I am sick. Not the head cold, why won't this annoying thing just go away sick either. The kind of sick were you are amazed your body contains as many fluids as have come out of you. Jules informed me when he came home from work today that I "looked like hell." I don't know what he is talking about, I'm dead sexy! Headache, bed in the bathroom, just shoot me, dead sexy!

Hopefully I will be back to somewhere resembling normal by Friday.

We live in a place where "damp" is at its best. Nine months of the year we are damp, our city is damp, most of existence outside is just plain damp. You can smell the rain coming around this time of year and then it just doesn't leave. In my opinion, it is part of what makes here so wonderful - Drippy, soggy, unending rain.

This is also the reason our rain barrels are so well suited to our house. They just don't go dry. We can flush toilets, we can do dishes, I might even begin washing laundry and they don't go dry. Dry just doesn't happen in our rainy season.

This constant cycling of water, is one of the main benefits of cleaning our rain barrels. The barrels need to be cleaned yearly, even if you only use them for irrigation. This is due to the algae blooms which will occur. There is nothing harmful about this algae, in fact it probably makes the water much nicer for the plants, but it can clog the spigots and make using the water difficult. Some people use fish or snails as a way to remove the algae which builds up inside. It seems to work for them, but I have no experience here. We use standard Clorox.

Two to three months of the year there is NO rain. It is as though the rain goes on summer vacation too. So, in late summer, as late as responsibly possible, we begin once again using our rain barrels for much of the household water. The barrels are at their lowest, and we begin to quite rapidly drain them for dish washing and toilet flushing.

I add 1/2 cup of bleach to each full barrel. This means that as the bleach dilutes in the water, it is able to kill any of the algae clinging to the walls. The barrel sits for 24 hours to make sure the bleach has really permeated and then the barrel is drained with usage. DO NOT USE THE WATER FOR IRRIGATION at this point. It will kill your plants. It will kill any wonderful mycorrhizal fungi at work in your soils. The point of the bleach is to sterilize and it will sterilize anything the water goes near. This makes such water ideal for dishes and toilets. The first 2/3s of the barrel I use solely for dishes, the bottom 1/3 starts to get a little ookier with dead algae and sediment. Such things need to come out of your barrels, but don't necessarily need to be in your dishwater. This last 1/3 goes to just toilet flushing. The bleach water is excellent for the toilet tank and pipes, and the residue in the water doesn't matter.

If your rain barrel is a solitary barrel (not attached to a system or other barrels, just by itself) you can use a wrench to take off the spigot, disconnect it from the downspout, and tip the barrel toward you to allow every last bit of water out (a 30 degree angle works best). You can then spray out the barrel with a hose if need be and leave it to sit in the sun for 48 hours. This will completely sterilize the barrel and you are good to go for another year.

However, only three of our barrels are solitary. They are our just-in-case, backup barrels. The main ones we use are all hooked together and do not tip at all. These barrels will always have at least 6 inches of water in the bottom of them. There is no way, other than completely cutting them free, that they tip and can be totally drained and rinsed. For this reason, we clean them a bit differently.

We begin draining at the last in line (Barrel 5) and take as much water out as possible. I work backwards (Barrel 4, 3, 2) bleaching and draining all the way through. I never bleach Barrel 1 which is hooked to the downspout. (This means at least one barrel at all times has fresh rain water.) At the point all but Barrel 1 are drained there is still 6 inches of bleach water sitting in the bottom of each barrel. When the rains come this water is diluted as the barrel fills and cycled through the entire system. All the overflow bridges get bleached, the main overflow gets bleached, and the entire system is cleaned. Slowly, but surely the bleach water is dissipated through out the barrels and in a month, there is no trace of bleach.

Six inches of slightly bleached water diluted in a 55 gallon drum is not a toxic level. You can still smell it, I don't really want the dog to drink it, or to irrigate with it, but it won't hurt much that is very large. As the water goes through the pipes of the toilet, or sanitizes the dishes in our sink, the cleaning works double duty in our house. It takes only two weeks to completely drain all 9 of our rain barrels, and a month for the entire process to cycle through the barrels. In my opinion is is very low maintenance for the return.

I have heard there are fancy chemicals you can use, weird tools you can acquire, or various organisms which people use to do their cleaning (and maybe we will one day get there) but for right now, we will stick to our $2.50 jug of bleach and our unending rain.



Other Helpful Resources
Approved Bleach for Sanitation of Drinking Water
The University of Texas has done significant research into varieties of bleach. Apparently, all bleach is not created equal. (Who knew?!?) If you are using your rain barrels for drinking or to create potable water, be sure to check this site out!

Storing Water for Emergency Use
Colorado is currently facing quite a water crisis. For this reason their agricultural extension has a wealth of information about storing water. Included is information about amounts to store, ways to sanitize, and different storage techniques.

