Here’s What’s Happening

It’s snowing big fat frosty flakes here in Madison, Wisconsin today, so naturally I’ve been planning my vegetable garden. It’s fun to think about all the delicious foods I could plant in our lovely new yard, and also kind of fun to take the list of a zillion items and pare it down to just two or three favorites and hope for a more reasonable first foray into the botanical arts. I’m also very much looking forward to discovering what might already be alive in our garden, since we took possession of the house after most everything had died back. I think we might have some rhubarb (woot!) and I know I spotted peonies, but have no idea what to expect out of the rest of the yard. I saw some mysterious crowns whilst poking around with a shovel last November, so one never knows–there might even be asparagus. Dare to dream.

The problem is, I think the Squirrels are already on to me. They’ve been congregating in clumps in exactly the spot where I want to put my tomatoes, and I sometimes see them whispering to each other and rubbing their tiny Squirrel hands together and then pointing at the house. And they are fat, too, despite it being the deepest depths of winter. Fat, I am 100% sure, on CROCUS BULBS.

But the crocus bulbs won’t last forever. I’m pretty sure that they have a tiny calendar hidden away somewhere and they’re marking off the days until tomato season with a big red X. I just hope to heaven that they aren’t reading this blog.

Now, some of you might say to yourself, Don’t worry, Kelly, Squirrels don’t eat tomatoes. BUT YOU WOULD BE WRONG. Already my neighbors on both sides have reported tomato theft by my rodent nemises last summer. There are witnesses, people. When I asked one friend from a nearby neighborhood if she had any Squirrel issues in her little veggie garden, she said, “oh yeah. They’ll take your tomatoes if you aren’t careful.” When I asked her what she did to be careful, she told me, “sick the dog on them, at least twice a day.”

Suddenly I want a dog.

Here is the thing. I have to grow tomatoes. The whole point (okay, not the whole point) of buying a house was basically to get a yard. And the whole point of getting a yard was to get tomatoes, which would cost four gazillion dollars to buy at the market if you’re looking for enough to can, say, a winter’s worth of salsa, sauce, and ketchup, which I am hoping to do. (What, I ask you, is the point of taking out a 30-year mortgage if I can’t save money on pantry items?) So the Squirrels must be defeated. But how?

Here is what my AMERICA’S GARDEN BOOK* (first printing: 1939) says about the little bastards:

“Squirrel:  Climbing rodent; active all year harvesting and digging.  Plants affected:  Apples, pears, peaches, nuts, sycamore, beech, corn, various bulbs, lawns.  (Hey editors, you forgot TOMATOES.)”

And then here is my favorite part:  “Controls:  Raptors, cats.”

Holy Jeebus.  Raptors.  Of course!  Why didn’t I think of that!?  I need a raptor!  Or a pair of raptors!  Does anyone know a reputable raptor dealer?

Call me a barbarian, but nothing makes me happier than imagining one of the same squirrels that made off with my 90 crocus bulbs skulking up to a nice juicy red-ripe tomato only to be suddenly picked up and carried away by a majestic falcon.  It just brings a smile to my face.

Alas, I have googled “Mail-order raptor delivery service” and come up empty, forcing me to read deeper into my AMERICA’S GARDEN BOOK (which tells me on the cover it’s the only book I’ll ever need to grow my garden, so there’s no point in researching elsewhere).  And guess what else they recommend for controlling your squirrel problem:  Shooting.  Forget repellents or fencing or high-pitched noises, AMERICA’S GARDEN BOOK tells me to go for raptors and pistols at dawn.

Clearly this is my kind of garden book.  And we are about to become those kinds of neighbors.  Squirrels, if you are reading this, it’s ON.

ETA:  oops, I forgot to mention that AMERICA’S GARDEN BOOK is a Macmillian title.  So, you can’t buy it from grouchy spoilsports Amazon who I used to link everything to out of laziness.  I’ll try to get more creative with my book links in the future.

I just (a week ago) got the newest book from those crazy kids behind ARTISAN BREAD IN 5 MINUTES A DAY. It’s called HEALTHY BREAD IN FIVE MINUTES etc. and it’s the same idea as the first book, which I celebrated here and here (and in my belly), only this time it’s with all whole wheat flour.

The results are simply delicious. I mixed up a batch in 6 minutes, on Monday, when I was sick (I washed my hands, for pete’s sake!) because I was low on bread but happened to have some vital wheat gluten on hand, you know that goes, and then fixed up a one pound free-form loaf in the time it took me to toast the last piece of storebought bread in our pantry on Tuesday. Let’s call that 4 minutes. It took the oven 20 minutes to heat up, and then another 30 to bake the bread.

(Here’s the bread-sludge right after its initial rise).

That leaves me with approximately 3 more pounds of dough hanging out in the fridge waiting for me to get hungry.

