So, we replaced our major source of heat in the house with a wood pellet stove in the living room with the oil furnace as a back up in case the weather got so horribly cold that we could not keep the house warm enough.

The is just one problem with wood heat – it’s dry. Really really dry. Like dries out your nose and your skin and makes you cough and gives you winter itch dry. So, we needed a source of moisture.

As some of you know, the DH and I have used racks over the floor furnace forced air vents to dry clothes in the winter time; as a source of moisture, it works really well, but we no longer have floor vents that are in operation except when the weather is really cold and we turn on the furnace. So, we were looking at humidifiers when one of the big ones at my office died and they were going to just throw it in the dumpster.

I looked at it; the power lights were on but the fans did not work. Which meant that something was not working between where the power came in and whatever was controlling the fans.
(Warning: Be aware that working with electrical appliances takes care; when testing individual components with a voltage tester, the tester leads were touching the components at all times to determine if power was going through; no one should ever use allow any part of their body to touch electrical sources)

This humidifier has two rheostat sorts of switches – one which says Humidity on it and one which says Fan Speed on it. The fan speed switch was the culprit, the DH found by using an voltage tester on it. As you can see from this photo (and I’m sorry that the labeling is not coming out very well; the call out on the right is indicating the black electrical power lead which comes INTO the switch. The call out on the left indicates the blue and red leads which go out of the switch to the fans. The switch controls the amount of power going to the fans and thereby controls the fan speed. Because the switch is buggered in some way, no power was getting to the fans at all.

The switch itself consisted of the outer knob which is attached to a soldered circuit card with power leads attached. This is what the switch actually looks like when you get it out of the little box. At the top of the photo, you can see the black power lead coming into the circuit board; the blue and red leads which went to the fans are at the bottom. The every-trusty DH’s hand is holding the actual knob which was used to set the fan speed.

First, we went to our local appliance parts supply store with the model number of the humidifier and the actual switch and the little box sort of thing it was housed in because that had all sorts of labels on it that we thought the appliance guy would find useful. No luck – the humidifier is not being made any longer and the manufacturer which made the actual part is no longer making that part and there is no substitute, according to the clerk’s database (Now, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that IMHO, there has to be someone out there who is making this sort of thing – I think the clerk in the parts place was not knowledgeable enough to look at the item, identify it in terms of what it was – “oh, that’s a 2 amp rheostat umpty ump,” and find us another one – he only knew enough to look at the database that said ‘no sub’ on it).

So, we were dead in the water. We could not replace that part.

Try strategy number two: Figure out what the switch actually did in the system and see if we could figure out a work-around. By using his tester, the DH figured out that the switch was really the gatekeeper for the power going to the fans, so we decided to ‘hot wire’ the thing so that there was a direct connection between the power supply (the plug in the wall) and the fans themselves. We did not particularly care how much humidity there was; just that there was humidity, which meant that if the fans ran, that is what we’d get. So, the DH fastened the black power line directly to the red and blue lines going to the fans under an electrical screw nut (see photograph).

This is NOT an elegant solution. I don’t even know if my high school physics teacher would OK it. And the way we control this thing is: plug in the wall/the fans work; plug out of the wall/the fans don’t work. Pretty crude.

But we do have a big humidifier now (that thing has two bottles that are probably two gallons apiece) that we use when we are in the house and it kept another piece of electrical appliance stuff out of the landfill.

And seriously, the only tools it took to do this job were:
A Phillips head screw driver
A voltage tester
Wire cutters
Electric nut
and some time.

Now, I realize that a voltage tester is not necessarily in every apartment or house tool box, but it’s definitely worthwhile to have one and learn how to use it and learn what you can use it FOR. In this case, by attaching the leads to the power and then to various parts of the humidifier, the DH was able to determine that a) the motors attached to the fans actually worked (thus eliminating the fans as the culprits in the case), and that b) the switch which controlled the power going to the motors on the fans was the ‘fan speed’ switch and that was the gatekeeper that was broken. Again, once you have identified where the issue is, then the solution can be very simple: Either replace (if the part is still made or if there is a substitute) or do a work around.

Yes, you CAN do things like this.

That was all in the service of science, of course (which is why the ‘o cookies’ disappeared like snow off a dike by Tuesday…). Today’s discussion is much more up my alley because frankly, Aunt Toby doesn’t like having to fuss with all of that. Any baked good that requires that level of diddling around with doesn’t get made at Chez Siberia very often (read that: the only time. If anyone lusts after homemade ‘o cookies’, they will have to make them). But, I digress.

At this point in the year, people have been fiddling around with cookie cutters, jimmies and egg wash for the past several weeks, tinning things up to give as gifts and so on. People have been eating decorated cookies since Thanksgiving and will continue to do so until they run out, which will probably be after New Years. If you have missed out on this ‘cookie steamroller’, good for you. If you want to give a gift that someone will thank you for in March, read on.

Forget the damn Santa cookies; make a pound cake and give THAT as a gift. Real from scratch (Sorry Ms ‘only from boxes and cans’ TV cooking person with the cakes made out of commercial store cakes) pound cake is not only heaven on earth; it is so damned useful as a base for desserts and goodies that having at least one in the freezer at any given moment is almost a requirement at Chez Siberia.

