Write something every day

I had two interactions yesterday that I want to share.

I stopped at Family Fare (a regional grocery store) yesterday morning. At the checkout line I mentioned to Randy that $1.99 for four pounds of sugar is a great price.

He looked at the three packages I was buying and observed "And it never goes bad."

I said "Yeah, but it can solidify into a brick."

Then Randy suggested "It doesn't have to. You can store it in dry mayo jars or some other type of plastic container and it will stay pourable for decades."

I thanked him for that idea. It had never crossed my mind.

The other interaction was on the same shopping trip. I stopped into Quality Dairy (a regional convenience store) and purchased a jug of cider and a jug of milk.

Things were chaotic when I got up to the counter. One guy was resetting the gas pumps and was looking away, out the window. One guy was stocking the cigarettes 8 feet to my left. The guy who was immediately opposite me behind the counter was multi-tasking...trying to fix the receipt printer on a cash register and in-process a package that had just been dropped off by Amazon. The manager had just clocked-out for her break and was walking out the door to have her morning cigarette.

The gas guy had turned and locked up. Deer in the headlights time. There were too many things going on for him to process. The manager said "Troy, can you help the customer" and she nodded at me as she skated out the door.

The dude fighting with the receipt printer moved over a fraction of a foot. Troy moved to where he could work a register (maybe five feet) and he processed my transaction. (His name wasn't Troy but I needed to call him something in this short vignette). 

The manager had not raised her voice. She didn't have to. Maybe the dude fixing the receipt printer is grumpy and Troy didn't want to ruffle his feathers. The manager handled it. Troy just needed the tiniest nudge to get off top-dead-center and the manager stepped up to take grumpy's ire (if he dared).

After I stowed the jugs in the truck, I mentioned to the manager that I thought she had handled things well back in the store. Not that it was a big deal. A calm "suggestion" at the right time can nudge future events away from ever becoming a big deal.

The manager had managed the art of "just enough" and "right time", and it showed. 

So, two excellent customer interactions in two different businesses.

Canning notes

From the comments "I love seeing Mason jars, but it’s nicer to see full Mason jars😋"

A couple of nights ago, Mrs ERJ asked me "Can I put away all of this canning stuff?"

I waffled. "Maybe..."

We originally planned to streamline our pantry and only preserve the amount of food we expect to consume in the next 365 days.

Take apple sauce, for instance. We go through one quart a week like clockwork. There are 52 weeks in a year. The correct number of quarts of apple sauce to have at the end of canning is 50(ish) quarts.

But then Quicksilver started eating our apple sauce and she is going through a growth-spurt. Mrs ERJ suggested that we put up a few more quarts. Since the canner handles 7 quarts per load, it became a question of "How many loads?"

Mrs ERJ deigned 2 loads, 14 quarts, to be adequate margin. So...we made and canned 14 more quarts and since we had 3 extra quarts (math is hard), we canned those too. So our 49 quarts grew to 49 + 17.

"What do you mean, "Maybe,"?" she queried.

"Do you remember that young man who graciously volunteered to pick apples for us in the Upper Orchard?" I asked her. "It would be a classy thing if we made some apple sauce from the apples he picked and gave it to him."

Mrs ERJ knows this particular young man and has the universal, maternal urge to feed him.

"What can I do to help?" was her response.

So...Mrs ERJ selected the apples that went into the blend and washed the pint jars. She suggested smaller jars because single guys who eat out a lot don't always go through food quickly.

Even Quicksilver got into the act. She enjoyed turning the handle on the Squeezo-strainer and watching the cooked apples go into the hopper, apple sauce flow down the chute and the pomace eject from the far end of the screw. She was also fascinated that I ran the pomace through the tool a second time to squeeze as much pulp out of the skins and seeds as possible.

Seeing how the cheerful volunteer struggles to keep body-weight on, his custom-made apple sauce had 2 pounds of sugar (about a 12% bump in sugar), 1 teaspoon of cinnamon, 2 teaspoons of citric acid (as suggested by the latest USDA guidelines) AND a substantial dollop of molasses (for depth of flavor).

We can stack up to 20, small-mouth pints in our canning kettle. The load which started out targeting 14 pints ended up at 18 pints.