Preventing Food/Water Borne Injury and Illness
As I began looking for information on safely treating water for household use, I kept getting websites or books about sailing on boats. It was frustrating and made no sense to me. Then I realized (with Jules' explanation) this is because when doing long distance boat travels, sanitizing water, storing sanitized water, and learning how to utilize treated water are imperative skills. Sometimes valuable information is found in the oddest of places. This is one of the absolute best places I have found for information about sanitizing and using water. The writers not only do a lot of long distance boating and have used the methods, but are medical professionals (ER doctor and pharmacologist; registered nurse and paramedic).

In just a couple of days my new sewing machine is coming! So excited!

Well, let me explain a bit more....the sewing machine is far from new. In fact it is rather old. It is a Bernina 730 which I won off of eBay. Anyone who knows about Bernina knows they are quite on the spendy side of sewing machines, so used is the route we needed to take. However, a Bernina will last you just about forever making the age much less important
.
The machine was a secondary machine for a woman who upgraded to a spiffier model a few years ago. It has the older steel body and comes with all the accessories. YAY! Below is a picture of the 715 which is very close (one step down) from the 730 which I purchased. Finding a picture proved much harder than I thought!


Jules tends to blow the knees out of his work jeans and the only way to reinforce them is with a machine. My hand sewing will work in a pinch, but not hold up to much abuse. Secondly, Jules through-hiked the entire Appalachian Trail directly after graduating high school. He has many T-shirts from various outfitters along the way, and a few which no longer exist. For such a large accomplishment the sentimentality is too high for the shirts to actually be worn around and demolished, so I told him I'd start a T-Shirt quilt we could use on the bed. This way he gets to use the shirts, enjoy the nostalgia, clean out the dresser (a perk for me), and not ruin something which can never be replaced.

I'll be sure to post some pictures of the process and the finished product.

Summer is officially over, Jules returned to work some time ago, and tonight we are having our first fire due to the cold which has closed in around us. The days here are still T-shirt weather, though sometimes a bit windy, but the nights are now down right chilly. It will probably be 40 degrees tonight and that is fire starting weather.

This can mean only one thing for the garden....well, this can actually mean a few things for the garden, but I'll focus on just one: Garlic. This is garlic planting weather! Garlic has some unusual requirements as growing goes. For one, it likes cold. Without at least days of cold temperatures (40-50 degrees), garlic will not germinate. The sustained cold weather in the winter is what also initiates the side bulbing of the garlic which eventually turn into the cloves. The shoots can still be eatten, and it still tastes of all that garlicy-goodness, just nothing under the ground but roots. The cold triggers the plant to begin stockpiling growth to make it through the season so it can grow again. Once the longer spring days come about, the bulbing is promoted and you have garlic by the summer harvest.

We don't plant any expensive, gourmet garlic; just the grocery store stuff for us. Even better, planting is as simple as separating a bulb up into cloves (plant the big ones) and putting them in the ground. No muss, no fuss, just done. Water occasionally, but it is the winter and that means rain here Garlic likes water. Weeding is helpful so they don't have to compete over the winter, but with a little mulch even that can be taken care of. Next year, just plant the leftover cloves you have from this year and there is no need to buy again.

Garlic prefers crumbly loam soil just like most root veggies. Since our backyard is not in any way perfectly arable, I double dig the garlic beds to provide a nice soft place for growth. Double digging is a bit of work, and you will definitely feel it the next day, but it is much cheaper than a gym membership.

To begin you mark off the bed in sections of about 18 inches wide - for a nine foot bed this would give you six sections.
Stand in section 2 and dig all of the dirt out of section one about 12 inches deep. Put it either in a large pile next to the bed or in a wheel barrow. Cover the exposed area of section one with compost and aerate the soil another 6 inches, thoroughly mixing the compost in. Now dig all of the dirt out of section 2 about 12 inches deep and dump it into section 1. This should yield section one now filled back up with dirt which is nice and loose, composted, aerated and all yummy for planting. Now be sure not to step in section one at all costs! You have just completed a very laborious task and would undo all your hard work with one misplaced foot.

Section 2 has just been cleared of all its dirt, now lay down a nice layer of compost and aerate the soil another 6 inches - thoroughly mixing in the compost. Step into section 3 and dig out all the dirt 12 inches deep and dump it into section 2. Section 2 is now done!

Section 3 has just been cleared of all its dirt so lay down the compost, aerate six inches deep and mix all the compost in. Step into section 4 and start diggin'. Dig out 12 inches of soil and dump it into section 3. Section 3 is now done. Are you noticing the pattern?

If you continue in this way - dig out 12 inches, place removed dirt on the previous section, layer compost, aerate 6 more inches, mix it all together, move on - you will methodically work your way through the entire bed. When you get to the point that all the dirt has been removed from section 6, it is composted, it is aerated, you just dump all the dirt you first took out of section one on top. All the soil is now back into the bed, just shifted around it. Consider double digging the musical chairs of the soil world.

The size of the garlic bulb is not only dependent on the nice fluffy soil, but also on the spacing. The closer your cloves, the smaller the bulbs will be. So, you will get more bulbs from your space, but fewer (or smaller) cloves. Fewer planted, larger bulbs. We tend to compromise and plant Biointensively. Doesn't that sound swanky!

