• made my own glass cleaner and used it to clean mirrors
• spent a few hours planning the great declutter project of 2011
• clean my bathrooms
• make soup from leftover beef bones
• make bread (mmmm warm bread)
• vacuum up cobwebs and dust elephants

Little House in the Suburbs has lovely simple recipes for cleaning products in her third post in her Home Management Notebook series. I can vouch that the glass cleaner works great, even when you scent it with a few drops of lavender essential oil. I’m going to try all the other Homemade Cleaning Solutions on her list as well. I can’t make my husband stop buying expensive brand name cleaners, but since I’m normally the only one doing any cleaning, I can just keep saying “nope honey, we haven’t run out of it yet, no need to buy more.” I’ve reached the end of 2010 more committed than ever to dropping out of the market for as many products as possible.

My latest bout of anti-consumerism was brought on by the great o.b. tampon debacle, which you can search on your own or wait for the full-blown post I will eventually write about it. You can also choose not to hear about it at all, filing it under the TMI category.

Anyway, that’s my sharing for the day. I find when I’m doing other productive things, sharing feels productive too.

My favorite thing about buying locally grown produce is that it forces me to be creative in order to use whatever happens to be fresh. I go shopping with a general plan, but instead of knowing I need potatoes, I might know I need “some starchy vegetable” and I get my choice of all kinds of great stuff, but I could end up with jicama or turnips instead of potatoes. That means I have to be flexible and let the food inspire me. In turn that makes me feel very alive, instead of like a cooking robot sticking grimly to the shopping list and the menu plan.

So, the other night at the market there was this cutie little mix of Heirloom tomatoes, cherry size, that came in four colors. When I was washing them at home, I noticed I’d squashed one in my grocery bag, so of course I ate it on the spot. Oh! My! Goodness! It was super delicious, almost like a summer tomato, only less acidic, with a mellow sweet tang. I knew some of these babies would have to be lunch the next day.

In the cabinet I had half a pound of orzo pasta and in the fridge some leftover feta cheese. I remembered a Food Network recipe for Orzo with Feta and Tomatoes and decided to make it. It called for pasta, feta cheese, grape tomatoes and fresh parsley. Had all that stuff. But I also had a couple roasted red peppers left over from when I wrapped them around goat cheese last week, and half a handful of leftover chopped scallions I’d used for a garnish on some Thai noodles. Meanwhile, I had bought fresh dill at the market, and I love, love, love tomatoes with dill. While the pasta boiled, I did the minimal prep work of halving the tomatoes, chopping fresh parsley and dill, and cutting the peppers into bite-sized pieces.

So the improvised recipe turned out to be:

• half a pound of orzo pasta
• a handful of feta cheese crumbles
• fresh parsley
• fresh dill
• half a pint of mixed cherry tomatoes, halved
• two roasted red peppers, chopped
• half a handful of chopped chives
• 1 tbsp. butter
• 1 tbsp. olive oil

After draining the pasta, I mixed in the butter and oil and feta, then dropped in everything else and tossed it a bit. It was so good I completely forgot about fresh ground pepper or salt.

This will serve 2-3 people as a meal, or four people as a side dish.

Oh, and you should be amused. Jeffery and I have the same apron, and we both posted cooking episodes for NaVloPoMo Day 11.

Potato Soup

very slightly adapted from The Vegetarian Epicure by Anna Thomas

Ingredients

• 5 large russet potatoes, peeled and diced
• 3 – 4 leeks, finely chopped
• 4 cups water
• 1.5 cups milk or cream
• 2 Tbs dill weed
• 1 tsp salt
• fresh-ground pepper
• 2 – 3 Tbs sour cream
• butter
• garnish options: chopped chives, parsley, fresh dill, basil

Instructions

Simmer potatoes and leeks in salted water about 30 minutes, until they’re tender. Add milk (or cream) and dill. It will be salty enough, but add pepper to taste. Simmer 15 to 20 minutes until you reach your preferred consistency and the potatoes are falling apart a little.

Now stir in a few tablespoons of sour cream and a tablespoon or so of butter. Let that heat through, and serve. Garnish with chopped chives or whatever fresh herb seems yummiest to you.

Makes 4 – 6 servings (4 in my house).

Potato Peel Broth aka Garbage Soup

Ingredients

• peels from 5 – 7 large, healthy potatoes
• 1 large onion
• 2 carrots
• 1 small stalk of celery
• sprig of parsley (optional)
• clove of garlic (optional)
• salt and pepper to taste

Instructions

Quarter the onion. Cut the carrots and celery into large pieces. Put the potato peels and veggies in a big pot with 1.5 quarts of water. Add parsley and/or garlic cloves if you want them. You can add any other vegetable bits you want to pull nutrients from before they hit your compost heap. Squash, green bean ends, carrot tops, broccoli leaves, the tough outer skin from beets, anything.

Keep adding water as it evaporates so everything stays covered. Simmer this concoction over low heat for at least 1.5 hours, until everything is very soft. At that point, you can go one of two ways:

1. For a clear broth, just drain off the liquid and correct the seasoning.
2. If you want a thin puree-like consistency, remove the celery and garlic and put the rest through a sieve or food mill.

Your broth will be light brown in color, fragrant and delicious. It’s a great starter for almost any soup. Store it in the fridge until you’re ready to use it, but try to use it within 5 – 7 days.

Makes about 6 cups.

Almost every mayonnaise on the market is encased in plastic, and I’m sick of it. My husband is the type of person who keeps a spare of everything. We always have one jar of mayo in the fridge, and one in the pantry. Over the last year we have watched our choices of brand diminish as more and more of them switch to plastic jars.

We bought some mayonnaise in a plastic jar exactly once, when we had no other choice in the grocery store. By the time it went from our pantry to the fridge, three weeks tops, it had gone bad. It smelled, well, wrong, and we dared not eat it. Now, the only place I can get mayonnaise in glass jars is the local organic or health foods stores, where it is approximately twice the cost of regular grocery stores, at least here in my neighborhood.

Glass is better for two huge reasons. First, it isn’t permeable like plastic, and your mayo won’t go bad, at least not in the next several years. Second, you can reuse the glass jar for a long time, and then you can readily recycle it. (Phoenix only recycles #1 and #2 plastics, and not all plastic food containers are accepted.)

So one of my resolutions this year is to drop out of the mayo market. I am no longer a mayonnaise consumer. I am a mayonnaise creator.

Oh, and in keeping with another new year’s resolution, this video is compressed using the h.264 codec using the multi-pass setting, as per Freevlog‘s latest screencast. It’s still iPod compatible, and I can do it from my MacBook Pro.

Happy New Year, everyone!