Save on Heat with Firebricks

heat, energy, fire

Photo: insulatingfirebrick.com

Make the most of your oven’s heat by placing several firebricks inside as you bake. The firebricks will absorb the heat from the oven and once you’re done, continue to emanate heat long after your oven is off. Just prop your oven door open to allow the heat to escape. Of course, you’ll want to use extreme caution with this method if you have young children in the house.

Firebricks are more expensive than regular red brick, but cost under $5 in most locations. Not a bad expenditure for lowering your fuel and energy consumption.

Thanks to my friend and colleague Jennifer Margulis for sharing this idea!

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Easy Homemade Jelly in the Middle of Winter

One of my sons is a P,B & J hound so I’ve got to keep jam and jelly in the house. The trouble is, almost every single brand of jelly that my grocery store carries is made with high fructose corn syrup (HFCS). I don’t like that. One local brand does use sugar instead of HFCS and there are organic options, but sheesh, it’s expensive! More than five bucks for slightly more than a cup of jam? This is why I’ve been making my own jam and jelly for years.

I know that some of you are suffering through snow flurries and blizzards right now, but what better way to spend a snow day than to whip up a batch of jelly? Making freezer jam or jelly is so easy. Truly. And get this: you don’t even need to have fresh fruit to make jelly. The freezer or juice aisle of your grocery store is your ticket to HFCS-free jelly in the middle of winter. Look for ready-to-serve 100% juice in the drink aisle (you may have to seek out a natural food store) or a frozen concentrate (Welch’s is one brand that offers 100% juice). It may not be quite as self-sufficient of you to use store bought juice, but we’re all about small steps around here; homemade jelly with store bought juice still eliminates icky ingredients and unnecessary shipping of disposable plastic containers.

I’ve recently discovered Pomona brand pectin (available at health food stores) and I’ve been using it exclusively because it allows me to use less sugar. Use this recipe if you’re using Pomona pectin, or see the links below the photo gallery for alternative recipes.

Important: This is not scary. It took me about half an hour to make 3 pints of grape freezer jelly for around $10. If you’re new to this, it might take you an HOUR.

Grape Freezer Jelly

Ingredients:

  • 4 cups 100% grape juice (if you’re using frozen concentrate, reconstitute before measuring)
  • 1/4 cup lemon or lime juice
  • 3/4 – 2 cups sugar or 1/2 – 1 cup honey
  • 1 box Pomona brand pectin

Prep Work:

  1. Prepare calcium water. Put 1/2 tsp calcium powder (the small package in the Pomona box) and 1/2 cup water in a small jar with a lid. Shake well before using.
  2. Wash and rinse jars. For freezer jelly, it’s best to use straight sided jars (such as a wide mouthed Kerr canning jar). If you plan to use the jelly quickly you can reuse any old clean glass jars and keep them in the refrigerator.

Make the Jelly:

  1. Measure grape juice, lemon juice, and 4 tsp of prepared calcium water into a large pot. (Save the remaining calcium water in the fridge for a future batch of jelly.)
  2. Measure sugar or honey into a separate bowl. Thoroughly mix in 4 tsp of powdered pectin.
  3. Bring fruit juice to a boil, stirring frequently. Add sugar or honey mixture and stir vigorously to dissolve the pectin. Return to a boil and then remove from heat.
  4. Fill jars:
  • To freeze, fill the jars 3/4 full to allow room for expansion when frozen.
  • If you’ll use the jelly within a month or so, you can refrigerate it. In this case, you can fill the jars to within 1/4″ of the top.
  • Screw on lid and allow to cool before placing jelly in the refrigerator or freezer.

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Put a Lid on It

cooking, lid, energy savings, kitchen, stove top

Photo: butkaj.com

When you’re cooking on the stove top you can cut your cooking time and/or energy use by up to 75 percent just by using a tight fitting lid says Richard Ehrlich, author of The Green Kitchen. Boiling water? Warming soup? Put a lid on it! I use a lid on almost everything I cook to save energy, but it also helps to save time – and who couldn’t use more of that?

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Make the Switch to Green Grass

organic, turf, lawn,

Photo: victoriapeckham

If you’re still maintaining your lawn using chemicals, stop! (Now, wasn’t that easy? Think how much time I just saved you!)

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that U.S. households use nearly 90 million pounds of herbicides and pesticides on their lawns each year. Those chemicals end up in our groundwater and run off into rivers and oceans. If growing your own food is on your sustainability agenda, you certainly don’t want those poisons ending up on your kitchen table via the vegetables you grow.

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Homemade Granola

Packaged cereal has become a breakfast staple in America, but we gave it up long ago. In fact, we stopped buying cereal regularly long before I before I began this whole sustainable quest of mine, mostly because even after two (expensive) bowls full of cereal, my boys were hungry again by mid-morning. It just didn’t stick with them. Instead, I make homemade granola and I do it without a recipe. That means no measuring. Which means I can throw together a batch really quickly.