All Biointensive gardening is, is planting with space in mind. Planting in the standard rows is used for most large corporate agriculture because they have the big fancy machines which need to get through the fields. No fancy machines here, just a small space. So instead of only planting three rows in our bed and having them all start in the same spot, we plant five rows and have them off set.To create this effect, begin 5 inches in from the sides of your bed and space your main three rows 10 inches apart. Follow these rows down the length of the bed, placing a garlic clove every 10 inches. (The blue ones. ) Now go back to the beginning of your bed and move 10 inches in on the sides still keeping your rows 10 inches apart. These will be your two offset rows. (The red ones.) Continue to place the cloves 10 inches apart for the entire length of the bed. Voila! Biointensive gardening! Now you can sound swanky too!

After some quick math in your head, you might realize these measurements don't add up nicely. This is because I allow for a two inch wiggle room for each clove. This way if it isn't in there exactly right it doesn't matter. The cloves in the offset rows are about 7 inches from their diagonal siblings and almost double the amount of garlic you can grow in the space.

With two beds like the one pictured above, we have just over 100 cloves of garlic planted. This gives us 8 heads a month or two bulbs a week. No vampires in this house!

The paperwork is here, ready to be filled out. The birth certificate is on the way because I have no idea where I put it. One more immunization and he is all set. Within a week, the Spicy Barracuda will be starting virtual kindergarten. Yes, virtual. The kindergarten "class" is all done through the internet, conferences with his adviser are Skyped, and he can advance as slowly or quickly as he needs to. There is even a stipend for him to take part in local art, music, foreign language, and sports classes as a way of socialization.

This comes as a big sigh of relief for Jules and I. We spent the end of last year and the beginning of this one (eight months in total) fighting to try and get the Barracuda into our local public school. It didn't happen. This meant extensive looking into options for schooling. Either that or he would be entering kindergarten reading, knowing how to add and subtract, and being one of the absolute oldest members of his class. The circumstances were frustrating, the bureaucratic mess that is public school was down right daunting, and we don't have the money for swanky private kindergarten.

Much perseverance has paid off and now we are a few short faxes from being all set for this year and beyond. Along with this comes the advent of new blog. Virtual school requires quite a bit of parent involvement and documentation. It is much like homeschooling, only you have some curriculum provided and quite a bit more support.

Schoolwork for the Age of Five is the Spicy Barracuda's own blog all about our schooling experience.

The typical green scouring pads are what we used to use for cleaning the dishes. In the new attempt to remove disposable items from our house, specifically plastic ones, these green pads are gone. In their place are the new green scrubbers in our life.

These little knitted numbers are 100% cotton making them incredibly durable and incredibly absorbent. They work just as well as the old ones and don't scratch up all the pans. The best part is that at a price of $1.79 for 120 yards you can knit up three compared to spending over a dollar a piece on Scotch Brite. I've also found that they last longer than the plastic ones because they don't wear down to a smooth green blob like the others tend to.

The pattern is incredibly simple and even a beginning knitter can handle creating these scouring pads. As long as you can knit and purl, you're set! I use Lily's Sugar 'n' Cream yarn, but any 100 percent cotton will due. Ours are Lily 'n' Cream Lime (now known as Hot Green).

The pattern for our scouring pads was derived from one posted at Little House in the Suburbs. However, there's is a bit more on the pretty side, whereas I wanted ours to be significantly more durable. So there has been a bit of tweeking, a few more added scrubbers, some size altering, etc.

You will need 1 skein of 100% cotton yarn. 2 size 5 knitting needles and 1 double pointed size 6 needle.

At first, I was a bit nervous about the mention of a cabling needle. Cabling is significantly above my skill level and quite a bit intimidating. Not only that, I didn't even own a cabling needle. So, some testing out of options and a bit of trial and error led me to using one double pointed size 6 needle instead. However, you can use any object that is long and skinny like a knitting needle - pencil, pen, marker, hair pin, piece of doweling - but seems to work best if the object is about six inches long. All you basically need is something to hold the stitches for a bit.


The instructions on making a scrubber are below the pattern.

Cast on 29 stitches.
Knit a complete row
Purl a complete row
Knit 5 stitches, create a scrubber, knit 5 more stitches, create scrubber...continue till the end of the row.
Purl a row.
Knit 1 stitch, create a scrubber, knit 5 more stitches, create scrubber, knit 5 more, scrubber....till the end (you should be left with a one stitch remaining after the last scrubber.)
Purl a row.
Knit 5 stitches, create scrubber, knit 5 more stitches, create scrubber....continue till the end.
Purl a Row.
Knit 1 stitch, create scrubber, knit 5 more stitches, create scrubber, knit 5 more, scrubber...till the end.
Purl a row.

The pattern basically entails knitting one row, purling one row, knitting, purling, etc. On the knitted rows you alternate between knitting in five stitches before starting to make scrubbers and knitting in 1 stitch. There are always five knitted stitches between each scrubber. You should never be making scrubbers on a purled row.

Making a scrubber:

The scrubbers are places where yarn has been wrapped around three stitches and then the stitches are knitted, leaving sort of a bubble of yarn over the top.