Now, being a cheapskate of the first order, this also leaves me with a question. Is baking bread at home, with this ingeniously simple system, cheaper than buying it at the store? Or just healthier and more delicious?

There is only one way to find out: STINGY NINJA STYLE. (Props here go to Amy Dacyczyn, brilliant mind behind the Tightwad Gazette for being the original Ninja of Savings and showing me how to do this sort of math when I was but a Frugal Grasshopper.  Amy, if you are out there, please go on Twitter, where your powers would be ten-fold.)

First we have to decide what a comparable loaf of bakery bread costs. What’s comparable? A fancy, cracklin’ crusty, soft-textured, scrumptious one-pound loaf of whole-wheat bread with no funny business on the ingredients list. For the sake of argument, we’ll say it costs $3.50 around here and never goes on sale, which it doesn’t. We’ll call that Bread A (for Aren’t you fancy?).

Also, since Woodmans sells a small store-brand wheat /white loaf with no funny bidness in it at the low low price of $1.99, and that’s probably what I would buy if I weren’t making bread myself, we’ll throw that into the mix. We’ll call that Bread R (for Real world).

Now then, how much does a loaf of Bread H (for Homemade, or Holla!) cost?

That’s where the maths get a little more complicated.

First we have to make a few assumptions:

• Assumption one: vital wheat gluten rarely goes on sale.
• Assumption two: cheapskates buy our yeast in jars, not packets.
• Assumption three: that $3.50 bakery loaf of Bread A is not made with organic flour, either.  I’ll do the math on organics another day.
• Assumption four: four cups of water will count as virtually free unless we actually open a bakery.
• Assumption five and six: you already have a bread knife, and you actually like bread, and thusly will eat it all.

Okay, are we all assumed?

Now then.

Let’s say we buy whole wheat flour, on sale, at $2.48 for a 5 pound bag.

A ten oz box of vital wheat gluten is $3.89 at the local co-op (though they also sell it in bulk, but I can’t remember for how much right now).

A 4 oz jar of active dry yeast is $6.95, full price, but they often have coupons and sales bringing it down to what I paid: $3.95.

White unbleached flour (which you need a smidge of) can be nabbed on sale for 98c for 5 lbs.

The salt is 50c for a drum. Kosher is more expensive, and called for in the recipe. But I use table salt for this. See also: cheapskatery.

Now, using my friend and yours, Excel, I’ve calculated the price per oz of each item and the number of ounces needed for the four pound batch. That involved a lot of maths and some unit conversions.  Stand back and look on in awe:

Now, I’ve left out the oz of each item required by the recipe to keep from giving away what the authors of this book are trying to sell, but that’s what would normally go in column E.  And then column F would be the cost of each ingredient actually used in the recipe (column E times price per oz).  And the total of column F would be…

$1.986

Gasp! My FOUR LOAVES of homemade whole wheat bread sets me back $1.986. That’s just under fitty cents per loaf. Bargain, right?

Well, yes. But we also have to factor in a few other things. First, the oven.

It ain’t as precise as you would think to figure out how much it costs to run your oven for 50 minutes. According to this man and his amazing hair, running our electric stove at 350’ for an hour costs about a quarter. (You are supposed to bake the bread in a hotter oven, but for some reason, our oven just doesn’t seem to want to get much hotter than 400, and even this takes a good half hour, so we’ll say 350 over the full hour seems close enough.) But, being me, I had to check with my own price per kWh, which is found on my incredibly complex MG&E bill just under the formula for calculating the weight of dark matter. And guess what! In December, 2 kWh, or an hour’s worth of bread bakery, cost me only 19c. NINETEEN CENTS!

So now we have a total of 69c a loaf. Still a bargain, one would say. But just how much of a bargain?

Well. Comparing Bread H at 69c to Bread R at $1.99, we’re looking at a buck thirty saved per loaf, $5.20 saved per four pound batch. Labor-wise, I’ll spend six minutes to make the dough, 4 minutes to ready it for the oven, and another minute taking it out of the oven, tapping on it a little, and inhaling deeply of the aroma. So we’ll say, for the four loaves, 26 minutes total. Now, if I save $5.20 by spending 26 minutes making bread, that means I’m saving (paying myself) exactly 12 bucks an hour for my bread baking efforts! Not too shabby for something as pleasant as bread bakery.

But, just for fun, let’s not stop there. What about if I were comparing my homemade bread to a bread equal in quality (Bread A), and not just the bread I would buy if I weren’t making my own bread (Bread R). What would I be “paying myself” then?

Hum to yourself for a moment. Lessie, $3.50 minus $.69 is $2.81 per loaf times four loaves is $11.24 per batch divided by 26 minutes times 60 minutes for an hourly wage of…

$26 bucks!  Tax free!