So, what can you do with a frozen pound cake?
Totally Obvious Dessert Solution #1: Slice the frozen cake up, plop a scoop of the best ice cream you can find with an appropriate sauce (home made of course but if you lack the time and dinner guests are in the driveway, when you scream into the phone, “so and so’s strawberry ice cream” you can also mention “so and so’s thus and such topping’ and a pint of heavy whipping cream).

Totally Obvious Dessert solution #2 (but only during the months when you can get local fruit): Take local fruit or berries, wash and slice up if they need slicing up, wash if they don’t, put into a small sauce pan with a teensy bit of water, a couple of tablespoons of sugar and heat slowly. Do not stir. When the fruit starts to release its juices, turn off. Serve with the aforementioned whipped up pint of heavy whipping cream which you will have added a teensy bit of vanilla or almond extract to and a tablespoon of confectioner’s sugar.

Less Totally Obvious Dessert Solution #1 (not for when there are sudden guests in the driveway unless you keep things in the fridge): Trifle. This is genius if you are good at making your own egg custards. Make up a recipe of lovely custard (the pan sort not the bake in the oven sort). Layer chunked up pound cake in a glass bowl (the visual is a big deal with this; don’t ask me why – it all ends up in the same place), with custard, fruit, cake, custard, fruit, etc. If you are feeding adults and are feeling generous, you can soak the fruit in a little brandy before you layer it in. If you have kids in the crowd…don’t.

Completely Obvious Secret When-you-need-something-sweet and nothing else is available: Take a slice of pound cake and spread with any of the following if you have them in the fridge:
Good fruit-based (home made if possible) jam or preserves.
Dairy –based frostings or fillings (cream cheese, sour cream frosting, etc.)
Peanut or other nut butter if you are feeling virtuous; Nutella(tm) if you are not.

Cut in half, stick both halves together. Cake Sandwich.
At 10 p.m. at night with a cup of tea, this is heaven, I tell you…heaven.

Totally Fancy “How Did You Do That?” Dessert: Slice up the cake. Layer 2-3 slices with jam, frosting, filling or whatever sort you desire. Cut the slices into sticks. All together now? Good. Get some sort of candy melt stuff. Good dipping chocolate from a restaurant supply, wedding cake supply or bakery supply house or even those wafers that you can get from chain craft stores. Melt according to directions and with the sticks on something like a rack over waxed paper, carefully spoon over the coating over the sticks. Voila! Extremely fancy homemade Petits Fours. Two of those on a plate with a cup of something will impress everyone.

So, there you go. Why wouldn’t anyone have at least one frozen homemade pound cake in their freezer? It’s almost un-American not to have one, right? So, do your patriotic duty. Make the recipe. You can be generous and give both away or hold onto one for yourself.

Pound Cake – this makes TWO loaves, so make sure you have two loaf pans to do it with.
(from the extremely grease-stained and written on pages of my cookbook – the original recipe is Fanny’s; the changes are mind)

Ingredients:
2 sticks of unsalted butter
1 cup of vegetable shortening
2 cups of sugar
10-12 eggs (depending on size – the smaller number is for extra large)
4 cups of cake flour
1 tsp of baking powder
2 tsp of vanilla
1 cup of milk or other liquid (orange juice for example)

How to:
Preheat the oven to 325 and grease two bread loaf pans
Sift together 4 cups of cake flour and the baking powder
Beat up the butter until it is mushy and soft, then add the vegetable shorting to cream together.
Add the sugar a little bit at a time. Beat up. Then add the vanilla and beat that.
Add the eggs 2 at a time and beat after every addition. This is going to be ‘sloppy’ but not liquid-y.
Add the sifted flour/baking powder a half cup at a time, adding a little bit of liquid every single time. The last addition should be liquid.

This is where things get weird with pound cakes. This is NOT going to be coming off the beaters like a standard layer cake batter. This is heavy and thick. You should have a batter that almost doesn’t come off the beaters at all – it should come off in a fluffy clump. It is lighter than the density and texture of something like banana bread, but not by much. Fluffy but dense (we’re getting into the woods here in terms of this, but trust me on this one. You will definitely scrape the beaters to get this off).

Divide up the batter between the two pans. Don’t second guess yourself and think you have too much and need to throw the extra into a Pyrex™ bowl to bake it. Two loaf pans. That’s it.

Bake at 325 degrees F for at least an hour. It usually takes mine about an hour and 15-20 minutes. Depending on your altitude and so on, your mileage may vary. The top is going to crack (accept it). Make sure the centers are all done with the toothpick test. When firm and done, take the pans out and cool on a rack. When cool, THEN use a knife around the edge and take out. Let cool all the way, wrap tightly in plastic wrap and aluminum foil. Gift wrap if you are feeling virtuous and give away. Otherwise, stick in your own freezer (Mwa-ha-ha!)

Variations on a theme: chocolate pound cake

All else is the same except for the flour:
3 ½ cups of cake flour
½ cup of baking cocoa

That’s the only difference.

Happy holidays. Bon Appetit!

It all comes down to fat. Or, rather, fat that is solid at room temperature versus fat that is either semi-solid at room temperature or liquid at room temperature. This is actually, in its own way, the same exact discussion and issue that is the foundation of pie crusts, biscuits, filo and other forms of puff pastry and so on. Everyone have their notebooks at the ready? Good.