This effect is created by transferring three stitches onto the double pointed needle. You don't need to knit them, just slide them over onto the double pointed needle.

Next wrap the yarn around the double pointed needle (and the three stitches) counter clockwise somewhere around five to seven times. Wrap the yarn so that it fits nice and snuggly, but don't try to strangle the stitches.

Now, knit the three stitches off of the double pointed needle one by one. Continue knitting five more stitches and repeat the process.



What you should have when you are done are nice rows of scrubbers alternating across your scouring pad.

Being cotton you can re-wash them over and over in the laundry whenever they begin to get ooky or smelly, and they store well in the drawer along with all the other dishcloths. Voila! Homemade scouring pads, without the plastic or the landfill!

...Yes, I realize my excitement makes me a nerd...

It may sound a bit funny, but I'm stunted in the area of dish washing. The learning curve of having the dishes all washed, dried, and stacked neatly in our cabinets by the end of the night is one that has taken me quite a bit of time. More just always seem to appear, and then there is dinner and all its dishes, and just when I think all is completed I'll discover another glass in Jules' Man Room. It was enough to drive me completely insane. Along with this came much frustration from Jules that has a rather large issue with dishes and is convinced that every fly on earth must just know when there are dishes in our sink. Thankfully, with the expansion of our rain barrel water usage, the dishes have been converted into a very deliberate task during the day and have become much more manageable.


With the exclusion of about three months a year, we are one of the rainiest places in the continental United States. This leaves us with much water falling from the sky and quite a wonderful resource for harvesting to later return to the water table. With the rainy season returning (at least supposed to be returning) we are once again at a place to begin discussing the usage of our rain water. This last year, our toilet was flushed with rain water and with some treatment it can now be used for dish washing as well.

There is absolutely no treatment necessary for water if you are using it for irrigation, toilet flushing, or car washing. To use it inside as any kind of cleaning agent or use with human contact does require further considerations. The treating of rainwater really doesn't require much unless you are wanting to drink or cook with it. I don't think we will ever get to the point where our water is being used for direct consumption (however, I also never thought I would refill the back of my toilet after every flush as well). Two things need to be considered 1) the presence of bacteria or algae which could make you sick 2) heavy metals or pollution run-off from the rain collection sight. You can pay for an fancy (and expensive) water test, but ultimately don't need to if you know even a little bit about where you are collecting the water.

Living in an older house, both of these were concerns for us. The only portion of our roof which runs into our rain barrels is from our porch. The old fiberglass/asbestos sheeting which covered the porch has been swapped out for high impact plastic alleviating the worry of harmful chemical runoff from the sheeting. We have not replaced the gutter, however. This leaves some heavy metals as a possibility in our rainwater.

Secondly, the plastic we now use to cover our porch is clear and allows us to see the amount of accumulation of bird droppings, air pollution, or mold which might be growing. We get significant enough amounts of rain and the surface has a large enough slant, that it is fairly self cleaning.

The third consideration, is the area in which you live. We do not have a significant air pollution problem in our area. Sometimes in the summer there are air advisories, but mainly due to all the rain, it isn't an issue. If you are living places with acid rain, I would contact the local environmental studies/sciences department of your local university for advice.

Once you are sure of what might be contaminating your water, you can treat it accordingly. Water for dish washing needs to be treated much like potable (drinking) water because you are, after all, eating out of your dishes. But dishwater doesn't need to be taken to quite the measurable extreme as drinking water since poisoning yourself with the treatment chemicals isn't as much of a threat.

There are many different ways to disinfect water, but household bleach works for us. Make sure you are using plain bleach, no smells, or other foofy stuff. Straight bleach. Texas did quite a bit of research and came up with this list. Clorox is great for us. To sterilize water, you need 8 drops of bleach for each gallon. This means for a 55 gallon drum, you need to add 440 drops of bleach. Colorado State University recommends 1/2 teaspoon for every five gallons of water. Rather than count them all out, I compromised and just added 1/2 cup of bleach directly into the top of the barrel. This is more than 440 drops by quite a bit, but we are not drinking this water, just using it as a sterilized rinse to clean our dishes.

The bleachy water was left in the barrel for two days to thoroughly mix, combine, and have contact with any algae that might be stuck to the walls of the barrels. At this point, the water is all set to use for dish cleaning. When it comes out of the spigot, there is enough bleach that you can smell it (like a swimming pool) but not so much that it will take any color out of your clothes. One of our rain barrels is now filled with bleach water at all times and is used solely for dishwashing as the bleach would probably kill or severely damage any plants.

Information acquired from: http://www.clubcruceros.org/FoodWaterPrecautions.html

Warning: Do not drink water which has had bleach added, unless you are VERY careful about precision measurement. Any chemicals added to water without extreme precaution can make you very sick. We are NOT drinking this water, merely using it to clean with.

The dishwasher in our house is used as a holding tank for the dishes before I can get around to washing them by hand during the day. This way Jules doesn't ever have to see them and the flies which are lurking everywhere can't find them either. I do thirty minutes worth of dishes a day and then stop. This is normally enough to get the dishwasher completely empty, and results in me doing dishes usually only every other day because there aren't enough to justify using up the water.