Whew. Tomorrow, join us while I calculate the cost of the running shoes I’m going to need to replace twice as frequently to make up for the vast amount of homemade bread I am capable of eating.

Oh right, in San Francisco.  What a grand town, and what a brilliant idea of my husband’s to have family nearby providing a lovely reason to visit at the drop of the hat.  Good work, Husband!

You can read the details of the trip here, though he leaves out some of the best bits, like the coffee we had at Blue Bottle–lord almighty that was good–and the glory of cable cars.  Cable cars are my new favorite mode of transportation, usurping the long-standing kayak and close runner-up ski lift.  (Now I am imagining some sort of triathlon involving all three items, though, and thinking that it sounds pretty awesome.)  I love, love, love that you can be a hop-on with cable cars.  Whilst in NYC, I used to spend a lot of time (A LOT) thinking about how great it would be to be Spiderman, not because of the climbing buildings or saving people nonsense, but because if you were in a local subway station, waiting for the train to come, and an express came whizzing by in the middle track, you could just grab onto the express train with your web and shloop, you’re on your merry way.

I think the reason I have yet to be granted spider-style powers, despite all the time I spent around the spiders at AMNH chewing Uranium-Pop and standing in radioactive puddles, is because of ambitions like these.

Anyway, San Francisco.  Cable cars.  On one of our rides, (yes, I required multiple cable car rides) the grip needed to be swapped out, and we got to see a working grip get inserted in the middle of our descent down Washington.  The grip is, per a sign I read somewhere, “basically a 300 pound pair of pliers” that fits into that slat in the ground and grabs onto the cable for dear life, except when it’s supposed to let go, and I just find it so fascinating that all day long, that cable is just going on its merry way under the street, not caring atall if a car is latched onto it or not.  I like the way you can hear it whooshing underground when there are no cars around.  It makes one want to put on  roller skates, fashion a sort of mini-grip out of a vice, two crowbars and some duct tape, and go on a wild ride.  One knows one shouldn’t actually do that, but one could.

One other newsworthy item in our trip that Husband failed to mention: on our descent into SFO, our plane got hit by lightning.  Zot!  (Again, no super powers seem to have resulted.)  Apparently this happens from time to time.  It was a first for me, and quite exciting.

I was also struck by lightning when I tasted my carne asada nachos in the Mission district but that was more of a metaphorical lightning strike.  Which is the kind I prefer, frankly.

These were the best nachos I have ever had, and get this:  they were 100% Velveeta Free.  I didn’t think it could be done, but they did it.  Oh man, just looking at that picture makes me wistful.  We had such times together, me and the nachos.  I miss you, nachos.  I would fly through lightning for you.

Next time you see me I’ll have eaten Rice-a-Roni on a cable car and escaped Alcatraz.

To keep you from missing me too terribly much while I am gone, I offer up a delightful piece of reading recommended to me by Anna and well worth cozing up to if you have ever read, written, or killed someone:  THE WRITING CLASS by Jincy Willett.  I would never have found this book by myself–I like my mysteries forced upon me, generally–but when I asked Anna to suggest a genuinely funny novel written by a woman (not a book that has a pink cover to imply funniness, or a book that has people falling down a lot, or a funny memoir, all of which I’ve read in droves) she said the words Jincy Willett so many times I started to wonder how exactly one spells “Jincy.”  This lead to the actual reading of the book, which had me chortling out loud about twice per page (except during the murderer’s pov parts, which were, purposefully, as mustache-twisty as Jafar on a railway bridge) and saying, Homer Simpson style, “It’s funny because it’s true” every time I attempted to describe the action aloud to my hapless husband.

Here’s my blurb for the book (you’ll see why this is appropriate… when you READ THE DARN THING):

“If you like your mysteries truly mysterious, and your heroines truly insightful, and you enjoy making fun of

a) Californians

b) Writers

c) Bliaries

d) The Publishing Industry Such As It Is

Then you will enjoy THE WRITING CLASS by Jincy Willett.”

Prepare yourself.

Ready?

Have you ever seen so much romance in your life?  I mean, really?  Answer: NO.  Not possible.  I had to get a special romance license just to publish this pic.  It wasn’t easy.  The lines at the Department of Romance this time of year are unreal.

Congratulations to Jennifer and Mo!

Mostly I am okay with being inspired in my day to day life, but there are some “inspirational” messages that make me want to do a worse job and possibly take a nap.  To wit, spotted in my place o’ bidness recently:

“Excellence is a choice.”

I have seen this one everywhere lately.  Written, no doubt, by people who have already decided they are excellent.  Hey, excellent people: What are you trying to do, make everyone else feel wildly inadequate, and then also guilty for choosing inadequacy?  Quit it.  And also, is it even true?  NO.  It is not true.  No matter how excellent I chose to be at football, I will not be excellent at it.  See also, basketball, volleyball, other things with “ball” in the name.