For a nice, neat overview of fats, go here: Fat
The ‘money quote’ though on fats is this: Fats (fatty acids) which have what are referred to as long chains (that is, they have more connections with carbon and hydrogen atoms) have a higher melting point and yield more energy because there are more connections being broken up. At the same time, because in saturated fats, the carbon and hydrogen atoms are paired (so that there are no dangling carbons or hydrogens lollygagging around), the fatty acids can arrange themselves in a very efficient and closely packed stack – this gives them a physical stability in terms of all temperatures up to their melting points. That’s why they are solid at room temperatures. One of the interesting chemical and physical characteristics of baking with solid fats (such as butter and lard) is that because of this stacking characteristic; even when you bake them, they maintain their physical structure for a very long time before the fat will melt into the baked goods. This is how flaky pastry, pie crust, biscuits, etc. are achieved: The fat in the dough maintains its structure just long enough to hold the various layers of the dough apart. They get ‘set’ by the baking and the fat then hits its melting point and becomes part of the baked good.

So, where does cookie meet chemistry here?

Depending on how you like your cookies, the choice of fat in the recipe can completely help or defeat you. Aunt Toby, for years, despaired of ever making a decent chocolate chip cookie until I was advised by a coworker, when I described my problem (constant shattering), to divide up the fat in the recipe and do one half as butter and the other half as….vegetable shortening. Hunh? Although my coworker only knew from HER baking experience that mixing vegetable shortening would make the cookies more ‘flexible’ (if you like your cookies chewy and soft, this is where you get the chemical structure to do it, plus the relationship between the fats and the amount of sugar you are using), and they would not shatter when lifted off the baking pan with a spatula. On the other hand, if you like to make Christmas/cookie cutter cookies, flexible is not what you want.

Here is an example of a cookie (and I admit that this is my first time through with these cookies). I was reading someone’s comments regarding ‘sinful pleasures’ at the holiday time and how she can only get a certain cookie product from Trader Joe’s at Christmas. This was described as TJ’s version of the famous and ubiquitous chocolate wafer cookie (not only national brands but also seemingly every large grocery store chain has their own versions of these, but we will all know them as “O” cookies, to protect the innocent). Now, this holiday version of the cookie has ground up peppermint candies in them and this lady just doted on them. I went wandering around looking for a recipe for said cookies – no luck. But I did find various versions of ‘the O cookie’ and decided to give the whole thing a shot.

Now, in your mind’s eye (or mouth as the case might be), recall ‘the O cookie” – shape, flavor, mouth feel, cookie texture. Right? Got that? The chocolate wafers are relatively hard and crunchy; the filling is vanilla flavored.

Filling is filling, but how is the wafer texture achieved? Go back to the top and read again. If we want to reproduce that same crunch, we’ve got to use a fat that is solid at room temperatures; otherwise, we’ve got a ‘cakey’ not a cookie.

My recipe, courtesy of goodness knows how many blogs and sites on the internet:
Oreo(tm) cookies from scratch
Cookie Ingredients:
• 1 1/4 C all-purpose flour
• 1/2 C unsweetened cocoa
• 1 t baking soda
• 1/4 t baking powder
• 1/4 t salt………………………….I did not use salt
• 1 C sugar
• 1/2 C plus 2 T butter, room temperature
• 1 large egg
1. In a medium-sized bowl, mix the flour, cocoa, baking soda and powder, salt, and sugar.
2. Beat in the butter and the egg. Continue mixing until dough comes together in a mass.
3. Take rounded teaspoons of batter and place on a parchment paper-lined baking sheet approximately 2 inches apart. With moistened hands, slightly flatten the dough. (I found that while the dough wasn’t sticky enough to roll, I could press it flat with my hands like the recipe said and then use cookie cutters to cut perfect circles. If you just care about the taste, then there is no need for the cookie cutters. Also, remember this is a chance to get creative and use all kinds of cookie cutters.)
4. Bake for 9 minutes at 375 F. Set on a rack to cool.

I played it strictly by the book here – but I doubled the recipe and only used two sticks of butter. I found that I needed to add some water at the end in order to get the dough to come together properly. I added several teaspoons of water, one teaspoon at a time. The issue might have been the temperature of the dough – our kitchen is pretty chilly.

In terms of a filling, I went out on a limb and did a standard cream cheese frosting:
1 big block of cream cheese or Neuchatel cheese
4 cups of sifted confectioner’s sugar
1 tsp. Vanilla flavoring
Beat hard until combined and fluffy. Since you want this to set up in the cookies, we don’t want a really fluffy icing, but then again, we don’t want something that is too stiff either. You mileage may vary in terms of needing to add more sugar to this. The amount of filling per cookie depends on the actual baked size of the wafers; I ended up using about a half of a cutlery-drawer teaspoon in each cookie. That’s enough to fill the cookie and not squeeze out when you put the other cookie on top.

So, how did this work? Well, it worked like a charm and frankly, one of the secrets to this whole ‘non-shattering’ cookie thing is using parchment paper on the baking sheets. Great stuff and definitely worth it; I would not try to substitute waxed paper for this. But it saves on having the wash up the baking sheets afterwards.