Doing the dishes now is fairly quick and painless, with the added perk of Jules approving over the level of cleanliness now presiding in the kitchen.The stopper is put in the sink, criss-crossed with dish soap and then I go out and fill one of the old Tidy Cats liter containers (which has been cleaned thirty million times!) we use to transport most all of our household rainwater. By dumping the water into the sink, the water gets all soapy and the dishes are done one by one starting with the cleanest and ending with the dirtiest. All the dishes then get an incredibly quick rinse in tap water due to a small concern over possible heavy metals from our gutters. They are then dried really well and put away.

The left over water in the sink is usually kinda gross. This water is used to soak any dishes which I will be washing the next day or any dishes that have stuck on food which needs to soak. The junk is all rinsed or soaked off of them and then they go back in the dishwasher to be formally cleaned the next day. It may seem like extra work, but they aren't scrubbed much and by taking the food bits off of them in the leftover water that is already disgusting, the dishwasher tomorrow won't get disgusting right away.

Once all the dishes have either been put away or placed back in the dishwasher, I rinse out the dishwasher with my washcloth and the extra sink water. By pre-rinsing the dishes, the water isn't anywhere near as bad as it used to be when I washed dishes and can be used really well to wash out the inside of the dishwasher so it doesn't get stinky. A stinky dishwasher might alert the flies as to where the dishes are being kept. We can't have that!

Garage saling this summer led Jules and I to quite the irresistible box of Pyrex dishes. They were avocado green and white to match the refrigerator in the kitchen beautifully. There were nice little flowers printed on them and a very vintage feel. The absolute greatest part is that there were only two pieces missing from having 3 complete sets of dishware (with lids!) and the entire price was a whopping 10 dollars. Now, at the time, both Jules and I realized this was something to purchase. What we didn't realize was how extreme the complete amazement of what we had stumbled upon. After much internet research, it is now apparent that the dishes are the Spring Blossom Green (Crazy Daisy) vintage Pyrex. They are the original 1972 printings, not the later reruns, and their condition is amazing! Said bowls now sport themselves proudly in the open air cabinets of our kitchen and have become normal dinner attire for the table.

The greatness of Pyrex was slightly known to me before these bowls but has now become incredibly clear. After almost 40 years of use, these bowls still look fabulous. Their durability is second to none. They can live well in the refrigerator or the oven, and have marvelous clean up quality. By this I mean that they can go from creating lasagna on the counter to in the refrigerator for later cooking, into the oven to bake, onto the table to eat, and then back into the refrigerator as leftovers and the only dishes that have been dirtied are two! This eliminates the need for refrigerator Tupperware as we now just store the items in the original baking dishes, and the lids remove the need for Saran wrap or aluminum foil.

The removal of a couple more items from our monthly grocery list is nicely helpful for our budget, but it also got me interested in a the life of many of these plastic wonders that once were lived without. Sixty years ago glass refrigerator dishes, or multi-use dishware were a normal phenomenon not stirring up any wonder. There was no Saran Wrap until the 1950's.

Even more, where does it all go when we are done with it? Being a single use disposable product, a small ball of Saran Wrap or aluminum foil doesn't look like much, but everyone uses it so regularly there must be quite a bit wandering around landfills. This now ubiquitous product is renowned for its ability to be impervious to both air and water, so how could it break down?

Such pondering questions drove me further into the Internet only to discover that the final resting place of much of the world's plastic is closer than I realized. Below is a picture of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.


This jar contains ocean water floating in a soup of plastic bits and non-biodegradable debris. In the jar the plastics can settle to the bottom, however, in the oceans the turbidity is too high. The plastic particulates float about causing a consistency of soupy Alfredo sauce. The Pacific Ocean has become one of the largest garbage heaps in the world due to the way ocean currents flow and the amount of plastic usage now prevalent in the world. This mixture of the world's plastics, which have been degraded into soupy consistency, is at its smallest twice the size of Texas and at its largest twice the size of the continental U.S., and resides between California, Hawaii and Japan. It may not look like as much as it sounds, but unfortunately, the trash is no longer a floating eyesore of plastic bottles, bags, and miscellaneous large debris. The plastics have been broken into small enough bits to create particulate matter in the waters which look like food for animals and fish, culminating in a consistency which is much more dangerous. Marine trash (90 percent of it plastic) is killing a million seabirds and 100,000 sea mammals and sea turtles ever year. Dutch scientists have found on average 30 pieces of plastic in the stomach of seagulls. This is problematic as plastic is a magnet for PCB's and DDT in the oceans and is working its way up the food chain.

Information acquired from: http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2004/06/63699

Plastic has taken on a new persona in our house. It may be cheap, but the cost has many externalities which are unforeseen. Jules still uses plastic GladWare to take lunches to and from work, because we cannot seem to find anything else which transports as well. He does however have an entire file cabinet filled with glass jars of soup, fruit, and other lunchtime favorites as a back-up if leftovers are forgotten.

