A Blissful, Simple Life

Every morning, I assemble two lunches. The lunch sack containing a sandwich and chips isn't glamorous, but it saves my husband and I $3,000 a year. (Two $6 fast-food lunches, 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year)

In the evening, we snuggle in and watch a TV episode on DVD, or show on Hulu. We can't join the conversation about the latest Office or American Idol, but for over $700 a year for the basic cable channels, I'm OK with being out of the loop.

The cars we drive may have around 100,000 miles on them, but they are paid for. No debt on the cars, no debt on the credit cards, no debt on the school loans- interest on what we owe works against us, and I avoid it like the plague.

In our home, only our desk and our nightstands were bought new- every other piece of furniture was bought second-hand, handed down to us, or hand-made. Our guests are none the wiser.

On the weekends, a home improvement project often consumes our time- whether it's painting or re-flooring or siding or something else on a huge list. We could hire out the work, but my husband enjoys working with his hands and taking care of our home (and he does a great job!).

Rather than vacationing during the summer, we're busy in our yard. The backyard garden provides produce that continues to feed us throughout the year. Green beans, applesauce, herbs, potatoes, pears, peaches, pickles- all these things I haven't had to buy since they were last in season, and probably won't have to for a while.

Why live like this? If I can afford to buy a new car or furniture or processed food, why not go the easier route? Because I believe in living mindfully- Mindful of what we consume. Mindful of being a good steward of what we have. Mindful of being in debt to no one. Mindful of our impact on the earth.

Thanks to this mindfulness, and living below our means, we can ride out the ups and downs of life. When a refrigerator started leaking, we were able to save up and get a new one fairly quickly. When a car was caught in a bad hail storm beyond repair, we were able to incur no debt to replace it. A pipe burst in our home, and the panic was only due to the water pouring out of the hole in the wall, not how we were going to afford a repair. This year, we were able to give more than ever to those less fortunate than ourselves, and that was thrilling. Life is good. Blissful, even.

This is my entry into Inexpensively.com's contest for a Blissdom '10 ticket. I'd love it if you popped over there between the 14th and 20th and gave me a vote. Also, Heather's site is a huge help while working to live this blissful, simple life. Go check it out.

The downside to the industrial food system

As a kid, Anamaniacs was probably my favorite cartoon. The songs on their show were clever, catchy, and somewhat educational. The one that sticks in my memory is the Countries of the World song, during a phase where I was into the school's Geography Bee and even had a world map as a shower curtain. Yeah, I was a dork. Still am.

Anyway, this is a song I didn't remember but came across today:


Did you catch what they said at the beginning? There were a couple interesting phrases: "Modern food technology has the answer!" and "We got coupons!".

"Modern food technology has the answer!"
We'd like to think that the food we eat is wholesome, natural and straight from the farm or some warm, homey kitchen. As it is, much of what is sold in the grocery store is more aptly described as "modern technology" than as "food"! The barely-pronounceable chemicals listed in the song are very real- and in most everything we eat when we buy packaged or processed food.

"We got coupons!"
There are two sides to this. Many national food brands put coupons in the paper each week- and most the time, these coupons are for highly processed "food products" that are convenient, but not wholesome. This is not always the case. Coupons for dairy and produce products are out there. Organics companies are starting to offer coupons, too. The two lessons from this are:

• Not all coupons are for bad stuff
• Just because you have a coupon for something doesn't mean you should buy it.

Thinking about our food choices matters. Filling our bodies with whole foods rather than processed "modern food technology" will not only save the land from getting doused with chemicals and having its resources used to process and transport what we eat, it will save us medical bills down the road.

Homemade Butter

Or, What to do with leftover heavy cream

For our wedding, we registered for an ice cream maker. It seemed like the right thing to do at the time, and brides and grooms can get a little carried away with the scanner thingy at Target. Anyway, so we ended up with one, and I've found that it is used more infrequently than I'd like to admit. The primary reason it's not used very often is that the ice cream recipes all require heavy cream, something I don't have on hand very often. When I do have it on hand, after making ice cream, the extra heavy cream just languishes in the refrigerator, until I decide to make alfredo sauce or throw it out.

This weekend, I found another great use for the extra heavy cream! Butter!

When my husband woke up Saturday morning and I told him I had made butter, he gave me a groggy, confused look. "Without a churn?" Yes, we do have a churn, but it is really old and just decorative. I wouldn't dare put actually food I'm planning to eat in it. So how to make butter, at home, without a churn? Easier than you might think!



Homemade butter
1/2 C to 1 C heavy cream
1 pint jar with lid
Arm strength

Pour the cream into the jar & tighten the lid. Shake, Shake, and shake some more. You'll hear sloshing. Eventually the sloshing will stop. If you open the jar & take a look now, you have whipped cream coating the jar. Close the jar again. Keep shaking. The silence of shaking the whipped cream will turn into a thud-thud-thud noise. Keep shaking until the sides of the jar are clear again, and you can see the clump of butter in the buttermilk (see photo). At this point, you can pour off the buttermilk (save it for biscuits!) and you have butter!

For salted butter, add salt sometime in the middle of this process.

Enjoy the toast! And the knowledge of what's ACTUALLY in your butter!


This is part of a Notebook Experiment from one of Amy's Notebook entries once-upon-a-time ago. Thanks to SouleMama for the inspiration!

Washing for pennies

Part of saving money around the house often means making or doing things yourself, rather than paying for a processed version of the product or paying someone else to do the work. This applies to a whole host of things: cooking at home rather than eating out, making from scratch instead of from frozen meals, doing your own home repair, doing your own yard work... the list goes on. Before starting to read money-saving blogs, however, I never thought of replacing my store-bought laundry detergent with a homemade version!

Since I started doing my own laundry, in college, I've not really known what brand to buy. I didn't think about it too much, and defaulted to whatever I saw at home that I didn't think I would have an adverse reaction to. Fast forward 5 years, and I'm tired of buying laundry detergent.


Liquid laundry detergent:
To make this, you'll have to some hunting at your local supermarket. In the laundry aisle, pick up three ingredients:
Borax (probably Mule Team brand)
Washing Soda (probably Arm & Hammer brand- and be sure to get WASHING soda, not BAKING soda)
Laundry Bar Soap (I use Fels-Naptha. Zote brand is mentioned in other recipes)

These ingredients will be good for many, many gallons of laundry detergent, so you'll be set for a while.

Use:
1/2 cup Washing Soda
1/2 cup Borax
1/3 bar soap (grated- use a food processor or box grater to accomplish this)

Heat 6 cups of water on the stove. Add the grated bar soap and stir until melted. Then add the washing soda and borax. Stir until powder is dissolved, then remove from heat.

In a 5 gallon bucket, pour 4 cups of hot water and add the heated soap mixture. Top pail with cold water and stir well with a wooden paint stirrer. Let sit for at least 24 hours. The mixture may separate- stir then add to smaller, more manageable containers than the 5-gallon bucket. As you can see, I've used vegetable oil bottles, milk gallons, and any plastic container that's easy to pour.

Shake container before using and use 1/3-1/2 cup per load.

I haven't done a cost savings breakdown, but others around the web come up with 1 cent or less per load, vastly better than store-bought alternatives. We've been using this soap for about a year and have been happy with our clean clothes!