The 9 minutes is exactly right. No trying to figure out or fudge it. Take the baking sheets out at 9 minutes (I did one sheet at a time), put out to cool and take off the wafers and put on a rack. They set up and get hard and crispy right away.

This dough definitely is not something that I could roll out and use a cutter for. It was great as a ball cookie dough, though. I rolled about a teaspoon (the one in the cutlery drawer; not the one that you use to measure ingredients with) of dough between my hands and then pressed out each ball into a circle using a spatula and put them on the parchment and baked. Worked really well. If someone has a great chocolate-roll-out-and-cut cookie recipe, that would probably work much better if you want to use a round cutter. By the way, the standard size of ‘the O cookie” is about 1.5 inches across.

Now, let’s have some fun. One of the things I found when I searched around on the Internet for ‘the O cookie’ is that there is this whole industry surrounded home confectionary and baked goods that involves doing things with ‘the O cookie”. There are businesses out there that make molds and forms so that bakers can make ‘chocolate covered’ ‘o cookies’ etc. It’s amazing. But once I made these cookies, just for kicks, I got some of the meltable candy wafers (these come in various colors and flavors and I’m sure there are millions of people out there who know about this and who use them all the time; I missed the memo) and did a little bit of decorating the cookies. I dipped, splotched, and generally had fun; someone with far better eye and practice than I can produce some really great confections with these homemade (and better made, too, I might add, since there are no preservatives or high fructose corn syrup or whatevers in these) cookies.

And what about the Trader Joe’s cookies? Ah – well, since I’ve never had them, I had no guidelines, so I took some of the green and white mints, put them through the blender to make a fine powder and mixed that in with some of the filling. It made the filling a little bit stiffer – if I’d had peppermint flavoring or peppermint liqueur, I’d have put a teaspoon of that to loosen the filling up a little bit and give it even more ‘minty freshness’. As it is, the comments from my judges (the DH and The Boy) were that you could tell they were minty but it was not a flavor that was ‘in front’ of the product, if you know what I mean.

This is also NOT a quick item to do. So, if you are stuck indoors this winter with kids who are over 5 years of age and want an activity that will be fun, educational, and keep them occupied for several hours (with some incentive at the end of eating them), this is a great project.

Bon appétit!

Meat thermometer. This particular probe is actually no longer being manufactured by Taylor. The closest level of digital meat probe that they have is this one, which as you can see from the link at Amazon, is $25+. This new one has more bells and whistles; it folds up and it runs on 2 AA batteries. Taylor Meat Probe

We actually own several of these more primitive digital probes and one of them is my go-to SOIL thermometer. When I went to use it the other day (to write a post, actually), I discovered it did not work anymore. This is a simple piece of equipment and it’s battery operated, so that chances that something other than a dead battery was the issue were pretty small. My biggest issue was actually finding what other batteries could be exchanged for the battery which was inside the case. I found my exchange here. battery exchange chart
and was able to find the right battery at my local drug store.

Fixing this probe was simplicity itself:
Open up the case using the blade of a knife or a dime.

Using something non-metal, like the top of a pen, push out the battery, which was held in place by a metal clip.

Using a cotton topped swab, clean out the area (not with acetone or anything like that because it IS plastic in there) where the battery WAS.

Using fingers or something plastic (the end of that pen again), push the battery, business side down(that’s the part on any battery that sticks up — all batteries have a flat side and a side with a protrusion on it; the ‘sticky-outy thing’ is the business end of a battery).

Clip the case back together.

Wa-la. Working meat probe. The battery cost me $5.00; I’m sure there are sites on the internet where I could have gotten it cheaper but the shipping would have probably brought it over. But it kept another piece of something out of the landfill and I fixed it myself.

Example Number Two:
Oil Filled Radiator Heater. I love these things; we have two that we use to keep the odd corners of Chez Siberia warm when people are there and the regular heat does not go there (we have an extension on the house where it’s just tooooo far away from the furnace. No amount of insulating ductwork or fans can keep the air warm when it gets to that place. It’s just easier to have a heater on when a person is working in that area of the house. We also use them out in the workroom of the garage, basement, etc.). This one ‘died’ last winter and we’d never gotten around to seeing what we could do with it. Unfortunately, my son started working on it and by the time I could get my camera out, he’d fixed the problem but I’ll describe it to you so that you can fix this yourself.

There are two ‘points of failure’ in these units:
The electronics themselves.
The controls for the electronics.
Considering that all controls are made out of cheap plastic, the chances that it was the electronics was the point of failure was actually pretty small.

Here is what the controller looks like — this one comes off my stove but all knobs are like this. In this oil-filled radiator, there are two; one which operates like a rheostat and just rotates through Min-Max and the other one, which actually is involved with the power itself, which clicks through off/low/medium/high.

Again, like the probe, the trick is to get at the business end of things, which is underneath this cover. At the top of the cover, in an oval depression above the top control knob, is a Phillips head ™ screw. Undoing that allowed the entire front plate to be loosened and taken off so that my son could look at ‘where the rubber meets the road’, knobwise. The lower knob, the one involved with the power itself, once he took it off, showed that the inner tube of the knob (see the photo of the stove knob? They are all like that; that inner tube clips over a metal rod that is the switch that rotates from off to on/low/medium etc.) had a crack in both sides. It no longer gripped the metal rod so you could not turn the power on. He repaired the tube with some packing and electrical tape, made it tight enough on the inside of the tube to grip the metal rod, and turned the radiator back into a functioning appliance. If the knob had not been salvageable, he could have taken it to an appliance store and found a knob that was the same size to replace it with. It might now have exactly matched in terms of shape or color but we’re talking about an item which is not exactly sitting out all the time or used in a place where appearance is exactly a crucial element.