What has begun with some garage sale (and now a bit of eBay) Pyrex, has moved into quite another realm in our house. Slowly but surely, I hope to become as disposable (and plastic) free as possible.

Well, it has become apparent we now have a boy on our hands. All remnants of toddler, baby, or small person have completely grown up and away. The Spicy Barracuda is now, officially, a kid and quite the boy at that.

This began to become apparent in Georgia. He little round Buddha belly (which he had sported practically since birth) skinnied into a flat strong little tummy with ribs showing. His pants no longer fit and he shot right up practically an inch! I'm very thankful he doesn't have my legs, but has opted for thinner, leaner muscles which give him much more grace than I have ever been able to muster. I am equally thankful we didn't accumulate more size 5 pants as it appears he will have grown out of them quite rapidly.

As his shoulders have broadened and his jaw line continues to become much more defined the man residing in him has become quite obvious. It may be quite a while before girls start showing up at the door or calling on the phone, but we are having to let go of our little man and relinquish him to new-found friends. Though there are no young kids on our block, we live less than five walking minutes from a large park and the local elementary school where children abound. He also has quite the following at one of the grandparents houses in suburbia.

It is too soon for me. I tell myself that his sense of personal direction isn't strong enough, his knowledge and judgment in the face of peer pressure aren't fortified, his ability to stand alone with difficult choices falters too much. All of this is moot, however, he has made the decision himself and is demanding personal independence.

He knows many of the neighborhood kids now all by himself and looks for them at the park. Most of the YMCA afterschool program knows him on site and some wait for him to show up and play. He now wishes to play with me sitting quite a ways away (luckily Dad is still cool enough) and when I come to pick him up from a weekend with the suburban grandparents, there is a very down face.

The final blows of reality came when the desire to shave off the back of his mohawk was issued. The haircut has been all his own choice since it was first given at 18 months old. From the colors to the style, his hair is his to do with as he wishes. So after four or five "are you sure's" the clippers took off the long mane of hair traveling down his neck. This request was shortly followed by "Can we go get Pokeman cards with my allowance?"

So up the street the family walked. The Barracuda giddily running ahead with his prized allowance jar clutched in his hands, Jules and I following close behind. The realization came quickly that this will be the first of many such walks.

I remind myself that his independence is a good thing: we want a leader, not a follower. This new found voice and sense of self have shown themselves elsewhere from learning to read by himself to now declaring a desire to learn Spanish. He will make his own way, and we are still there to guide him, but from this point on he has taken over the drivers seat.

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.

Many people seem so amazed when I knit. Granted, the entire process is a bit amazing. You turn one long string of yarn into a square of cloth and then a garment or blanket. However, the process of actually knitting is one of the effortless and most soothing I have come across in my dealings with Simplicity.

When I was pregnant with The Spicy Barracuda, I wasn't gaining enough weight the first five months. So I was told I didn't get to do much other than lay around and eat. This might sound like a really great referendum to come from the doctor, but it drove me a bit crazy. I was very into exercise before the Barracuda and didn't like the idea of stopping. Eating massive amounts of spaghetti and hot dogs while watching cable TV became my daily routine. It lasted about two weeks. (However, I did become addicted to Judging Amy and Dawson's Creek on cable syndication. Now you all know one of my most embarrassing guilty pleasures!)

When I couldn't take television anymore, I began to look into other outlets and stumbled upon knitting. A friend's mother owned a yarn shop where ladies of all ages sat, talked and knit. It was the perfect solace for my non-exercise frustrations: I could sit and yet still be productively doing something! Moreover, I could talk about motherhood, marriage, relationships, children, and all sorts of other female topics which had begun to bother my emotional, pregnant nerves. The ladies taught me the basics: how to cast on, how to finish off, how to knit, how to purl, and how to combine those two stitches to do ribbing, a stockinette, or garter stitch.

This experience spun a love of knitting and a new found stress relief. I now make it a point to knit regularly and almost every day. Rather than watch a movie at the end of the night or mindlessly turn on the television, I now knit. It helps to sooth my nerves and ad a form of directly productive meditation to my life. From the basics of knit and purl you can do most anything you could want. It takes a bit of patience with yourself and some time to practice, but you are mainly doing the same thing over and over and over.

Knitting also gives me a bit of one on one time with Bell Bell. She adores my knitting. From playing in the yarn to snuggling up on just about any knitted item left by itself she comes hopping (she only has three legs) from the corners of the house to either nuzzle in close or leap out ferociously showing the yarn just how scared it should be.

The place for knitting in our Simplicity hasn't really shown itself quite yet. So much of this last year has been devoted to food knowledge. The growth, storage, and acquisition of our families meals has taken so much time there hasn't been room for much else. But, these last few months both Jules and I have noticed an definite turning point in our food storage as purchasing has gone down and stockpiling gone up. August is nearing its end and canning season is winding down. As such knitting is becoming a much more prevalent aspect of my day to day routine.

This next year, it is my hope to complete a knitted blanket for Jule's and my bed, replace our dish scrubbers with dishtowels, replace our dish-drying towels, and create not only hand towels but also washcloths for the bathroom. We will see if that is even remotely reasonable.

