cholesterol and triglycerides. Not only that, but it slows glucose absorption as well. In laymans terms, your body consumes more cholesterol, more sugar (glucose), and more fat (triglycerides) because the intestines are processing it so much slower our body can't register that we have had enough. It doesn't block the absorption, it just slows it way, way down. This means the "full" reflex in our body can't kick in when it should because our intestines are still working so hard to break down the nutrients.

I don't know about you, but I would much rather have foods which help aide the digestion and absorption of nutrients into my body, rather than disrupt them. So, sour cream is being created now on top of our refrigerator. The hardest part of this process is leaving it alone. In fact, it doesn't require any work from you what so ever after combining the ingredients together.

Ingredients
1/4 cup of cultured buttermilk
1 cups of heavy cream

Directions
Pour the heavy cream into a mason jar, bowl, eating receptical. Add the cultured buttermilk (regular buttermilk will not work, only cultured). Stir to combine. Now cover it and leave it alone. Don't stir it any more or it will kill the culturing and you will have runny sour cream. Leave it out at room temperature 12-24 hours (basically overnight) or until it gets desirablly thick. Once it is thick enough, you can stir it all you want. Just put it in the fridge (this stops the culturing and thickening) and it will keep for about a week and a half.

If you can't find cultured buttermilk, you can always add plain white vinegar. The only difference in the final product is a slightly vinegary taste and no probiotic bacteria. You can also use Half and Half, Whole milk, 2 percent milk, or any combination there of. Just remember that it is the fat in the milk which makes it thicken. No fat, runny sour cream. Jules like his sour cream to stick to the spoon and make a Shloop sound when it is removed from the container. The only thing more important than the shloop is the loud Pluh sound it makes when it is splatted onto your plate. For this reason, the first couple of batches of sour cream I made were too runny for approval. They tasted great, but no shloop.

When I started reading In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, Micheal Pollen points out that our brain is about 60 percent fat; every neuron is protectively sheathed in it; our cell membranes are constructed of fat and require the correct ratio for everything from hormones and glucose to toxins to permeate the walls; vitamins A and E require fat to be absorbed by our intestines; and essentially fat is a necessary part of our bodies ability to function. Somewhere in the obesity epidemic and scientifically modifying food we have forgotten this little fact. When I remembered it, I promptly could careless about how much fat was in our sour cream and the shloop was achieved.
Update: When you put the sour cream in the fridge, it will firm up a bit for those out there who are concerned with their final product. If you don't stir it up, and just eat it off the top, it will stay fairly thick as well. Secondly, the next time you need to make sour cream, use a 1/4 cup of your previous batch and it will turn out even better! This only works if the previous batch still has live culture in it. All that means is you need to use it within about 10 days. However, the awesomeness here is that you can keep creating miraculously FABULOUS sour cream without having to re-purchase the cultured buttermilk! Personally, I find this rather cool. I know....I'm a nerd.

Footnotes:
Carageenan

Filament Disassembly and Loss of Mammary Myoepithelial Cells after Exposure to Carrageenan,
Joanne Tobacman, Cancer Research, 57, 2823-2826, July 15, 1997

Carrageenan-Induced Inclusions in Mammary Mycoepithelial Cells, Joanne Tobacman, MD,
and Katherine Walters, BS, Cancer Detection and Prevention, 25(6): 520-526 (2001)

Consumption of Carrageenan and Other Water-soluble Polymers Used as Food Additives
and Incidence of Mammary Carcinoma, J. K. Tobacman, R. B. Wallace, M. B.
Zimmerman, Medical Hypothesis (2001), 56(5), 589-598

Structural Studies on Carrageenan Derived Oligisaccharides, Guangli Yu, Huashi Guan,
Alexandra Ioanviciu, Sulthan Sikkander, Charuwan Thanawiroon, Joanne Tobacman, Toshihiko
Toida, Robert Linhardt, Carbohydrate Research, 337 (2002) 433-440

Guar Gum

GuarNT Product Information, Tic Gums web-site (http://www.ticgums.com/), April 13, 2005.

Okazaki H et al, Increased incidence rate of colorectal tumors due to the intake of a soluble dietary
fiber in  rat chemical carcinogenesis can be suppressed by substituting partially an insoluble
dietary  fiber for the soluble one., Int J Cancer. 2002 Aug 1;100(4):388-94.