Again — this is not necessarily an expensive item; you can pick these up at home/garden centers, hardware stores, Amazon, etc. for $45 on up to several hundred dollars. But with literally less than 10 minutes work, my son, with a screw driver, some tape and a little ingenuity, turned something that would have ended up in the landfill, back into use. The only point of fear someone should have about trying to fix something like this is to first make sure the item is unplugged from the electrical outlet first.

But…you never know….that stuff is pretty yeasty smelling. So I tried an experiment. I frankly bought the cheapest beer I could find at the grocery store (no Oomegang Belgian Dark or anything like that), opened up a couple of bottles and left them open all night to try to make it flat. Next morning – no good. Still bubbly as ever, so I poured it into a big glass measuring cup and zapped it for 30 seconds and stirred it up. And I did that again. At that point, it was warm enough. I measured out two exactly the same amounts of the beer into bowls, added one teaspoon of sugar to each and a half a cup of flour to each and put them in a warm oven to raise. Then, I added one tablespoon of dry yeast to one of the bowls.

Well, NOW we know. Warm beer/sugar/flour? Zippo.

So, there I was with a bowl full of very bubbly starter so I decided to make bread out of it. I warmed up the rest of the beer (the total volume must have been close to 16-18 ounces of beer) and produced this:

Beer Bread With Multigrains

16-18 ounces of beer, opened and warmed up
1 Tbs. Yeast
1 tsp of sugar, honey, or molasses
½ cup of flour (I use bread flour but regular basic flour will work)

Stir up and put into a warm place to rise – this will take about 10-15 minutes. Should be very bubbly.

Put into a big bowl with 1 cup of whole wheat flour and stir. Add enough regular or bread flour until you have a sticky dough.

Add: 1/3-1/2 cup of multigrain hot cereal (if you don’t have that you can add other whole grains that you’ve got – amaranth, grits, quinoa, whatever)
Add ¼ cup of flax meal or flax seeds (flax meal is actually better for you; crushing it up allows for better absorption)

Mix all of this together and turn out onto a floured board or countertop. Put more flour on top and knead until it is no longer sticky at all. Put into a big greased bowl and let rise in a warm place for 45 minutes.
Punch down, turn out on your floured board or counter and knead a little bit. Grease up two cookie sheets and divide the dough in half, forming each into a ball. Taking a sharp knife, make one cut straight through the top. Put back into the oven and let rise for 30 min. Take out of the oven and preheat the oven to 375 degrees F.

Bake for 30-45 minutes, until the loaves sound hollow when you rap on them with your knuckles or a knife handle. Take out, let cool, slice and enjoy.
(Yeast micrograph courtesy of Dr. Maxim Zakhartsev, Dr. Sergei Rarozin, Carmen Momeu, International University Bremen, Germany)

And though our landlord was very encouraging (“Sure, you can rip up the lawn for a garden”), we felt the need to get some books because we wanted to ‘do things’ but did not know anyone who actually knew how. Over the years, we have collected a pretty extensive library of books which we have read over and over and consulted many times over. We haven’t felt the need to look for any books currently so we thought we’d take a look at what is being marketing right now on the shelves of what would probably be what most people have available to them unless they are going to the Internet. A lot of people buy books off the internet, but if you are looking for something specific, it really helps if you can go to the bookstore, plunk yourself in front of the shelf, pull down books and take a look and a bit of a read for yourself.

Today’s Topic: General Self-Sufficiency
Now, it’s obvious from my looking at the books that are on the shelves right now, brand new, that ‘self-sufficiency’ is definitely one of those ‘in the eye of the beholder’ positions. The range seems to run from the level of “How to handle survival after a nuclear attack” all the way through “How to slaughter your own pigs” and everything in between. So, a lot depends on what exactly someone’s goals actually are and where you are living. Because, if you are living in the suburbs, having a book that has general home and family stuff, gardening, a bit of home repair and maintenance, energy saving and so on is going probably be useful for someone who has never picked up a hammer or canned food. Having a book that delves deeply into radiation disease, setting up military level home protection systems and so on might not be your cup of tea. Or, it might, if you are into weaponry and thinking ahead…way…way…ahead.

This post is not meant as an in-depth review of every book out there. Basically, the DH and I walked into our local ‘extremely large big-box national chain bookstore’ and pulled every book we could find off the shelves that seemed to be handling certain topics and sat down and looked through them. We looked for certain topics that WE feel people who want to be more self-sufficient would want to see and at a level that is accessible, understandable, and in enough detail that a family could actually perform the task and complete it. No book is going to be truly encyclopedic but we felt it had to be good value and give people enough information to do the jobs; if readers want books that are more specialized, there are certainly books on specific topics out there, but for the true beginner, someone who perhaps is a little concerned or fearful, here are our recommendations for a good first book.