I'm not venturing into clothing yet, just nice square things which don't require turning, or knitting two together, or increasing and decreasing stitches. But, who knows, by the end of this year I might be whipping out socks in a frenzy of stitches!

....with the moon and the stars and the sun. Well, it is August; Canning season. That means two things in our household: 1) the kitchen (and sometimes the house) will never really be completely clean or un-sticky, and 2) there are never, ever enough jars. We need to take our stock in Ball, because the local canning supply store already knows us on sight.

Much of our canning this year has been a bit experimental as we don't really know what it is we are going to love and what we are going to want to change next year. A few things have become quite apparent right away. We will definitely be picking more blueberries and strawberries to can into preserves rather than just yogurt and ice-cream mix-ins. However, two items have become instant hits: peaches and corn. These two are definitely keepers! Not only are they fabulous canned up, they were relatively cheap and easy to can.

At this point, any people with whom we knew before the simplicity move deem us crazy. I can't say that I blame them. When you walk into a house and have to ask, "Is that a garbage can full of corn in the living room?" you tend to believe your friends have gone off the deep end. However, there really aren't very many good ways to get eighty or ninety ears of corn home from the grocery store (where it was on sale) without using the giant garbage can you just purchased at Home Depot.

Telling my coworkers I couldn't have a round with them after work because I needed to go home elicited the question of "Why?" My excited response "Jules and I are going to shuck corn!" isn't exactly the most normal after-work past time. My father was also a bit disheartened when he came to pick up his grandson and the Spicy Barracuda pouted, "I don't want to go, I want to say and shuck the corn." But honestly, it was all quite a bit of fun! We all sat around the living room coffee table yanking the husks off and throwing them in brown grocery bags to be hauled out to the compost bin. We slowly stacked all the ears in large Tupperware containers to be boiled up over the next couple of days. We laughed along and got silks stuck to us, marveling on how much corn we had and how we might have over purchased just a bit. Jules and I will forever have fond memories of the grocery store man's shock at the idea of us purchasing eighty some ears of corn. "Are you serious?!" he declared and led us into the back of the store because he wasn't going to bring that much all out to us.

At a quarter a piece our yearly allotment of corn cost us 20 dollars and we can recycle the jars over and over. Considering that a can of corn from the grocery store is about a dollar and contained close to half as much as one of our jars, the math worked out and we should have been fine. All stacked up, however, it seemed like quite a bit! (Next year we are going to go to U-Pick because they are six for a dollar!)
Once shucked, it was off into the boiling water. This is the reason you leave the long stems on the corn. They are wonderful handles! I was able to place fifteen ears of corn up on end in my gynormous stock pot. I filled it up with water once they were all in and cranked the stove up to high. The corn was boiled for only three to five minutes. This was basically enough time for it to turn brilliant yellow, but not be fully cooked. Since corn is low acid enough to require pressure canning, you don't want to cook it all the way through. The canner will do the rest and still leave the consistency nice and firm. Much more cooking and your corn will be really mushy when you take it out of the can for dinner.

Out came the casserole dish and the knife because it was time to start kerneling. Using a non-serrated knife and a bit of a sawing motion, cut the kernels off the cob about three quarters of the way through. You don't want to scrape the cobs or cut the kernels so low that you get any bits of cob into your jars. The cob won't soften up and you will have a very nice crunchy chunk in your corn. Eww! Later, we stumbled onto a great tool in the canning section of the store which kernals the corn for you! With handles on the sides and a sharpened metal circle in the middle you slide it down the shaft of corn and it does all the work for you. No sawing, slipping, or rotating necessary. It was only four dollars and awesome; next year it will go much faster. This kitchen gadget is completely unnecessary, however, the knife worked just fine.

I could kernel about three cobs before the pile became too large. A 1/2 cup measure was just perfect to fill my wide-mouth quart jars, and then to put 1-1/2 cups of hot corn-water on top. They were processed for 85 minutes at 11lbs of pressure. (For pints, process for 55 minutes at the same pressure.)

Then it was off to the local canning supply for more quarts because we soon realized that it takes about four ears of corn to fill one quart and we dramatically under purchased. The kernels look so small you would think that so many would fit in one large jar, but alas, not the case. In total, I did all eighty ears in two different sessions over two days. Leaving the husked corn out for a day didn't do much at all to dry it out. More than a day of drying and I might be a little worried the flavor might be effected due to sugar to starch conversion. We yielded 23 quarts of corn total leaving us at just under a dollar a quart. No sodium, no high-fructose corn syrup, and way better tasting!

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.

I have made some decisions in my life which preclude me from having a lot of people to visit. I worked too hard, had a child too young, and broke a few too many hearts. All of my people whom I would visit tend to still be right here near us.

I moved out at 16 and bounced around quite a bit. I was juggling working to live and school to survive, leaving a place for "home" out of the question. There was a lot of being tired, couch hopping, and living wherever. The first place that would even qualify as a "home" was a 16x9 Skittles-lime-green van. It was the first place I completely owned and could do what I wanted with. It was lived in for almost two years, filled with crazy college adventures and eventually parked in front of my college apartment which was filled with even more crazy, nostalgic adventures.

