Fun with Fermentation

In trying to cut down on plastic, I figured one of the biggest sources in my home is plastic bread bags. We eat a lot of bread. I was able to get bread for my son at a local bakery and have them put it directly in a (clean) cloth bag for me to take home.

Unfortunately, I am allergic to wheat and cow dairy, which makes grocery shopping for me much more complicated. No local bakeries that I know of make gluten-free bread and the GF bread sold at the supermarket are either wrapped in two plastic bags or a hard plastic sheath that has to be cut open. I decided to try my hand at making bread. 

One of my favorite cookbooks is Silvana's Gluten-Free and Dairy-Free Kitchen by Silvana Nardone. I used her recipe for sandwich loaf bread and made a delicious loaf. I realized I need a bigger loaf pan though because when I let the bread rise in a warm oven, it overflowed the pan and dripped on the oven floor. Yikes!

My other experiment in fermentation was Harvest Apple Beer. You may be saying, but hey, beer and wine come in recyclable glass bottles and tin cans. Why not just buy beer? Actually, I found out that many wine bottles have plastic corks and plastic sleeves near the top of the wine bottle. The inside of cans is often coated with plastic. 

My apple beer recipe was given to me many years ago, and I no longer know where I got it from. It has apples, raisins, sugar, cinnamon and clove and uses wild yeast in a one-week long fermentation process. Now I have plenty of mildly alcoholic apple beer to share throughout the holiday season. 

How weird am I willing to be?

I went to a networking function run by the Hunterdon County Chamber of Commerce. I hadn't seen many of the attendees in quite some time. There was a nice buffet and an open bar.

Unfortunately, I hadn't thought ahead about what would be available to serve myself with: plastic cups and dishes. I had a travel mug and metal bowls in my car, but I felt really awkward about eating off of them in a public business setting. So I opted for a glass of wine in a plastic cup and a paper napkin. Then I ate only things I could pick up with my hands -- like shrimp, teriyaki meat on sticks, and skewered bacon and pineapple.

Am I really going to bring my own wine glass and plate to a networking function? What am I supposed to say to people when they ask my what I'm doing?

Actually drinking out of a plastic cup gave me an opportunity to tell people about my new hobby and blog. A few people asked me for the web address. Publicity, one - Fight against plastic, zero.

The worms are here!

When I got home today, a box was waiting for me by my door of live worms. I wasn't expecting them for several more days.

After I broke the news to my son about composting in our apartment, he said, "You mean we're going to have live worms in our apartment?"

"That's right," I said. His expression was priceless.

Still I had absolutely no idea what I was supposed to do with a composter (The Worm Factory 360) and a pound of worms, so I put the DVD that came with the composter into my computer and watched how to care for my new pets. Then I broke out the worm factory, created "bedding" for my worms, put some (new) lettuce into the composter, and deposited a pound of red wigglers into their new nest. They squirmed around and then quieted down.

I couldn't help but peak in on them a few times during the day. I put some veggie scraps in with the lettuce as I made my lunch. They wiggled a little and then disappeared into their nest. I looked again, but they were quiet. I looked again and a couple were sitting on the lettuce. Right, worms are not that interesting.

Still I felt like a farmer, making soil in my kitchen, slightly deviant, with my worms wriggling in the dark enclosed space.

Composting

On average about one-third of our trash is compostable. There are a number of things that you can do with biodegradable trash that doesn't involved sending it off to the landfill. Besides the obvious benefit of not filling up landfills as quickly, biodegrading materials in landfills create methane gas, which is a big contributor to our ozone damage. Landfills are the third largest source of human-made methane in America.

If you live in a house, you can fairly easily set up a compost bin. Rotating compost bins are available, but a garbage can on wheels with holes cut into the bottom also works. Make sure you park the can somewhere where worms can get into it, not on asphalt or cement. When I lived in a house, we used to alternate vegetable matter and gerbil bedding (from our gerbil), which helped the compost break down.