For those who really appreciate having photographic ‘how to’, detailed diagrams, uplifting copy, etc., the best book of the lot is:
Dick and James Strawbridge’s Self-Sufficiency for the 21st Century ($30.00 retail; DK Publishing, New York, NY. www.dk.com)
DK Publishing is to DIY books today what Readers Digest was 20-30 years ago: big, glossy, informative books which weigh a ton, filled with meaty material. Their position is obviously, “If you can only get one book, we want it to be OURS and we will make sure you get value.”

What put this book at the top of the heap for me was the totally realistic and pragmatic tone, a recognition that most people who are just starting out, who most likely did not grow up on a farm or even out in the country, not only don’t have a lot of skills or confidence, but also might have very…mmm…strong feelings about things like doing their own slaughtering. This is a British book; the father and son team of Dick and James Strawbridge have a UK television series called “It’s Not Easy Being Green” where they are working on a 300 year old derelict property. But everywhere I looked, the techniques and advice being given were right on the mark for people anywhere. Two big thumbs up.

Second Place, and only because I am extremely nostalgic about Storey Publishing is this compendium:
Country Wisdom and Know How ($19.95 retail, Black Dog and Leventhal Publishing, New York, New York)
Storey Publishing is one of the original ‘back to the land/do it yourself’ publishers in the United States. Their series of ‘Country Wisdom Bulletins’ (single topic booklets) have grown, expanded and been sold everywhere from through the mail to the counters at home and garden and farm centers since 1983. What Black Dog and Levanthal have done (and don’t misapprehend me here; it’s a clever thing to do) is to collect all of this material in the bulletins and other Storey publications, and put it into a paperback book the size of almost a newspaper – like the old Whole Earth Catalog. To do this, they are using extremely small print on the page, which is newsprint (which is not exactly a high contrast medium), and squeezing down the diagrams and drawings. Little showing of ‘how to’ and frankly, I doubt if they updated any of the material. This is referred to in some places as ‘old wine in new bottles’. I always felt Storey’s information was boiled down and very useful but with this font size, they really should have packaged this with a magnifying glass. Great material, almost encyclopedic but not current and not user friendly.

Third Place, or Top of the Heap if your goal is to be prepared for alien or zombie invasions or having to live off the land or dealing with natural or national disasters, is this book:

The Big Book of Self-Reliant Living, Walter Szykitka (Lyon Press, Guildfor, CT)

The Table of Contents says it all:
1) First Aid
2) Survival
a. Radiation Contamination
b. Survival On Land
c. Survival At Sea
d. Emergencies At Home
3) Health and Exercise (includes such topics as malaria and lead poisoning)
4) Food and Nutrition (includes preserving and drying)
5) Farm and Home (includes gardening, orcharding, and home repairs)
6) Tools, how to use them and repairs

If you are the sort of person who has a lot of concerns about whether or not your family is prepared for emergencies or some sort of disaster scenario, this is a book you might want to have on hand and use. And lest anyone mistake me, most American families are totally unprepared for what can happen.
Example: 9/11. Families all over the United States who had friends and relatives in New York and Washington, DC were suddenly unable to contact, find or assess what was happening to their loved ones. People were being evacuated; no one knew what was going on. It was horrifying.
Example: Hurricanes. Every couple of years (and sometimes in the same year), we have major hurricanes and people do not have any other plan other than putting up plywood on the windows. Thousands of families got stuck trying to evacuate from vulnerable areas in Texas the year after Katrina because…they ended up on the Interstates in a giant traffic jam and they ran out of fuel in their cars. There is nothing wrong with sitting your family down and talking about family emergency plans. This book contains information to help you through the process.

Books Worth Looking For in Used Book Shops:
If you are interested in looking at used books, Storey Publications and Readers Digest Books from 20-30 years ago are definitely worth looking at. Rodale Press books on gardening topics from that period are also excellent. Be careful about books which are frankly dated – “Five Acres and Independence” was probably one of the biggest sellers during the Great Depression but is practically useless today except in a general sense. The advice, product recommendations (DDT, anyone?), and so on leave it truly in the realm of ‘for popular historians only’.

And a habit is born. Whether it’s sit down or take out, it’s you and the spousal unit NOT sitting down and eating together at home. Whether it’s at the counter, at the table, or in front of the tube (which Aunt Toby does NOT advocate, by the way), eating at home is almost always less expensive and more nutritious than eating out. You have complete control over what is on the plate Chez Your House, which is difficult to achieve eating someplace else.

Now, if you have kids, this becomes even more expensive and kids get very easily lured into the habit of eating out and the general taste of stuff that comes on the plate when you eat out or eat take out. Something most of us don’t realize is that little kids don’t have strong food preferences; as a matter of fact, if you have a baby and want to make your own baby food, you should not put in any salt or sugar because first, those are two tastes that babies’ tastebuds are not sensitized to, and second, the more and earlier you put that into food that babies and children eat, the more habituated they become to the flavor of having that in their food. And they expect it and want it. And the more kids eat out, the stronger their attachment to those flavors are because there is more of that stuff in commercially prepared foods.

So, let’s say you want to cut down on eating out, for whatever reasons make sense to you: saving money, dietary issues, just spending more time together as a couple or as a family. Whatever. But you get pushback. People miss going out. There’s a lot of whining. “Let’s just call out for pizza, Mom….”