Let us test this theory out. I’m choosing right now.  Choosing so hard.  CHOOOOSE.  Nope.  Still not excellent.  (Though I am excellent at Pick Six.  Hello, final score of 70.  That’s a solid pass, where I come from.)

Phrases I would prefer:  “Excellence is hard work.”  Or, “Excellence is a job.”  or “Excellence is fine if that’s what you’re into.”

One more thing while I’m telling you kids to get off my lawn.  Bakes.  Can we just put an end to calling casseroles “bakes” right now please?  It’s an understandable mistake, but if you are making a tuna and cheese casserole, or hot dish, or gratin, or pie, don’t think that calling it a “tuna bake” will fool anyone into believing it’s anything other than the congeally cheesy comfort-goo that it is.  Bake = what you do to a casserole.  Baked = a good reason to use “excellent” in casual conversation.  Bake ≠ dish full of food.

Okay, I’m going to go take a nap now.   Seriously, get off my lawn.

Aerogarden Saturday:

Aerogarden today:

Adorable Chicagoers, who may or may not be wearing pants:

…to tell you about our super fun trip to Chicago last weekend, where we celebrated our dear friend Bob’s 25ish birthday and also celebrated the cake-baking skills of his lovely wife Kelly, to whom we are so glad Bob introduced us.

Highlights:

-Helping Bob solve physics. (what a relief to have that done, right?)

-Buying a bench scraper (didn’t know I needed one, but have used it thrice in the last two days.  And I don’t even have a bench!)

-Seeing Kelly’s galley in real life.  This book is lovely and sumptuous and is available now on Amazon (you’ll want to preorder).

-Being an innocent bystander on the L during No Pants Day. For reals people.  It was five degrees outside.  Those were some ugly pale goosebumpy pantsless legs we saw.  I’m no lover of pants, don’t get me wrong, and this would probably be fun in many of the locations where it is held.  But this is Chicago.  The “Windy City”.  The L is short for “elevated” as in “above ground.”  Put your damn pants back on before your no-health-insurance-having hipster tushies end up in my emergency room.

-Coming home and getting that “ooh, we’re home” feeling, instead of that “where are we again?” feeling, for the first time so far in our new house.  And seeing that luminescent glow that is the Aerogarden, beaming at us through the windows like a beacon, welcoming us home.

The other Kelly recently turned me on to a blog called YoungHouseLove, which is well-written and thought-out and all the other things this blog ain’t, (fine, I guess, if you’re into that sort of thing) and since then I’ve spent approximately seventy-five hours per day reading their archives and thinking about all the ways I am going to a) hang curtains, b) buy furniture, c) regrout the bathroom SO HARD.  Since buying a $35 dollar carpet for the rumpus room sent me into paroxysms of indecision, I’m pretty sure the timeline on said redecorating projects will be long, but it has to be done, right?  And I’m a smart girl, who knows, or at least as a vague idea of, how to swing a hammer.   Nothing’s stopping me from pimping this house out into a palace worthy of Cribs, or at least Cribs Special Pressboard Furniture Edition.

The trouble is, I’m sort of visually challenged.  I’ve never really gotten into, say, photography or painting, and when I look at some of the outfits I’ve worn in my life I don’t exactly trust myself to make decisions about anything so permanent as wall color or fabric choice.  If I had, you know, a “job” maybe I’d spend some of those ill-gotten earnings on hiring a professional to come tell me what to do, but where’s the fun in that?  No, I’m just going to throw myself into this thing called “decorating” and hope for the best.  After all, how bad can a paint color be, if they’re selling it at a real store with hopes of real actual customers buying it?

Oh, right.  Ruh roh.

Lucky for me, there is some streak of artishness running through my family that I can capitalize on.  My aunt, for example, is a sublime nature photographer.  She contributed, among other things, the artwork we used to mark each table at our wedding.  (Yes, people were seated at the “toad” table and the “copulating turtles” table and even the “not sure what kind of bird this actually is” table.)  My mom, in her own artish right, framed said art, backing each photo with a quote about love or marriage from our favorite nerdy sources so that each frame was beautiful on both sides, making them affordable if time-intensive table decor.

We couldn’t just waste all that time and talent after the wedding, now, could we?

Of course not!  So, with no further ado, I proudly present Tightwad Home Improvement Project (THIP) Number 1, of hopefully many.  The budget on the art installation was $11, all spent on 3M velcro strips (more than nails but utterly commitment-free on our plaster walls).  I also used a level and my digital camera for planning purposes.  Other materials include a sense of patience and a damp cloth.  I love the final result:

It’s hard, in this snapshot, to see each individual photo, but then, that gives you yet another reason to come visit and see them all in real life.