More on infestations

I can’t promise that this will be the last post about infestations, but I will do my best to put pictures in next time.

There are a few more benefits about being at the mercy of carpet beetles, not that I would recommend welcoming them into your home or anything.  As I’ve said, we have purged a lot of things in the last two years, most of them still usable and in good order.  We’ve been lucky in that we’ve been able to give most of our things to a local parish that has a number of families in need.  They will take pretty much anything, and put it to use, including pens, plastic containers, stickers, mismatched socks, and so much else.  This is nice, because it means something destined for the landfill gets more use than it otherwise would, plus someone else benefits from having it.  Honestly though, you wouldn’t believe how many disposable pens, pencils, and markers we’d accumulated and never used.  It was disgraceful, ahem.

Further to my point, though, we actually got to hear some of the stories about the families who got our stuff.  There is a family with a daughter who has the same taste as ours, but is a size or two smaller.  There was the man who needed a suit for a job interview just when we donated some of Husband’s.  It goes on, obviously, but the stories stick in your head, and when you pull something out to decide whether or not you need it, the question becomes whether someone else can get more use out of it.  This helps quite a bit with cleaning out Daughter’s things, but the concrete image of someone else in need becomes ingrained in you, it haunts you, and it drives your purchasing and purging decisions.

This past June, Prague and its surrounding areas were severely flooded, though thankfully not as bad as in 2002.  Things were a right mess here, and emergency services were stretched to their limit.  When the Red Cross put out a call for towel donations, I didn’t have to hem and ha about whether we could live without a few extra towels.  I just opened our linen closet, did a quick mental calculation of how many we realistically needed, and dumped everything else into the donation bag.  I wouldn’t have done that before the carpet beetle infestation, because I would have been worried about our not having something.  Those stupid beetles have freed me from the worry of having to have something, and for that, I am grateful.

Glorious Infestations

Ok, so part of the reason that I’ve been away from blogging is because we have infestations in this flat, as in multiple ones.  Currently, it’s spider season, though the weather has been kooky enough this year that there aren’t many of them.  You may think that I might be happy about having fewer spiders, but I’m not, because the spiders eat the other little nasties.  We’ve also gone a couple of rounds with mites (not book mites, thankfully, at least that I’ve found) and a few moths.

By far the biggest infestation we have is carpet beetles, which look like little brown or black lady bugs/birds.  The irony of the entire situation is that we don’t have carpets, save the one polyester rug in Daughter’s room.  These little bugs are in our parquets, and their larvae eat everything – cotton, wool, leather, dust, food particles, and so on.  The larvae migrate too, so they get in between the mattress and the bed frame, behind the toilet, in the corners of kitchen cabinets, and anywhere else that is dark, dirty, and undisturbed (like under century-old parquets).  The only way to deal with these little things is to clean, everywhere, regularly.  Every drawer and cabinet has to be turned out and wiped down every six weeks, every bit of clothing and linen has to be shaken out and refolded, and even every book taken down and dusted behind.  Yes, it is a mighty load of work, and it keeps me busy.

However, this on-going war against migrating nasties has had some positive effects, beyond the clean flat.  After about six months, I started to get tired of turning out suits that Husband never wore, refolding the extra set of sheets and towels that never get used, and emptying out over-stuffed kitchen cabinets containing duplicate cooking wares.  So, I started to purge, and purge we did.  We didn’t have an exceptionally large amount of stuff to begin with, but it had begun to accumulate.  Those extra sheets are gone, as are the suits, my sweaters, shoes we wore less than once a year, table clothes that were never used, and quite a lot of the stuff from our kitchen.  We’re still purging, and I am going to start pulling everything out again and re-evaluating in the long winter months, but we seem to be getting a handle on things.

The only reason I’m sharing this is because it is nice.  It’s a nice feeling to be surrounded by things that are meaningful, useful, and few.  Husband has fewer clothes, but complains significantly less about having nothing to wear.  Daughter has fewer art supplies, but uses what she has.  I can cook much more efficiently, and I honestly haven’t missed a thing we’ve gotten rid of.  We aren’t done yet, but we’re getting there; and we’re learning about living with enough, which is the real blessing in all of this…

What to do with an empty milk container

Or rather, what to do with it before you recycle, throw it in the bin, or use it around the house for some mysterious purpose.  I know I can’t be the only person that dumps a tablespoon or two of water into the milk jug to swish out the last bit.  At any rate, I do, and this leaves a milk wash that can be used in any number of ways.  It probably doesn’t save much milk, but I figure it must add up over the course of a year or two.

So, what to do with this one or two tablespoons of watery milk?  The possibilities are endless, but here you go…

1. Any baking recipe that calls for milk, just dump it in to the rest of the milk.

2. Use in baking recipes that only call for a few tablespoons of liquid in place of what is called for

3. Dump it in to any cream soup, and finish off with regular milk.

4. Use it in making creamy dressings.

5. Use it in as a wash to top baked goods before baking.

6. Use it as a liquid for making a spread for sandwiches, for instance if making a flavored butter or cheese spread.

7. Dump it into the glass of milk.  I promise that you can’t tell the difference.

 

Buy better and use less

Granted, this may not always work out, but I have found that it holds true with food, at least in our family.  For instance, we use less butter than margarine, since the butter tastes better and you need less of it.  The same goes for cheese, chocolate, meat, coffee and just about anything else I can think of.  I now make it a point to buy the highest quality that I can reasonably afford, and then I stretch it through various ways. If I am buying cheddar cheese, for example, then I will buy the most mature available, since the flavor is much stronger.  I end up using less, and it saves me money in the end, even if I had to pay a little bit more in the beginning.  If I buy free range chicken from the farmer instead of one from the supermarket, we eat less and the resulting stock has a stronger flavour, so I can get more stock out of the same amount of bones.

Once in a while, this will backfire.  I might buy a jam that tastes so good that we gobble it up in one sitting (almost) or a cheese that disappears the minute I open the package.  However, I find that if I buy it a few more times, we get used to the flavor and eat it at a more reasonable pace.  Do you have similar experiences?

4 meals from one chicken

For today’s Double Dip Monday, I want to share how I got four meals for three people from one whole roasting chicken.  I will be upfront and admit that Daughter and I don’t eat very much meat, so this might not work out to four meals for you, but the principles still apply.

To start, I roasted the chicken whole for our big Sunday meal, and served the meaty breast and legs with brown rice.  There was one breast left over, plus the meat that was on the rest of the bird, so I picked that off, shredded it, and put it in the fridge.  I saved all of the bones, plus the meat on the wings and back, and made cock-a-leekie on Monday by adding leeks and the leftover rice.  This gave me enough soup for two full meals for the three of us, if I added some rolls or scones and a few cut up fresh veggies.  On Tuesday, I took the leftover shredded meat, added in some random salad bits I had floating about the fridge and some actual leaf salad, and served up chicken salad with a balsamic dressing.  Then, on Wednesday, I served the leftover cock-a-leekie.

Given that I could get three to four meals out of the roasting chicken, I splurged and bought a free-range, organic bird (what I generally refer to as “happy hens”).  The upside was that the bird was so flavorful that none of us ate as much as we would have eaten if it had been a factory bird.  I plan to try this out several more times, just to see if it is one particular type of chicken or all happy chickens in general, but you can get several meals out of any bird if you’re clever about it…