So here I am now, we're creating our own little home. It isn't an apartment, it isn't a rental, it is our own house to do with as we like and make a peaceful family. Having never really been in such a place, I didn't realize how exhausting it is to go away for over two weeks at a time and visit Jules' people. Before, going away to stay with other people was pretty much the same as being where I lived.

It is odd the things that you find yourself missing. I missed hanging our laundry outside. I missed the quiet of no television. I missed being able to take a long, ridiculously, hot bath. I missed watering the garden late and night and early in the morning. But most of all I missed the cottage cheese.

A while ago we switched over to me making all of our cottage cheese. There are a few food choices we have made that there is just plain no going back. The cottage cheese is one of them. It isn't runny, it is creamy. The taste has the definite tang of cultured product and a distinctive balance to the sweet, crunchy, or savory topping to which you eat it with. Best of all, you feel as though you are really eating something because it has a real substance to it.

When I first began reading up on making cottage cheese, the most important part was the price break. Could it be done economically? One gallon of milk, makes one quart of cottage cheese. Could I have been reading this right?! Only one quart?! We would need to buy like five gallons of milk to make the adequate amount of cottage cheese for the month. That just wouldn't work out.

Then there were more questions. A lot of discussion about enjoying it dry or creamed. What did that mean? Wasn't cottage cheese, cottage cheese? And rennet; so many needed rennet. I didn't know where to buy it, I didn't even know what it was. It was looking a bit like cottage cheese was out of the question. Then I discovered this simple article from Mother Earth News. All it required was a gallon of milk, some cultured buttermilk, and a double boiler. We have all that on a regular basis! This was my kinda recipe.

There was some tweaking involved, but after a couple of times we had our cottage cheese recipe and it was still simple as ever.

Ingredients
1 gallon of milk (whole, skim, 1%, 2%, whatever)
1/2 cup of cultured buttermilk
whipping or heavy cream
salt and pepper to taste

Pour the entire gallon of milk into a pot. Heat the milk till it is approximately 90 degrees (you can hold your finger in it and it feels warm, but not too hot). This is so that the culture can grow rapidly, but not die from being overheated.

Remove the milk from the heat and stir in the cultured buttermilk. It has to be cultured buttermilk not just regular buttermilk or the buttermilk left over from making butter. It is the culture which is important.

Now set it up and don't touch it. Stirring kills the culture once it has started growing. We put ours on top of the refrigerator. Don't worry it won't smell or anything.

Wait until the milk begins to thicken (this is called clabbering). It will become the consistency of custard or pudding. The first time, this is really weird feeling and a bit strange to look at. Waiting for the milk to clabber could take a day or two. If it is warm outside, it will happen sooner. Just check it about ever 6-12 hours or so. You will get a feel for how long it takes in your climate area.
Once it is Jello-Milk (you can literally push on it with your finger and it is spongy), slice a knife through it making 1 inch cubes and pour it into a large metal bowl. Create a double boiler by placing a pot of water on the stove to begin boiling. Once the pot of water is boiling, put the pot of clabbered milk on top. This keeps the milk from direct heat, but allows it to slowly heat up. Cook over low heat until the curds begin to separate. Stir occasionally so that the milk doesn't scald, and the thickened milk doesn't stick to the bottom. Once the curds begin to separate they will float up.


This is the part which is a preference and a learning curve. Once the curds separate you want to continue to cook them. The liquid will begin clear and then turn a yellowish color. The longer you cook your curds, the firmer they become. The curds also gain in tartness as they cook. In our family, we don't like them really firm or really tart. I cook them until they don't yield to gentle pressure. The curds begin to smash together and give a bit, but not crush into goo. They also will smush up to the side of the container and stick there. The best way to test them is to take a curd or two out with your spoon and use your fingers to feel the firmness. Be careful, the curds are really hot.


Once they have cooked for the desired time, you need to strain them for drying. Place a strainer or colander over a large bowl. Line the strainer with a flour sack towel (under 10 dollars for a package of three at the supermarket) and slowly pour the separated curds and whey. You can just put the colander in the sink and line it there, but you won't be able to save the whey. Whey is a great protein source, can be used to make ricotta cheese, or be useful in cooking of sauces, soups, salad dressing, or gravy. We freeze our whey for later use and always have a container in the fridge. I use it instead of milk when we make our bread.

Once the curds are strained, pull up the edges of the towel around the curds and squeeze out any left over moisture. It is helpful to twist the towel around the bundle of curds and wring them out. Hang the towel containing the curds either outside on your clothes line or inside over a sink. This allows the curds to air dry for an extended time before you put them in the fridge. We do ours over the sink due to Guadalupe and her amazing attempts at getting food.

Once the curds have dried overnight (12-18 hours) they are ready for the fridge. We smush ours into a old, glass, mason-style jar and they keep for at least 2 weeks. The dryer they are when they go in the fridge the longer they last. When you are ready to eat them, just pour a little cream over the top and salt/pepper them to taste.

It is so good you won't believe it!