Melnick RL et al, Chronic effects of agar, guar gum, gum arabic,  locust-bean gum, or tara gum
in F344 rats and B6C3F1 mice,  Food Chem Toxicol. 1983  Jun;21(3):305-11.

Uh, no. Tom Sawyer is a complete dismal failure. He could care less about Tom Sawyer, any of Tom's adventures, and has difficulty understanding much of the older language due to the style the book is written in. So back on the shelf you go, Tom. I'm sure in another year or so Tom Sawyer will be quite a welcomed bosom buddy, as for now, The Barracuda has chosen Charlotte's Web by E.B. White. Talking animals are much more the speed of what The Spicy Barracuda is interested in right now and (in his words) he's "seen the movie." Oh goodness, movies over books this young? His English teachers are going to have their hands full when he is in high school!

When the idea of starting a garden first was broached to Jules, it wasn't one he immediately enjoyed. Well, that isn't true. He liked the idea of a garden well enough, however, he liked the idea of a yard much, much more. Initially, I'd planted a few fringe veggies around the edges and had a three tomato plants squished into one big pot. The turning point occurred when salsa found its way into the house. Jules LOVES Mexican food. Fresh salsa from our yard definitely made this garden thing a bit more worthwhile.

Now, the garden is extensive featuring seven 4 foot by 9 foot raised beds, a strawberry patch, blueberries, an apple tree, and an herb garden. It is wonderful! I'm bouncy about it whenever something new sprouts or we visit the local nursery. With all that produce we need somewhere to keep it.
Living in only 900 square feet, storage is at a premium. We just plain don't have the space to accumulate much. I quite like it as that means there is much less to clean and it is much easier to keep life simple. The drawback becomes having places to put all our extra bulk foods, canning, and fresh produce. My first thought was the garage, but Jules put a big veto on that one. It was for the best, we have way too much in there anyway. So next came the rather radical idea of a root cellar.

The very words root cellar seem archaic, but it makes a whole lot of sense especially as times get tougher and money gets even tighter. Basically a root cellar is a way to let Mother Nature do the refrigeration for you. Good root cellars both borrow and keep the cold. By digging in the ground well below the frost level the temperature remains as fairly constant 52 degrees and is slow to be effected by the extremely cold surface temperatures. In this way the veggies and fruits have protection from frost, and extra refrideration from the warm house temperatures. You can then emitt the extremely cold night air into the cellar (via vents or windows) allowing for the temperature to cool to between 32 and 40 degrees. With a pan or water for humidity (so the veggies don't crack or wilt) and two air vents to allow cross movement of air to avoid rotting, you're basic requirements are met. This gives you an extremely large, electricity-free, refridgerator. A finished or unfinished basement, an under the stair closet, a corner of your garage, even a hole in the yard can function as a perfectly good root cellar with little to no work after the initial set up. Canning and dry goods can also work well in a root cellar with only a small partition between the foods that need high humidity and cooler temperatures. In this way you can store large amounts of food and be able to "bulk up" when various fruits and veggies are in season and significantly cheaper not to mention better tasting!

Our root cellar is being put in by The Spicy Barracuda and I hauling up one 5 gallon bucket of dirt at a time. We are hand digging it out of what Jules has coined our "Hole." I honestly don't think he took me seriously when I said I was going to dig us one. But shovel and adz in hand the Barracuda and I began digging away. It is just plain hard work, but the exercise is wonderful and all the dirt has done nicely to fill our raised beds in the garden. The cellar is now coming along very well and we are beginning to consider shelving. The space is beginning as a way to hold our canned foods (most of this year's planting) and our dry bulk storage of 2 gallon buckets. As the space widens, and our garden yeilds increase, the Northeast side will become our actual root cellar to hold the cabbage, potatoes, carrots and such. The task has really been good for my exercising, and the Barracuda can now swing a adz like a pro! His arms are becoming very strong and he is really learning the value of watching his hard work patiently turn into a finished product.

Mostly I have been amazed at how simple this process has been. Though the work is physically tough at times, and you definitely get tired, the actual complexity of the project is minimal. You are mainly just digging away. There are many books which have been written on the subject and have helped me quite a bit when I first began and now as the spaces is coming to a point of some really setting up. Mike and Nancy Bubel have written Root Cellaring: Natural Cold Storage of Fruits and Vegetables as a guide for anyone considering such an undertaking. The book is complete with plans, explanations, crop varieties, and stories of people from all walks of life and how they have created cellars for storage. Whether you are urban (like us), suburban, or rural there is something in this book which will suit you! My copy came from Powells. As far as I know they will ship just about anywhere!