I let Quicksilver eat the left-over apple candy sauce in the mixing kettle. She didn't complain.

Are we done canning for the year?

Probably not.

I want to can 18 pints of chicken in wide-mouth jars.

I want to can the same amount of venison and, perhaps another 18 pints of ground pork. 

We like using wide-mouth jars for canning meat because some of the meat adheres to the sides of the jars and wide-mouth jars are easier to scrub. One hack is to fill the jars with water and then add a teaspoon of lye (sodium hydroxide) to soften/dissolve the adhering meat overnight before scrubbing. Exercise caution because the lye solution is till caustic in the morning.

And if 20 pounds of steelhead or salmon fell into my possession, I would pressure can that but I would probably opt for 8 oz jars instead of pints.

I might pressure-can cooked beans but I have to study the economics of canned-beans-on-sale vs the cost of the lids.

I would like to have most of that done before November 3, if possible. 

However, I think it is safe to say that we are done using the Squeezo-strainer for the season. 

May be the best minute you invest today

 

Busy like squirrels

 

Squash on shelves

Squash in oven. Both of these squash had a soft-spot on them that made the non-starters for storage.

Containers of potatoes getting tucked away in various places.

We have been appreciating 7 gallon, fabric nursery bags for storing vegetables in the root cellar. They are very inexpensive, collapse down to a very small size for the off-season, breath, don't create "pressure sores" on the rinds of vegetables. They have two handles that are easy on the hands.  There is a lot to like about them.

Fine Art Tuesday

 

Jacobus Hendrik Pirneef was born in 1886 in Pretoria, South African Republic. He died in 1957.

His work does not ape the traditions of the old, Euro-centric masters. He uses different scales, a different color palate and leans toward vast, sweeping vistas of alien (to us) landscapes.

 

Hat-tip to Lucas Machias who scours the internet and provides this blog with content.
 

Duck dormitory, walnut orchards and taking a child to the dentist

The Duck Dormitory

 

The glass in the rear lift-gate of the (free) truck cap had been broken. I framed the opening with 1" x 1-1/2" strips ripped from a two-by-four. Then I used 1/4" crown staples to attach galvanized poultry-netting across the opening. I plan to stretch clear, poly-film across it when the weather turns cold. 

Persian walnuts

Ukraine is the world's 4th largest exporter of "English" or "Persian" walnuts.

Producers get four-times as much, per unit weight, for cracked nuts as for nuts that are in-shell. By "cracked-nuts" I mean nut meats that have been removed from the shell. Since most Persian Walnuts run about 50% nut-meat by weight, that has the potential to double the revenue per tree.

Producers get a much higher premium for nut-halves, something like an additional 5X over the price received for nut-meat pieces.

The major bottleneck for the producers is lack of manpower. The men either migrated to Western Europe to avoid being conscripted, are conscripted or are dead. There is a stunning lack of "labor" in Ukraine.

From the perspective of the buyers, there are many quality issues with nuts purchased from hundreds of discrete suppliers. Some sell moldy or off-flavored nuts. Those are impossible to sort-out when sold as uncracked nuts. Some mix in a percentage of off-flavored (rancid, discolored, moldy) pieces to pad the weight of good nuts.

That results in the buyer absorbing all of the risk and he discounts the prices he offers for nuts that are still in-the-shell. 

Another factor is that most nuts sold in Ukraine come from seedling trees. Some walnut trees produce nuts that are well sealed at the suture between the nut halves and the nut-meats retain quality even when subjected to challenging environments. Other trees are the opposite. Their nuts are not well sealed and absorb water and quickly lose quality.

The universities in Ukraine, in spite of being battered by the tumult and vicissitudes of war, are promoting grafted trees of proven selections and seedlings from elite selections. The elite trees don't take up any more area or demand any more fertilizer than the trees that produce fewer or inferior-quality nuts. Planting them is like finding free-money.

Young walnut tress in the background.

It gives me hope when I realize that people were planting nut trees 70 miles from the war's front-lines, even as the war raged on.