If you have access to a farm or friends with a compost bin, you can save your veggie discards in the freezer and then bring the frozen stuff over to them regularly. Obviously, ask permission first and find out if there's anything they don't want included in the compost. (Most composters don't want animal flesh mixed in.)

Now I live in an apartment, so composting is a little more complicated. I thought about asking my landlord if I could set up a compost bin somewhere on the property. He does have a small vegetable garden, but he hasn't been keeping it up. Besides the downside of composting in the Northeast is winter. We still eat vegetables, but who wants to go out and wrestle with frozen compost in the dead of winter?

Several indoor composters exist that create soil using worms or composting tea that can be used as a fertilizer. Unfortunately, all the ones I located online were made out of plastic, and I didn't want to buy any new plastic if I could help it. Luckily, I found a worm-based composter called The Worm Factory 360 used on Craigslist. The guy I bought it from was moving and said he hadn't used it much anyway. I asked if it smelled when it was in operation, and he said they had kept it outside and not used it much. Now the proud owner of a used Worm Factory 360, I guess I'll find out.

First Grocery (foraging) Trip

Within 15 minutes drive I was able to get a week (or so)'s worth of groceries and drop off recyclables to boot. It did take some time though.

First I dropped dry cleaning plastic and hangers off at Tirpok Dry Cleaners in Flemington. Then I took batteries and used printer cartridges to Staples. I drove past the county recycling facility to drop off my old milk cartons, but it was Electronics Recycling Day and there were too many people waiting in line.

I went to Basil Bandwagon, the local natural food store, and shopped out of the bulk bins with plastic bags that I had brought with me (previously used). I bought some produce -- potatoes, mushrooms, garlic, ginger, lettuce, and broccoli. Most of the fruits and veggies had labels on each one so I passed on everything else, but I did take a melon with a label. I bought a few glass jars, even a couple that had plastic seals over the metal lids.

I was particularly delighted to find a glass jar with a metal lid of tahini. The only tahini I'd ever found before was in a metal container with a plastic lid. I'd scored garbanzo beans out of the bulk bins and now I could make hummus, which is definitely worth the work.

Later my boyfriend and I made the rounds of the Stockton Market, an indoor "farmers" market, that was much more gourmet than I usually do. More produce went into my basket -- apples and red chard, no labels, one rubber band.. A Mexican restaurant was selling homemade tortilla chips in a gallon-size Ziploc bag, which I decided I could reuse and therefore live with. I also bought some cheese and fish, wrapped in paper, but costing more money than I could justify spending on a regular basis.

Certainly I got less plastic packaging than I would normally have at the grocery store. I'm thoroughly enjoying researching and exploring this new hobby, because I recognize that at least for now, that's what it is.

OMG - plastic is everywhere!

When I first started thinking about plastic, I thought I would try to cut down on the amount of plastic packaging when I purchase food at the grocery store. I've just spent the last three weeks watching videos and reading news stories about plastic, recycling, landfills and zero-waste lifestyles. I feel like I've had an awakening that I can never go back to sleep from.

Now instead of cutting down on plastic at the grocery store, I'm contemplating composting in my apartment's kitchen, researching buying wine in refillable 750 ml bottles, and giving serious thought to whether I can still ethically wear contact lenses. (Daily I use four different contact solutions, all sold in plastic containers.)

My sweet boyfriend says, "Why don't you pick one item to eliminate plastic from and see what happens, one at a time." He's right, of course, but after watching all those videos, Every time I look at plastic, I can't help seeing dead marine animals with the plastic I'm purchasing in their bellies and mountains of plastic waste in India and China shipped from the United States to be "recycled".

Today at a diner with a friend, I took my meal home in the tin bottom of a take out container and asked the waitress not to bring the plastic top. I also gave her back the unused drinking straws. I felt like I should tip her more because I was asking for more, even though not taking plastic saves the restaurant some money. I immediately went home and put metal bowls in my car for future takeout dilemmas.

I'm not usually so black and white about anything. Indeed, my favorite color is gray, and I tend to make decisions on a much more fluid basis than most people, especially most other professional organizers. Beth Terry calls plastic an addiction -- I feel a little like I have to go cold turkey, or it will insidiously snake its way through my life.

