Food Storage, Rice and Beans

A few weeks ago I came across this blog called Earthineer. It is pretty neat in general but I found this article called "Long term food storage, done cheaply" about storing food long term, on the cheap. They just use 2 liter bottles and put rice and beans in them with bay leaves to kill any bugs or larvae that might be in the rice. It keeps for years and stacks nicely in little crannies. How ingenious. Right now I have 20 lbs of rice taking up room in my freezer.

Did you know that some rice comes complete with bug larvae? That is why when you leave it in a warm (sealed) container in the cupboard you still get bugs in it. Personally, I don't care about the bugs as long as they aren't alive destroying my pantry. So I freeze them and kill them. Problem is that now I am out of freezer space. So I am now going to try this bottle storage trick. We don't drink much pop out of 2 liter bottles but I do save all of our old liquor bottles. Something about the glass feels classy, even though its not.

So here I go. Being all frugal and stuff. I will update later when I find out how well it works. Until then, Live and Love.

Cucumbers with Hummus

One of my main goals during this pregnancy is to eat and keep healthy. This means remembering to walk and do my squats. I had icky 'morning sickness' my first trimester, dropping 15 pounds in about 4 weeks. Also, at the moment I am craving lots of healthy foods such as celery with ranch, oranges, and cucumber. So I need to remember to try adding lots of protein to my veggies. Here is my lastest protein packed concoction.

Cucumbers with Hummus.
For the hummus I take and rehydrate dried chickpeas (cheaper than buying them in a can), blend them in the blender adding lemon juice, olive oil, and chickpea juice all to taste plus a dash of salt. That is it. I don't add the tahini because it is something that I don't think I have ever had in my household. I know the tahini makes it just that much more yummier but unless I specifically put it  on my grocery list, it never ends up in my hummus.
I just put the hummus on my cucumbers and made it pretty with Paprika. Simple, to the point and delicious.

Live and Love

Little Baby Hat and a New Afghan

I guess I skipped the month of September, and almost the entire month of October. I haven't really been working on much besides Christmas presents though. Those always get posted after Christmas anyways.

But there is nothing like good news to make me want to post! Mr. Sir and I are expecting a baby! It is due around April 1st. I also joined a small community sewing group. Most people in there don't know how to sew at all so it is just basic sewing projects but still a lot of fun. So I sew with them along with my County Quilt Guild.

For the last community sewing meeting the theme was baby hats. So of course I jumped right on board to make my little baby a hat. No we don't know the sex of the baby. I just chose blue because it was on hand. If we happen to have a little girl, I will either hold on to it or give it as a gift to some adorable little baby boys I know.

 Then Mr. Sir and I went to the thrift store in search of a new nice hoodie for him to wear and ran across a couple of baby afghans. This green one below is really soft, made with high quality yarn and is a decent size. We got it for 2.50. I think about how much work went into making it and love it all over again. This was our official first purchase for baby. I was gonna try staying away from green because we are finding out the sex when it is born but I couldn't pass up the softness.

Happy Halloween!
Live and Love

Dilly Beans

I realized a couple of days ago that I haven't posted in almost a month! It has been quite crazy around here. I was trying to think of things that I have accomplished to post about, but it has been so busy that I haven't gotten much done around here.

So yesterday I took some green beans from our garden and made dilly beans. I love dilly beans with a passion, especially my mom and dad's dilly beans. I used a different recipe, I used the one from the Ball Blue Book Guide to Preserving.

We aren't quite sure how they will turn out though, first of all the type of green beans we planted this year aren't very tasty. We are hoping that the taste improves with the pickling. Second, we didn't have any garlic cloves so we used minced garlic. Third, we also didn't have any dill seed heads so we used dried dill seed. Finally, our jars were just a little too empty so we filled the space with some onion.

So, hopefully they turn out okay. If they aren't any good then we aren't out too many ingredients.
Live and Love