Even if you do not have a garden or a space big enough to put in more plants than you already grow, help the local farm community at your local farmers' market. The markets are free, full of great family events and street entertainers, and provide you with a sense of knowing where your food comes from. This produce is normally cheaper by miles than the produce in the grocery store because you don't have to pay for the middle man and the enormous costs of all the overhead for the supermarket chains. Can it up, support your local community, and store it away to have great tasting veggies and sauces all winter long!

Peter Pan was a great success! Much rapture was had when the last duels broke out. Much wonder at all the discussion of fairies. Flying was amazing as was the idea of living underground and having a tree as a door. Pirates definitely one out over mermaids and little care was placed to the Redskins. More than anything, the idea of sitting down and listening to a story together has been fostered to the point Barracuda now asks to read together. Even if the entire story is lost to him, the desire to sit down and read is considered a solid victory to me.

So, now we are on to our next book: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. The Barracuda is excited and so is Jules. Peter Pan was a bit painful for Jules to get through. His adult cynicism discouraged the wonder of the book a bit and made it hard for him to relate. But, Tom Sawyer. There is a boy Jules can relate to! Growing up in a small town on the Mississippi, living on stories and mischief, sneaking away to get into trouble with boyhood friends, trying to win the favor of a girl - this could easily be written about Jules himself.

I'm hoping this story reignites some desire within Jules to read with the Barracuda at night. Jules read, and the Barracuda loved it, but I would much rather the experience be mutually enjoyable rather than a chore. Unfortunately, most of the books Jules remembers enjoying as a child are just a bit too intense for The Barracuda right now. In a year or so, it will be Jules wanting to read at night exalting in The Last of the Mohicans,Treasure Island, and the like.

Hopefully Tom Sawyer gives Barracuda just enough encouragement to go out and have wonderful stories and adventures in our backyard, but not quite enough to go out trying to win the favor or girls. After all 4 and a half is a bit young!

""Oh, they just have a bully time - take ships, and burn them, and get the money and bury it in awful places in their island where there's ghosts and things to watch, it, and kill everybody in the ships - make 'em walk a plank. they don't kill the women - they're too noble. And the women's always beautiful, too." Chapter 13

My son and I have begun reading Peter Pan before bedtime. This is my attempt to have him exposed to great literature and use his imagination. A great added perk is the wonderful conversation which has spun out of it and all the questions he is now asking. His patience for listening has become quite impressive and he rarely interrupts any more, content to just listen and ask his questions later.

I would like to clarify that we aren't talking Disney. There is a great dislike within me for how much Disney steals, rewrites, waters down, and generally simplifies leaving so little left of substance. I enjoy the animated movies as much as the next guy (and some of the music is incredibly well done), but I don't feel that having a child watch Pocahontas or Beauty and the Beast does the actual tales any justice whatsoever. Alright, I'm stepping down from my soapbox now.

The beginning of the story is a bit convoluted for younger children, but I think the idea of having to give the book a chance is important. Sometimes it is the first hundred pages you have to diligently plod through, not just the first twenty-three. At any rate he hung in there till Peter showed up to have his shadow stitched back on and is thoroughly entranced at this point.

Taking the time to spend a good thirty minutes or more in the evening just sitting next to him and sharing a story is a simple pleasure we rarely engaged in before. By the time he was to go to bed, I was more looking forward to personal time than thinking about the opportunity we were passing up. It wasn't until we learned of the need to homeschool him next year (his birthday misses the cut off by 4 days and the district turned down our appeal) that I decided it was necessary to begin actively engaging him in literature. We have gone to the library for quite some time now, and he reads almost completely without aid, but I mean real literature; time-honored, classic books. It has turned into a real bonding experience for us and hopefully something he will fondly remember when he is older.

Peter Pan is an enchanting story so entrancing to children and adults alike it has become embedded in our culture. The best part, for me as a parent, is now re-reading the story and finding so much of the language deeply poignant and touching. The whimsy and mystical approach to which it is written are things that might fly completely over his head right now, but I hope will stick in his mind somewhere if only to give lingering wonder to other aspects of the world.