And the cycle starts again.

At Chez Siberia, when the Little Siberians were indeed little, there was a period of about 7 years when we struggled. A lot of clothing and shoes got handed down, down, down; A lot of ‘no we can’t’ got expressed, which made the Little Siberians very very grouchy. They wanted to go out to eat. We couldn’t afford it.

So, we invented ‘playing restaurant,” which is that we gave the kids the opportunity to come up with a dinner menu on a weekend day (and they were usually really good about filling in a format that had a meat, a couple of vegetables, a salad, and a dessert). We gave them free run of the cook books, the table linens and dishes so that they could set up the dinner table in as fancy a way as they wanted. They would pull out the crayons and construction paper and come up with fancy menus and we would all cook up a storm. Then, at the appointed time, the DH and I would go upstairs and change into ‘adult’ clothing; the Little Siberians would put on fresh aprons and we would go outside the house and make a big show of ringing the doorbell. The Boy, who was the littlest at the time, played the part of the host, with one of his sisters taking the coats. Our eldest would be standing at the table to seat us and give us our menus and then they would serve us and get their own dinners. For the price of less than one person’s dinner out, we were able to serve all of us and have leftovers for the week.

They had been in restaurants often enough at that point to ask us how everything was; if they could get us more water and so on. It was all a lot of fun and frankly, I think it also sowed the seeds of the people they are today, who like good food, who like to cook, who appreciate attractive presentation, and dearly love other people saying, “mmmmmmmmm.”

And frankly, it’s one of the activities that got us all through a pretty tight period.

Something to think about.

That is, they are big enough that you can do things with them, or modify them in a certain way, or are worth working with because they are made well or out of good solid stuff. And I’m here to tell you that many times, it’s worth it. Today’s experiment (which is actually just a variation of the theme I explored before) is making over another sweater which is very nice but which has a neck that I hated. Now, I realize some of you are asking yourself, “Why did you buy two sweaters with the same bad neck?” At the time, the price was right and I forgot what would happen to me if I wore a turtleneck like that in a very heated office environment (can we say “hot flash”? Bet you could).

So, as you saw if you viewed the videos, I had already decided that the best use I could get out of the tunic-length sweater was by making a deep vee-neck out of it so that I can wear other tops underneath it. I marked the vee-neck and ran myself some contrasting stitching around the vee and the back of the neck so that I had a guideline to use the ‘fake commercial seam-finishing stretch stitch’ that I have on my sewing machine.

Now, there are various ways to finish off a neck like this. I could have ripped down the knitted tube that was used for the turtleneck and used the yarn to knit a band around the neck. To do that,
1. Mark the center of the vee in the front of the sweater with a safety pin. You will want to make sure that you pick up that stitch.
2. Start picking up the stitches at the center back of the neck and pick up 8 stitches, skip one stitch in the sweater, pick up the next 8 stitches and so on until you get down to the stitch on the safety pin. Pick that one up and put a marker in it. Continue on picking up the rest of the stitches, as noted all the way to where you started. Work in ribbing for 2″, decreasing 1 st every row, each side of the center st of the V-neck. Bind off all stitches loosely.

Another method is to sew ribbed knitted material or very stretchy knitted material in a band on the neck. Measure around the neck, cut the band twice as wide as you want it and an inch longer than the neck measurement. Pin around the neck and sew a narrow hem. Flip the ends to the inside and cross over one another at the front and hand sew down.

A third way of treating this (and frankly the way I did it) is to use a narrow strip of stretchy knitted material as a binding. Starting at the back, pin the strip flush with the edge and sew around, stretching it a little bit as you go to pull the neck in a little bit. At the beginning, fold over the edge of the binding fabric and sew over the original edge of the strip. Then, folding over one edge and stretching it a little bit, bring the strip over to the inside and pin all around the edge. This hides the raw sweater edge inside the binding, finishes off the the neck line of the sweater and voila!

But here is as good an example and demonstration of the unfairness of it. I recently bought these shoes. Now, never let it be said that Aunt Toby doesn’t look for quality but in terms of women’s shoes in this country, the whole issue of quality is moot. If you can find a pair made out of leather with a supportive inside that fits you and is comfortable, that is almost the most you can expect. The concept of a ‘quality women’s shoe’ just doesn’t even come into the same radar screen with men’s shoes. A large part of that is the whole ‘women buy for fashion; men buy for wearing..and wearing..and wearing.’ So, men by and large are willing to spend a good dollar for a solid pair of leather shoes with good soles and heels that they will wear to work. They might have two or three pairs of shoes that they wear to work and rotate through during the week, but those are still pairs of shoes that are being worn 260 days a year and will usually last 3-4 years if they are cared for. If they are taken to the shoe repairman for new soles and heels and cared for, then they can last decades. Why? Largely because the inputs into the shoes are tough and first class: heavier leathers, solid soles (with multiple layers of tough materials in them) and heels.

Women’s shoes? Not so much. And these shoes “ri-cheer” are a good example. Yes, they are leather and they have an absolutely fantastic insole system (which is frankly why I bought them; I wear a 6 D and have some, ahem, foot issues, so a shoe that I can put on where my foot let out that “ mmmmmmmm” is a shoe that I am going to buy. If it is fairly stylish, that is the cherry on the sundae). They are a heeled oxford style, which has been fairly popular for the past couple of years and continues to be so.

