Sunday, May 30, 2010

Sunday Cooking ...

My goal in cooking is to have food for 1-3 days. Of course, this involves leftovers; leftovers that can taste good cold or re heated. The cold food will sound better and better in the next week or so.

Today it’s a turkey loaf in the Sun oven and a veggie dish in the Tulsi oven. They could both be stacked in the Sun oven but the potato dish was an afterthought so I just put it in the Tulsi oven. The potato dish is just, sweet potato and red potato chopped medium fine, a little salt, pepper, fresh parsley and dried dill. I usually add some olive oil if I’m roasting them in the electric oven but this time I'm doing without the oil.

Anyway that’s enough food for at least 2-3 days with some fruit or salad greens with it or as snacks. We got some tasty apricots with the CSA stuff last week.

Next is putting up shade screen over the container herbs tomorrow. I feel like there's a race on to do thing before the end of this week! Temps will increase a lot this week, we’ll be at 105 by the end of this week; 110 over next weekend. We’ve had a good May but the heat comes some time.

peace, shamba

Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Thinking about the coming heat ...

Some news from the big world: For the 4th year in a row, at the end of winter, the bee hives in this country, US, still have a lot of dead or mostly missing bees from the ones that were in the hive at the beginning of winter. This is the 4th spring in a row for this creepy disappearing bees issue. It’s also in other parts of the world. I don’t think we have a real handle on what causes this, too complex an issue for easy answers.

I'm putting up the shade cloth over the container herbs this week. They've done well so far but they'll need some help in the next few weeks to keep on going this summer. Actually, I don't really know if they will survive the summer but I'll give it my best effort.

The cat’s claw in the back wall is growing a lot faster since I’ve been watering this past week. Just a little regular water makes it grow like crazy. I’m working on getting it across the top of half of the block wall so it will help deflect the heat and sunlight that the wall absorbs in the hot weather. So far, the plant itself seems to agree with the way I want it to go.

And, our hot weather isn’t here yet. We hit 101 on Friday May 21 but we get another reprieve from triple digits for about another 5 days as a front blows through. Today was just dusty and windy but the next two days will be much lower in temps, about 80 degrees.

Mmm, the very old fridge is very inefficient also and it's freezing everything in it again. I'm sure this takes up a chunk of electricity.

Also, I got some window curtains on a very marked down deal and a Penny's card discount for fabric with thermal backing. I dug the card out of it's hiding place and used it. The thermal backing is supposed to help cut not only light but heat/and or cold. It definitely cut light and heat coming in a window with indirect light. Old curtains will be washed and used when clean when the new curtains get too furry from cats rubbing against them! Now, I’m thinking to do something with those very ancient drapes to the patio door. I’d get those cleaned and save them, too. There is how-many-years? of cat fur, dust, dirt and stains and who knows what else on those drapes!

I'm thinking with the way things are going in the economic and financial market place, I'm better off spending money on goods that will help the house be more energy efficient and more livable.

peace, shamba

Thursday, May 13, 2010

May 10 and 11th and 12th

Have spent several days with solar oven cooking different things:

1-Beef tenderloin, yes this turned out really well in the global sun oven. I put it in frozen and it came out pretty well. I left it longer than I intended to, about 2 hours instead of 1 ½ hours. It was a little dry but still pretty tender. It was well done, a little more than I like it. I don’t purchase this expensive meat and cook it very often—maybe once or twice a year—but it is my favorite meat meal.
It didn’t taste like grilled on a mesquite fire, of course, but pretty good anyway.

I like vegetarian food but I’m still the meat lover I was raised to be on Midwestern WASPy cooking. :)

2-Baked sweet potatotes. These were better than I thought they would be with a little butter, salt and pepper on them.

3-Eggs. Hard boiled eggs; 4 eggs in global oven for a little over an hour. Actually, it was an hour and 15 minutes.

There are a couple of other egg recipes I want to try that I found at the solarovenchef.blogspot.com and solarcookingathome.blogspot.com -- that last one is Sharlene T.'s blog.

I’m swimming in potatoes from the CSA! I’m eating them but they keep coming in good numbers. It's a good thing I like potatoes; mostly chpped up, like diced but not tiny cubes, with onions and just roasted.

We also got eggs this week, so it seems a good time to make the grits,chiles,eggs and cheddar cheese dish and freeze a chunk of it.

Peace, Shamba

Thursday, May 6, 2010

new and some stuff to wonder about ....

News lately:

--the financial situation in Greece in still not quite finalized, I think, so many times it’s been reported as “all taken care of” I don’t know if the latest version of their bailout/stabilization is done or not. A section of the Greek public is so worked up their demonstrations turn into riots and people are being killed in these demonstrations now. Did this influence the stock market drop today ?

--US Stock markets this week have had some losses, but today they had a big spike drop of almost 1000 points. They came back up though and show a total loss in points today of 347.80 to 10,520.32; S&P had 1128.15 Some commentators think the Greek and European financial situation is going to get worse and is a picture of the kind of austerity measure we'll have to take.

what I want to know, and I don't anyone is going to tell me!, is does that mean I have until the end of 2010 to get some more things done at the house?

--Bad oil spill from BP rig in the Gulf of Mexico; spill is growing hugely and could be spread around the west coast of Florida to the Keys and then up the East Coast.
What does this do to the temperature of water in regards to hurricane formation???
Is it going to hit the gulf Coastline, so far it's just hanging out there in the Gulf and hasn't come onto shore yet?

--The 99 weeks of unemployment that have been extended by Feds over the past year or so has not been extended to more. So, those people because of the recession for the past two, almost 2 ½ years, are going to run out of their UE benefits quite soon if they haven’t already--how many people is that and will they all be on the streets?

I think they just drop off any unemployment stat sheets and will that make the emplyment rates look better?

--Much more unemployment is probably coming with the education cuts across the country and also municipal and state workers will be let go starting with the fiscal year beginning July 1. Of course, many government employees have been let go all along the last year anyway.

Local weather news, no 100 degree days yet.

shamba