Stars are beautiful, but they may not take an active part in anything, they must just look on for ever. It is a punishment put on them for something they did so long ago that no star now knows what it was. So the older ones have become glassy-eyed and seldom speak (winking is the star language), but the little ones still wonder. (pg. 22)

Perhaps in reading to my son at night, I can rub away some of my glassy eyes and re-instill a little wonder in myself.

High Fructose corn syrup is in just about everything these days! One of the major benefits from starting to make our own snacks is the removal of this product from our daily consumption. As much as I knew that high fructose corn syrup probably wasn't the greatest thing for us to be eating, the effects of this product were virtually unknown to me until I began looking for ways to make our snacks at home.

When we first started removing packaged products, granola bars were one of the first to go. They were an easy product to just stop buying without impacting the daily goings on of our household. Both Jules and the Spicy Barracuda love a quick snack and the accessibility of granola bars so I had to find an equivalent substitute.

What is one of the main ingredients in most all store bought granola bars? High Fructose Corn Syrup. It just plain tastes good! However, high fructose corn syrup makes up nearly half of the sweeteners used in processed foods and is found in everything from sodas and fruit juice to crackers and cereal. Due to being six times sweeter than cane sugar and made from highly subsidized corn, high fructose corn syrup is significantly cheaper for commercial companies to use.

The catch is our body does not process high fructose corn syrup in the same way as sugar. Fructose is processed in our liver, and once there it triggers the liver's release of fat cells, called triglycerides. High triglycerides put us at higher risk for heart disease, stroke, and for putting on - and keeping on - weight. Scientists have also shown that the sweetener doesn't send the same "I'm full" message to the brain as happens when we consume sugar. This adds to the amount of unnecessary sugary snacks we consume.
Statistics and Information acquired from Grub:
Ideas for an Urban Organic Kitchen by Anna Lappe and Bryant Terry

Honestly, the first batch of granola bars were a bit of a disaster. They were uber crunchy, rock hard, crumbly things that the Barracuda diligently ate. He exclaimed their greatness as he does most anything Mommy makes (except broccoli slaw) in sentimental loyalty, but I knew the truth. Jules is not quite as humoring as the Barracuda and wouldn't go near them at all! A revision was necessary and quick!

After much internet research and dozens of recipes, I began to look much more at what they were doing, rather than what they were made out of. I know the ingredients our family likes, it was how to combine them so that the granola bars wouldn't be incredibly crunchy and would still stick together. It appeared to be a very simple ratio of sweet chewy goo to dry ingredients. Another attempt and the results were significantly different. Jules loves them now and the Barracuda has a hard time deciding between granola bars and his favorite breakfast of apple cinnamon oatmeal.

The dry ingredients don't matter. It is completely up to the tastes of your particular family. We like oatmeal, rice krispies, peanuts, dried fruit, sunflower seeds, and rough chopped mixed nuts. Other great add ins are wheat germ, flax seeds, coconut, and pumpkin seeds. This is a great way to get rid of odds and ends left in your pantry! The most helpful thing I have found is bulk trail mixes which come in tons of different varieties. You can find them with chocolate pieces or beloved M&M's, fruit and nut bits (our favorite so far) , salty pretzel combinations, and all sorts of stuff. They usually have a wide range and balanced variety of tasty snackworthy ingredients. These are wonderful when it comes to the flavored part of the granola because you don't need much of each ingredient just a balance of lots of little stuff. The trail mix also helps with variety if your family winds up loving this recipe as much as mine. We usually get about 3 cups of the trail mix and that will last for 3 batches of granola bars. The cost varies depending on which mix you get, but normally it is between 2-5 dollars a pound.

As much as possible, I get the mixed nuts/peanuts/oatmeal without roasting, oil, or salt. It isn't necessary for this recipe because the ingredients are covered in sticky sweet goo which overpowers everything else. If you are totally a salt fiend go ahead, but my guys don't miss it.

The ratio I've found to work is 7 1/2 cups dry ingredients to 2 1/2 sticky goo. These are approximates; it really won't matter if they aren't exact.