But the heels? OMG. Unlike the heels on men’s dress shoes, which by their nature are flat and broad, and solid, heels on women’s dressier shoes are plastic. Now, I’ve seen some that are solid plastic, solid plastic which have been covered with the same material as the shoe body is, and then there is this type here: hollow. With a tap at the bottom that fits in like a plug.

I caught the edge of the tap and it yanked right out. The heel itself is attached to the shoe with adhesives and perhaps some sort of nail-gun/staple affair, but the tap at the bottom of the heel just fits in with two little plastic extensions. You can see that in the photograph. But the tap was not glued to the heel itself.

Cheap. Very cheap. And the horrible thing is this: Luxury brand shoes are made…just…the…same…way.

In the same factories in China.

OK..so I really liked these shoes. That foot bed ‘had me at hello’. So, here’s how to fix this – this is a repair you really and truly CAN do at home.

All you need:
Roll of duct tape or other non-stretchy, tough tape
Adhesive that will work on plastic, leather, glass, metal (not wood or carpenter’s glue).
A toothpick or Popsickle™ stick to put the glue onto the tap
A paper towel

How to:
Pull out the tap a little bit more so that you have room to work in terms of getting the glue onto the surfaces.
Squeeze out a bit of adhesive onto the toothpick or stick and carefully smear it on the inside surface of the tap AND onto the matching edges of the heel.

Carefully squeeze the tap back into place so that the extensions go into their respective holes.

Press down hard.

Put the shoe ON and with a piece of newspaper on the floor or something else to protect the floor, step down and put your weight on to the heel. Take the shoe off.

Using the paper towel, wipe off any of the adhesive that has been squeezed out between the bottom surface of the heel and the tap.

Take about six inches of duct tape, and rip in half the long ways.

Take one piece and put in over the tap and pulling slightly, stick it to the side of the shoe. Do the same thing to the other side of the tape and the other side of the shoe.
Let dry and cure overnight.

And Aunt Toby is here today to tell you this: It’s worth it.

First – you KNOW what you have in your soil. You KNOW what you did or didn’t do. You don’t have any control over what was done to the field that the potatoes or onions in that 50 pound bag came in, how they were handled, how they were cleaned and washed, how they were stored, how clean the equipment was that put the potatoes or onions into those bags. What the warehouse or the delivery truck was like. None of that is under your control when you buy that bag in the grocery store.

But when you grow your own, however much you grow, everything is YOU. How much compost you put into the soil, how closely you planted the onion or potato sets, how much you weeded to get rid of competition, how much you watered (because you had a dry summer) or didn’t. When you dug them up. How you dug them up. How you cleaned them. How you store them. It’s all you. And if you want to make sure of as many bites that go into your mouth (and into the tummies of the rest of your family), growing your own is the best way to do that.

Second – the return on investment (or as our ‘friends’ on Wall Street call it, “ROI”) for veggies like onions and potatoes is huge. I’ll use this year’s onion crop as an example:

This spring, we planted about one pound of yellow onion sets (we use yellow Stuttgarter onions because those are hard, dense onions and store really well; red onions are great fresh but they do not store well), in a space 4 feet by 12 feet, with each set spaced 6 inches apart. We just dug them up yesterday (we actually could have dug them up earlier; the foliage had flopped down and died back but we had some rainy weather and you don’t want to dig up your onions when it’s all wet – they get slimy). That one pound (give or take a few ounces; I’m not exactly sure if it was just one pound or a pound and a half) of sets turned into onions which weighed about 35 pounds (again, give or take a pound either way because the scale I was using is not really exact). Depending on where you live, your best storage onion might be something different; what grows best in any particular area is highly ‘day length’ specific. In the northern half of the US, yellow Stuttgarter is the storage onion of choice. Also, please note: just jogging down to your local home/garden store might not be the best place to buy your onion sets. First: If it’s a large national chain, your local store will have the same onion sets that everyone else in the chain gets and this might not be best for your area, truly. Second, the quality of storage might not be the best. It might be better to go to the mail order outlets or the internet to find onion sets – many outlets have varieties that will not be available in your local store and they will be shipped to you when the time is right for planting in any case. Just a thought.

Again, let’s look at the numbers here:
Est. 1.5 pounds of sets
Payback: 35 pounds of onions
The only cost we had was for the sets, a little bit of weeding time (we mulch heavily so that keeps most of the weeds in check) and some watering time during the dry spell. We also were using a hose from one of our sumps which basically runs no matter how dry it gets so we did not have any extra cost for electricity from the pump. The amount of space was 48 square feet.

There are other vegetables that take more work, but I think onions are worth it. One note: Once you’ve harvested your onions, sort through them. Anything that ends up smaller than a golfball, put back into the garden. This will overwinter and you’ve got a jumpstart for the next year. Anything that has a thick/green neck still (referred to as a ‘bull neck’), eat right away. These don’t keep well at all. Anything that still has any green foliage in the neck, also eat right away. Once you’ve sorted out what you want to store, wash them well and get all the dirt off them and spread them out on screens or in wire baskets (we use the wire baskets from an old freezer), in a breezy dry place to dry. Then store in mesh bags in a cool dark place.

Enjoy.