And so, I was quite interested when one of the "Dacha" videos showed the fifteen year-old granddaughter tooling by a newly planted walnut orchard. Due to editing, the sequence is split but the first bit shows her driving by four year-old trees and the second bit shows her driving by 8 year-old trees. Guessing the age of trees is a hit-or-miss endeavor. They might be younger if heavily fertilized. They might be older if planted on blow-sand not taken care of.

Today's big adventure

I get to squire Quicksilver to the dentist at zero-dark-thirty. 

***Follow-up: A big shout-out to Pediatric Dentistry of East Lansing. Dental Tech Miss Emily (the Emily with the hair the color of a new, copper penny) was totally awesome. Dentist Jenn was also superb. They both have a gift for connecting with the-little-people.*** 

Dental issues and pepitas

I lost a filling in a lower molar yesterday. It doesn't hurt but the cavity feels enormous. I suspect that there is not enough tooth left to repair it and the dentist will advise that I get a crown.

Mrs ERJ is supportive. In spite of the fact that I am becoming higher-maintenance, she isn't making any noise about trading-me-in for a newer model.

Very early on, in our relationship, I observed that her VW rabbit had 147k miles on it and I asked her "Why don't you get a newer car?"

Her response was "There is nothing wrong with this car. I know where all of the controls are by-heart and it does everything that I need a car to do. Why would I get a new one?" 

To some guys, that would be an eccentric quirk. To me, that is a major feature. She doesn't discard items (or people) because she is bored with them or because the paint is faded and the doors have a few dents in them.

Pepitas

Pepitas are edible, inner-seeds of squash or pumpkin seeds. They are usually cleaned of their seed-coat by roasting but the coating can be removed by sudden depressurizing (the bends method) and some varieties of squash have "naked seeds".

In fact, the botanical name for most pumpkins, Acorn, Delicata, Zucchini and Spaghetti squash is Cucurbita pepo.

Ethnobotanists speculate that squashes were first domesticated for their seeds and only later were they selected for edible flesh.

In an austere situation, it is good to be mindful of the fact that pepitas are almost 50% edible fats/oils by weight and those are exactly the nutrients that are hardest to obtain in a subsistence enterprise. While the oil can be extracted and used as liquid oil, it is much easier to simply add the pepitas to your salad or munched on as snacks.

Don't throw squash seeds away after the SHTF. If nothing else, you can use them to bait mouse and squirrel traps.

Moving day report

You can say whatever you want about the older Gen-Z, but their "minimalist" approach to life makes them easy to move.

Two round trips and it was mostly done.

I got to tour the new house. They paid roughly $130 per square-foot. They shopped long-and-hard and figured out what was important to each party. One wanted a man-cave. One wanted a window for their plants...

I like the neighborhood it is in. It is a very good fit for their socio-economic and stage-of-life. It isn't so spendy that they will feel like bumpkins. It isn't so distressed that they will be afraid to go out at night. There were a couple of kids with a stand selling cookies beside the road...it was that kind of neighborhood.

The lot looks like it is perched on top of a feeder moraine. The longer moraine stretched from Lansing's Groesbeck/Post Oak neighborhood-to-Mason, Michigan and was mined out for gravel. It is now a series of spring-fed lakes. One of those lakes is a half-mile west of the lot.

The lot's boundaries are still a mystery. The lot to the west belongs to somebody who is "into" landscaping. They have switchgrass and pipevine and lots of interesting specimens, including an apple tree near the northwest corner of their house.

The lot to the south was more conventional.

Two of the (likely) boundary lines are defined by rows of Colorado Blue Spruce, a species that struggles with the mid-West's heat and humidity. They might have another ten years left in them...but maybe only five. There is also an ash tree that looks to be in astonishingly good health, perhaps due to woodpeckers. There is a Mountain Ash aka Rowan Tree that is near death's door. There were also two mulberry trees that were probably planted by birds.

In the yard-proper, there are Burning Bush specimens, a Flowering Dogwood, a Variegated leafed Beech tree. Oh, and a glider shaded by a grapevine. All very charming.

The herbaceous landscaping is heavy planted to deer resistant plants: Hostas, daylilies, mint, lemon-balm and so on. 

I applaud couple for seizing the day and moving earlier rather than later. They had the warm bodies. They had the vehicles. They had a beautiful day for moving.