Granola Bars
Dry Ingredients
3 cups rolled oats
1 1/2 cups rice krispies
1 cup peanuts
1 cup steel cut oatmeal
1 cup trail mix
2 Tblspns Cinnamon

Delicious Sweet Goo Ingredients
1 cup packed brown sugar
1/2 cup honey
1 stick butter
1/2 cup peanut butter

The honey and peanut butter can be the super cheap stuff. The flavor isn't impaired at all and it is significantly more cost effective. They are designed to bind the bars together, but allow enough oil for them to not become a granola brick.

Thoroughly mix your dry ingredients together in a gynormous bowl and set aside. (A clear Pyrex bowl works wonders because you can see through on all sides.) On low to medium heat combine brown sugar, honey, butter, and peanut butter in a sauce pan. Stirring with a wooden spoon I found worked the best, though a whisk would work too if you don't mind creating more dishes to clean. Make sure the heat is high enough for the ingredients to begin to melt together, but not so high it scorches them. You are basically trying to combine all of these ingredients together to become a very sticky caramel-like substance.

When the gooey stuff is well melted and combined (about 5 minutes) and beginning to bubble slightly, remove from heat and dump into the bowl of dry ingredients using the wooden spoon to scrape as much from the pan as possible. Immediately put dish soap and water into the sauce pan to soak. (The first time I made the mistake of allowing the goo to dry in the pan....It wasn't pretty or easy to remove. Lots of soaking, lots of scrubbing.) Mix the dry ingredients and goo together really well, making sure there aren't any pockets where the dry ingredients are hiding. This is why the clear bowl is so helpful.

Line an 11 x 13 pan with parchment paper, leaving a small amount of overlap so you can pull up on the parchment to remove the granola bars. Be sure to also grease the parchment; they are virtually impossible to get out without this! Firmly press the granola goo mixture it into the pan. I used large ziplog bags as gloves to smash the granola goo as tightly as possible into the bottom and corners of the pan. Let the pan sit for 4-6 hours or until the granola has completely cooled! I usually come back to them a couple of times to smush them down firmly again. The smushing is how they stay together, but are still chewy. When they are totally cooled, pull up on the parchment to remove the granola bars in one large granola brick.

Press down firmly with a knife to cut the brick into bars. Don't saw! They will fall apart. I put all the bars into a large ziplock and place them in the pantry. Some people wrap them individually in plastic wrap to grab and go snack.

This recipe makes one large ziploc full of granola bars, which is about how many we go through in two weeks. Sometimes, I make two pans at the same time so that I don't have to wait the 4-6 hours of cooling time twice. The heating and mixing doesn't take long at all (maybe 30 minutes?). They are a wonderful replacement for the store bought version of granola bars and I've noticed us start to eat them instead of cookies as well. You can increase or decrease the amount of sugary goo depending on how your family likes them, but I highly doubt they will miss the high fructose corn syrup!

I still think of us as normal, but in all honesty this probably threw us over the top into the realm of what my son will refer to as "his weird parents" when he is a teenager. To stop buying packaged foods in favor of those made at home was a very simple change that our household has made over about 3 months and it has done significantly more! This never began as a way to "Go Green." It was honestly that our food bill was reaching $300 a month and that just wouldn't do. We couldn't just stop buying food, something else needed to be done, so slowly we began venturing into the bulk food section of our local grocery store. Bulk foods generally cost less money because they can be purchased by the store in very large quantities and they aren't packaged. What shocked me was that many of them were the exact same product just without the box, and we were just going to put into the trash (or recycling) anyway.

We get everything from grated Parmesean and Ramano cheese to locally milled, all natural, whole wheat flour. We can get all natural wild rice, organic beet sugar, multiple varieties of raw nuts, dried fruit, whole wheat pasta, dog treats, candy, dark chocolate chips, and bajillions of other things in bulk foods that we could never afford in the swanky natural section packaged up in small quantities. The greatest part is not only are we getting a product whose quality is better than the packed brand name, but we are getting it for cheaper.

This seems as though it goes against all common sense and depending on where you live, it might. We are not shopping at Fred Meyer (Kroger) with their small (though ever expanding) bulk foods or at Wild Oats (Whole Foods) and some upscale market places where everything costs more. We are fortunate enough to live around a regionally employee owned supermarket chain which provides dozens of selections of bulk food. However, an internet search might find you amazed at the number of stores offering such options. When our store stopped carrying raw sugar, I went on a quest to find more in bulk. The internet search gave me five other places which were much closer that carried the product. The difference in price was about 60 cents more a pound because the stores were independent and not a chain, but still well below buying the sugar in a package.

