In our last episode of “The House Rehab that Wouldn’t Die”, the DH and I wrecked out the last room in the house, a little 10′x14′ room that has been used variously as a diningroom, a glory hole, home office, and a kitchen while we were wrecking out the real kitchen and having that redone two years ago(jeeze - did this take THAT long?). House Rehab
And this week, basically everything was completely finished. Continue reading →
This spring at Chez Siberia has been almost enough to have us change the name to Chez Seattle or Chez Portland Oregon in terms of the amount of rain we’ve been getting. So far this month, we are 1.5 inches above the average for precipitation.
Lots o’ rain. That means that we get Lots o’ Slugs too.
Grey ones, big honkin’ orange ones (grrrr). And snails, too (snails are only slugs with real estate pretensions..remember that when you think of escargot). And short of ‘slug death’ or some such other chemical horror, we have tried every ‘get rid of slugs’ method known. And your dear Aunty has had zip luck. Until this year, and this was not even written up; I just stumbled upon it. Continue reading →
One of the reasons that I started this blog is that last year, I started to see that the economy was going into the tank and was very concerned that for a lot of people, certain basic ‘activities of living’ were going to become harder and harder to accomplish.
And that has not changed.
I don’t care what the economics pundits and MSNBC bozos wave around. “It’s over.” “It’s NOT over.” “Green shoots” “Turned a corner.”
I could not care less what some of these know-nothing self-interested gasbags say, actually, because I know that there are a lot of people in a world of hurt right now and a lot of them have been that way, frankly, for years. Continue reading →
Totally shameless “Plug City Arizona” - earlier this year, I went, courtesy of the Broome County Cooperative Extension (ahem), on a bus trip to the Philadelphia Flower Show, where your Aunty goggled at all the orchids, was amazed at how big some people can grow various plants and bought a few things. I bought a rather nice basket and some horse radish roots (which I planted and which seemed to do absolutely NOTHING for a very long time but are now emerging) and I got a small bag of seed potatoes. Do not ask me what potatoes they were - I managed to lose the label from out of the bag. They were ‘German — something.” In any case, they were the first potatoes that I stuck into the ground this spring, as soon as the ground temperature warmed up and when they emerged, I took a picture, 
uploaded it to flickr.com and put the words “Philadelphia Flower Show” into the description. You now see the result - Schmap guides found it and as they would say, the rest is history.
The way to find it is to click, on the Schmap box, on the photo that accompanies their listing of the Philadelphia Flower Show and click through all the lovely photos in the slide show - my humble potato shot is toward the end. The rest of the photos are truly wonderful and give you a terrific overview of all the terrific exhibits and resources that are available at the show. I find it a little bit ironic that my rather utilitarian ‘tater shot’ is accompanied by all that beauty, but I guess that is what irony is all about, eh?
Far be it from Aunt Toby to tell anyone not to dress up. Dressing up is something that does not happen, in my opinion, nearly enough these days. And weddings are prime ‘dress up’ territory (and no, Aunt T is NOT going to get into a ‘what WERE they thinking’ tirade on how guests are dressing for weddings this days - if we can’t get people to even dress to go to the ‘house of religious worship of your choice’(tm), how can we expect people to understand what is acceptable dress for celebratory events such as weddings).
The photograph at the top is the outfit I made to wear as TMOB (The Mother of the Bride - for those uninitiated) when Daughter The Younger got married last summer. Aunt Toby is not an especially lacy person, but a formal version of a suit had a certain appeal - it had pieces that I could, with a little judicious matching later on, turn to other uses. The other thing is that Aunt Toby does not feel overwhelming amounts of enthusiasm for shopping in general - and shopping for ‘event’ clothing tends to bring on Code Seven Migraines, Continue reading →
Potatoes are from the plant family Solanacea (pronounced Soh-lan-ay-seh-eee, for those that care), which is a pretty interesting family, all told. It also includes such dainties as tomatoes, egg plants, and deadly nightshade Continue reading →
Although I’m really someone who likes to have food put by, I’m not into just freezing or canning just to freeze or can. The point really is to produce something that you and your family are going to want to eat later on. For the longest time, I made the big mistake with freezing veggies of blanching them far too long and then when we reheated them from the frozen state, they turned to mush. Made it hard to get the Little Siberians to eat their home grown veggies in January. Continue reading →
Aunt Toby was not always the Philosopher Queen on the kitchen counter; once upon a year quite a few years ago, she was the marketing and sales rep for a family-owned employment agency. I covered three counties and was in and out of every commercial office, manufacturing plant, and machine shop. On the one hand, it was an amazing education in what made our metropolitan area economically tick – who supplied whom, who depended on whom, where people were going and so on and so forth. Your dear Auntie had many adventures during that period, including being pushed through a door by an malicious office manager(and almost falling down two flights of stairs), watching two months worth of cold calling go rapidly down the tubes as my boss’s brother monopolized the sales presentation, creeping up a rickety staircase of a dark back room of a warehouse to speak to a director of human resources (that meeting did NOT end well).
The best part of the job, Continue reading →
If you are (ahem) old enough to recall the Ed Sullivan Show, then if I mention the words “Italian acrobats with spinning plates”, you will know exactly what I’m talking about. For the less ‘elderly’ among Aunt Toby’s readers, suffice it to say that this family group had a hilarious act whereby they set up poles with plates spinning at the tops and they ran about the stage, back and forth, making sure the plates were spinning and not falling to smash on the floor. The big finale was their all picking up the poles and catching the plates. Voila!!
Well, sometimes, Aunt Toby feels that way about KCE. I have to make sure to keep some of the ongoing things up in the air and revisiting them from time to time before they..well, they won’t go smash on the floor, but the story may not be fresh or interesting any longer and all of my little buggers might lose interest.
So, this post is a bit of a catch up. Continue reading →
Getting the most out of 23 pounds of strawberries would be a challenge for anyone (unless you were doing it to fill your freezer with just strawberries), but this past weekend, during the ‘Strawberry Special’ we made it a goal to do as many different things with strawberries as we could within the confines of strawberry-ness. Which means that we froze, ate fresh, made jam and started strawberry wine but did NOT dry. Dehydration does not do a whole lot for strawberries. We’ll save that for when the cherries come in next month (woohoo!!). Continue reading →
Kitchen Counter Economics is a community where we can share ideas on how to save money, live more sustainably, and gain control over the stuff of daily living for ourselves and our families in the current economic environment. This started as a series of diary postings at the Oxdown Gazette at Firedoglake. Sit down, grab a cup of coffee or tea and prepare for a visit.
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