Pickling

Recently I bought Kimchi from a farm stand and it was terrible, drowned in vinegar. I knew I could do better.

A few years ago my family had purchased a share at a local organic farm. We had been inundated by vegetables, way more than we could eat. I spent the summer pickling, canning, flash freezing and giving away whatever we couldn't eat. I was spending about 10 hours a week cooking and preserving my vegetables. After that I decided I didn't want a part-time job as a chef on top of my full-time business, so we stopped participating in the farm share.

In my forays into pickling, I had tried to make Kimchi with some of the vast quantities of cabbage the farm share provided. I dug through my recipes and found the old Kimchi recipe that I'd used back them, discovering that I hadn't bothered to write down any of the proportions. I pulled out my crock pot, cut up the vegetables on my list, added water and salt and covered them with a weighted plate for two days.

It made six jars of kimchi, which I tucked into the back of my tiny apartment refrigerator. Not ready to put them through the canning process to seal them and keep them in my pantry.

Here's what I put in the kimchee:
3/4 of a head of Napa cabbage
3 1/2 Carrots
1 Red pepper
3 Jalepeños

2 Leeks
6 Scallions
6 Raddishes (I'd use daikon next time because the red leached out of the red raddishes and turned the water pink)
3 cloves of Garlic
1" of Ginger
1/2 c Sea Salt
Filtered Water to cover

Reuse

I've always been a big fan of buying used items. My mother used to shop for my clothes at a secondhand clothing store, which still exists 30 years later. It was, therefore, natural for me to buy my own child's clothing secondhand, especially when he was a toddler, and we were on WIC (read: government cheese). Throughout the years I've prided myself on how little I've had to spend on our clothing, getting most of it secondhand.

When I woke up this morning it occurred to me that I've never bought undergarments, which definitely run high on the plastic content, secondhand. Not sure how that's going to be managed.

I stopped buying new books a few years ago, based on owning too many already and having run out of bookshelf space, and take most of what I want to read out of the library. What I can't find locally, I request through interlibrary loan (ILL), which can search for and get books anywhere in the country. 

Recently I purchased a bicycle for my son on Craigslist. I admit that's taking a chance and required some research on different types of bicycles. Then I took the bike, which I had to drive an hour and a half to pick up and cost $70 (not including gas), to a bike repair shop. I spent another $208 at the repair shop to get the bike into peak riding condition. The guy who owned the shop assured me I still got a deal. On eBay similar bikes were selling for $300, so 7% savings. Not a huge deal, but no new energy consumed to make a new bike.

The idea about plastic

I'm not exactly sure what started my current obsession with getting plastic out of my life. I had read some articles about how bad plastic and even recycling plastic are for the environment. I'd been thinking about how to cut down on the plastic packaging that inevitably comes into my house through grocery store and other purchases. I've been noticing plastic packaging and talking about it all summer.

While researching plastic and recycling, with the thought of posting some videos in the venue of my Rotary eClub, I realized that this whole plastic thing goes much deeper than I initially thought. And also that although there are plenty of articles saying what I want to convey, for the life of me, I cannot find any videos to re-post extolling the vices of plastic recycling.

I was planning a series of videos on Refuse, Reduce, Reuse, Recycle to share with my Rotary club. After hours of pouring over videos on YouTube, I still couldn't find the recycling propaganda that I was looking for. What I did find, though, was that I'm not alone in my distaste for plastic. I started looking at other people's blogs, including Beth Terry's Fake Plastic Fish, now called My Plastic Free Life, which lead me to her book Plastic Free: How I Kicked the Plastic Habit and How You Can Too. Delightedly, I found two copies at the local library and borrowed one, which ironically was covered with a plastic cover by the helpful library acquisitions department.

So I look forward to reading this pro-environment bible as I begin my own journey toward finding enjoyable ways to kick plastic to the curb. (But not literally, because then it might end up as part of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.)