As much as Jules likes it, he has said it was the largest degree of culture shock to him. Where would we store all these jars of stuff? We are going to look into the pantry and not see anything to eat. This isn't the way normal people live. Coming out of a grocery store with all these bags of dried stuff, coming home to put all the dried stuff into jars on our shelves, not having any bright flashing plastic like presents ready to open caused him a mind glitch. Now, our cabinet doesn't have hardly any of them. Mainly we are now filled with large glass jars harboring everything from corn meal to black beans. However, Jule's admits his favorite part of this whole process is emptying the contents of all our bags into the jars and watching our food supply slowly grow. It is a level of security for him to know that every month we are slowly accumulating more flour than we use, more beans that we eat, more corn meal than I turn into bread. By having an ever growing (if however slightly) supply of food right on hand, it is a nice saving grace for the stress of a recession. It also means that if we don't have the money one month for a specific staple, we have some backup. As long as I create the snacks from the dried foods, he is happy to eat them. I like that the pantry is no longer clogged with box upon box of stacked treats and never being able to see anything. In fact we have more storage now than we ever did before!

The initial output for unpackaging you pantry is a little more because you have to have a place to store all of your culinary treasure that is now without its box. Standard glass jars can be purchased most anywhere (even Ikea) and cost around 10-20 dollars a piece. (I think we got ours at Fred Meyer (Kroger)) Once purchased, they last forever and are dishwasher safe. More than anything you want to be sure they have a lid that will seal either with a rubber ring and clamp or a twist on lid. This will keep the air out and your food from getting stale. It also helps with keeping the moisture from your food. Even simpler and without the cost is to save glass jars you would normally recycle or throw away. Many products from spaghetti sauce, to salsa, to sundried tomatoes come in glass jars with securely sealing lids. By running these through the dishwasher and saving them you have food storage without the cost of a large glass storage jar. The only draw back is merely size. If you chose to buy jars, you will recuperate your cost of the containers in mere months, have much better food to show for it and much fewer items in your pantry to take up space!

The initial thought I had about going over to bulk was "Where would we put it all?" I had no idea it would actually thin out our pantry because I had no idea how much packaged and processed food we actually ate. Now, that we have transitioned over to bulk foods and I have been reading up on the subject it kinda creeps me out!

Many things about the way our culture acquires its food I'd never really considered. However, I needed to do so reading up on ways to lower the costs of our household, and on ways to make it run outside of the mainstream. We were (and in many ways still are) a highly normal American family. I didn't honestly know much about food storage, or how much flour the average family uses in a month when making their own food (the internet tells all), or what goes into making corn bread without a box. So I hit the local library and began reading, I started with Google and began searching, I hunted down blogs and began asking questions of people who were living this way. That is when I began to realize the extent of our agriculture in this country.

Currently, each food item in a typical U.S. meal has traveled an average of 1,500 miles. The amount of fuel it takes to put a meal on the table outweighs the amount of energy we gain from consumption of the food itself. Not only is fuel consumption created in direct transport, but also through processing, packaging, warehousing, and refrigeration. This doesn't even count the fossil fuels used in the synthetic fertilizer and pesticide used to grow and keep the food perfect looking.

Just think of it this way, if every U.S. citizen ate just one meal a week (any meal) composed of locally and organically raised meats and produce, we would reduce our country's oil consumption by over 1.1 million barrels of oil every week. That's not gallons but barrels.
Statistics and Information acquired from Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, by Barbara Kingsolver

Our families grocery bill is now $150 a month ($200 if you add the pet food and supplies) and we rarely ever go out to Taco Bell or Burger King anymore. We no longer associate cereal with a cartoon character, fruit with packaged gelatinous chewables, and Macaroni and cheese with a blue box. I make our food. I know what goes into it and where most of it came from. Our garbage bill has been cut %75 because we now have pick up only once a month due to a complete lack of packaging and an ever growing compost bin. More than anything else, we aren't getting sick anymore.

Jules spent most of last year feeling ill; when he got sick so did the Spicy Barracuda. Neither have had much over a day or two of feeling as though the onset of a cold might be coming. Though I have no direct evidence this is from a change in our diet and decrease in stress, there isn't much else that has changed. In general, we just feel better now that we eat better.