Here’s how I do it:

  • Oil the bottom of a large roasting pan to prevent sticking.
  • Fill the pan to the halfway point with rolled oats.

granola, cereal, roasting pan, homemade

  • Add “extra” ingredients like puffed millet, chopped nuts, flaked coconut, or sesame seeds (whatever you have in the cupboard) so that the pan is about 3/4 full.

oats, almonds, puffed millet, granola,

  • Pour one-half to one cup of honey or maple syrup over the dry ingredients, stirring it in as you pour.
  • Bake in an oven set between 300-350 (F) degrees. (The variable oven temperature allows you to cook the granola while you’ve got something else in the oven, making the most of your heat.)
  • Stir every 10-15 minutes* for about an hour or until the granola is toasty brown.

toasted, browned, granola, homemade, oats, cereal

  • Once the granola cools down, you can stir in dried fruit like cranberries or raisins if you like.
  • Store it in an airtight container.

If you don’t have a large roasting pan or just want to make a smaller batch, these instructions will still work. Just use less sweetener than what I call for here. (Unless you like your granola really sweet, in which case you don’t need to make any changes.) A smaller batch will likely take less time to brown, too, so keep an eye on it.

*Use a timer or I guarantee you will step outside only to find that the dog has run off with one of your shoes and while you’re off looking for it you’ll discover that someone left the hose on causing a minor flooding issue that you need to remedy Right Now and while you’re here you might as well put a load of laundry going. And when you smell something burning you will think, “Oh, those neighbors! Burning something again.” until you realize that the smell is actually coming from your own kitchen even though you can’t quite remember if you have anything on the stove. I know of which I speak.

Does your family eat granola? Or are they stuck on boxed cereals? Do you think they’d be willing to make a switch?

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Tomato Math – How Many Plants is Enough?

canning, preserving, applesauce, garden, larder, yellow pear

Bounty from a previous year's garden.

One of the primary reasons I garden is to fill my pantry with canned fruits and vegetables that are (almost*) free of bpa and pesticides. Of all the different things I preserve, tomatoes are far and away the most-used ingredients in my household; it seems I’m constantly pulling a jar of some sort of tomato product or another out of the pantry. In previous years, it’s been pints and quarts that I put up from our big California garden. I ran out of the canned goods I brought with me when we moved some time ago  and I’m reduced to buying canned tomatoes – it’s killing me. (And yes, the movers DID think I was nuts. But I needed the jars; why not bring them full?)

As the time for planting a garden nears, I’m gearing up to once again fill my pantry with tomatoes from the garden. In the past, I’ve planted as many as 40 tomato plants in a season and always had plenty for me as well as lots to share, but my space wasn’t nearly as limited. Here on this small lot where (ironically) full sun is scarce, there’s not room to wantonly plant excess. I need to know – roughly – about how many tomato plants will yield enough fruit to fill my larder.

I know that yields will depend upon the variety of tomato as well as the weather and my general success, but this page about preserving tomatoes says:

One bushel of fresh tomatoes weighs 53 pounds and yields approximately 18 quarts of canned tomatoes or 15 to 18 quarts of juice. Approximately 2 1/2 to 3 1/2 pounds of fresh tomatoes makes 1 quart of canned tomatoes.

Past experience in a hot summer region leads me to believe that a single tomato plant can yield as much as 20-30 pounds per season. Since I’m gardening in a region that’s new to me and notorious for being hard to grow tomatoes in, let’s assume I can get 10-15 pounds of tomatoes from each plant. This is nothing but a wild guess, but we’ve got to start somewhere, right?

In a year’s time, my family of four (including two teenage boys) will eat:

  • 26 quarts of pizza sauce (in 52 pint sized jars)
  • 24 quarts of marinara sauce
  • 36 quarts of salsa (I use salsa in chili recipes and Mexican dishes in addition to serving it with chips)

That’s 86 quarts of tomatoes (more or less, as there will be other ingredients tossed in with the tomatoes).

In order to stock my pantry with the tomato products we eat regularly, I’ll need to grow 258 pounds of tomatoes. That means I’ll need between 17-25 tomato plants in order to accommodate my family’s needs.

I don’t have room for that many tomato plants, but I’m told that with the mild weather here in Hawaii, I can get two or three crops a year. Which begs the question: if I can grow so many tomato crops in a season, do I really need to preserve so much? Maybe I can get by with fresh tomatoes for some of my cooking needs. We’ll see how this plays out!

Do you grow tomatoes? Do you calculate how many plants you’ll need or just plant and hope for the best?

*There is BPA in the canning lids manufactured by Ball/Jardin. Tattler makes BPA-free reusable lids, but they are plastic, and I’m not convinced that they won’t leak something just as damaging as BPA. Weck makes beautiful glass jars with glass lids that are probably worth investing in, a few at a time.

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Welcome

It’s one thing to think, “Hey, I’d love to be more self-sufficient!” and quite another to implement a lifestyle change that might require learning some new skills.

Attainable Sustainable is about bridging the gap between wanting change and making it happen without becoming overwhelmed. Nobody’s saying you have to go get a tractor and a cow. Attainable Sustainable is about discovering – one step at a time – how to make changes in your life to support a sustainable lifestyle.

The Author

Kris Bordessa has been gardening for most of her life. She's been authoring books and writing features for the past ten years or so. It's about time she combined the two, don't you think? [More about the author]