Favorite Things: Kinfolk Magazine

I used to be a voracious reader.  These days it can take me months to get through a book unless I'm on vacation.  Part of that is being a mother, and part of that is having an iPad and checking Facebook, blogs, and Pinterest when I would have been reading a book in the "olden days".  Although I don't make it through whole books, I do read a few magazines cover to cover.  They are like a mini-vacation from my real and digital worlds.




Kinfolk magazine is what I buy my housemate when I want to make her exceedingly happy.  She totally geeks out over this magazine and blog.  I, not too secretly, buy her issues just so I can read them too. Kinfolk is a beautifully curated collection of photos and essays about building community through small gatherings.

I love their manifesto:

"Kinfolk is a growing community of artists with a shared interest in

small gatherings. We recognize that there is something about a table

shared by friends, not just a wedding or once-a-year holiday

extravaganza, that anchors our relationships and energizes us. We have

come together to create Kinfolk as our collaborative way of advocating

the natural approach to entertaining that we love."

There is a very distinctive Kinfolk aesthetic that features traditional materials like natural wood, linen, leather, and simple dishes in desaturated photography.  It inspires me to invite a few friends over, put some flowers on the table and serve dinner.  It creates that quiet, intimate, calm world that seems like such an unattainable goal most days.

I'm curious if others have read this magazine and what you think of it.   At $65 (yikes!) for a year's subscription, I haven't jumped for it yet.  Although I've liked the issues I've read,  I'm not sure if their limited scope of subject matter and style will continue to appeal to me or if it will somehow seem predictable and boring.  I'm interested enough to buy the next issue to find out.

Sunday Photos: French Dinner

I love little rituals and routines that punctuate our days. One of my favorites is what we ambitiously call "French Dinner". This happens most Sunday nights at our house. It involves a crusty baguette (preferable from Little T), assorted cheeses, fruit and meat (a great salami or some proscuitto). The Housemate is the originator of this ritual. Often a friend or two is also at the table. Basically it is French Dinner because when we were in France we would go to the grocery store and buy just such a spread and have a picnic.

Sometimes we dress up the table with a tablecloth and nice dishes. Once we even tried to eat by candlelight. With two toddlers that lasted for exactly 56 seconds before we had to turn the lights back on.

I love this way to end one week and start the next with some of my favorite people in the world.

What rituals and routines mark your days? What moments do you treasure each week? Please share.

Inspiring: Lotta Jansdotter

This book is amazing. I keep looking and looking at it and getting different ideas every time. It is simple, Scandinavian, make-it-yourself Modern. I am in love.



Folded paper invitations.



I want this wall display of clipboard for rotating art and photos.



And these paper ball chains have inspired a few things around here lately.

Summer in the City

I can't decide if I'm a country girl that lives in the city or a city girl who likes to pretend that she lives in the country. What I do know is that on some of our summer days it's easy to forget that we live in metro Portland. Here are some pictures from our summer life:

Hanging clothes out to dry on our wooden rack.


Harvesting veggies from the garden. This wagon full grew in 10 square feet I am happy to say. We're clearing out the scraggily left-overs from spring planting and getting ready to put in some fall vegetables.


The remaining three chickens. We used to have four but one met its demise this summer. We don't know why, she just got sick and died the next day. This is Rita Henworth, Audry Hepbird, and Amelia Earhart. They are eagerly awaiting their table scraps for the day.


Eating berries. The Sprout has become quite adept at picking strawberries and blueberries. In fact, so adept that she's keeping the bushes clean and there aren't many left to pick and bring inside to cook with. But she is happy and healthy and learning to eat the most local kind of food possible so we just let her have at those berries.

How is summer in your part of the country?

Wardrobe Refashioning

One thing I did get accomplished while home on leave with the Sprout was to clean through our clothes and coat closets and purge the stuff we're no longer wearing. Nice stuff got packed off to Goodwill. Stained, torn and otherwise battered stuff got ripped into cleaning rags. What was left was a box of miscellaneous t-shirts and stuff that has small flaws but interesting fabric. I'm thinking that some wardrobe refashioning might be coming my way. I've been seeing all these great posts about how to refashion t-shirts and dress shirts.

The first one I decided to tackle was this brown Old Navy shirt. I liked the light-weight fabric used for it, and thought it would be a great summer shirt. But I rarely wore it because the collar and three-quarter length sleeves made it feel a little more stuffy than my usual summer wear. So I decided to "refashion" it.

I carefully removed the collar and sewed the placket back together (placket? is that the right term? do you know what I mean?). I ripped out the sleeves and made little gathered things (now, what would you call THEM?). The armholes were much too big once the sleeves were gone so I sewed a few darts to try to gather them up and keep the arm hole from gaping too badly.

I'm not in love with the final product, but, heh, it was FREE. And I'll see if I get a little bit more use out of it now that is has been "refashioned".

Question of the day: Magazines

What magazines do you subscribe to?

I adore magazines, especially glossy make-me-wanna-buy-stuff, eye-candy magazines. But I got sick of having piles of magazines stacking up and felt that it was an area of my life that I could simplify. I let all of my subscriptions go, and chose to use design and craft blogs for my eye candy and inspiration. The only subscription I miss right now is the O magazine. It's the most literate of the women's magazines that I've found and I often read it cover-to-cover. Even the sections that I strongly disagree with.

Lately I've been experimenting with internet magazines. They're free, they're multi-media, and they're total eye-candy. I miss paper though. I really do. You won't find me shelling out big bucks for a Kindle anytime soon.

Here are a couple of e-magazines I've found:
-- Parasol--Artists and Designers
-- LMNOP--An Australian mag for "hip, stylish parents and their children"
-- Small--more gorgeous stuff for the wee ones

Do you know of others? What do you think about internet magazines? What paper magazines do you find it worthwhile to continue to subscribe to? When you're stuck in an airport between flights, what magazine do you buy to get you through?

Go Local: Meal #4

The other day I made the most scrumptious blueberry-peach cobbler. The berries were from our very own yard and the peaches came in our Organics to You box the other week. The recipe was from my never-fails-me Cooks Illustrated cookbook. Yum!

One of the ways we've experimented with local food is by trying our hand at some edible landscaping. When we bought our current house, the previous owner had been a pretty serious gardener but more of the roses and pretty flower type. There were lots of pink and blue flowers in narrow flowerbeds on the perimeter of the property. There was a lot of lawn. Or at least more than the Wise and Bearded One and myself care to tend to. So we've been steadily tearing out lawn and adding beds the last four years. We figure that if we add a few more feet of beds every year, soon the lawn will just disappear.

On our side yard we've tried to plant native plants and/or edible plants. Blueberry bushes grow well here. Apparently they like our rainy winters and acidic soil. There are different varieties that make good landscape plants--some stay small and trim instead of getting all big and scraggly. The leaves turn a nice red in the fall. We also have strawberries for a ground cover. In our planting strip we have several herbs that love it hot and dry--lavendar, sage, rosemary,. oregano. In a new bed that we started this year we have a grape vine, a fig tree, rhubarb, and some black currants. In the back yard in pots we have several different kinds of mint. Next year I'd like to start an asparagus bed too. I don't feel the need to have to raise enough food on our property to sustain us, but I like the idea of having plants that do duel purpose--they look nice AND they give us good food right outside our door.

Go Local: Meal #3

We made mozzarella cheese the other day. Seriously! The Wise and Bearded One had seen these kits at the Urban Farm Store and we both thought they looked like a lot of fun to try so we bought one.

The recipe is calculated to work with one gallon of milk, so with our gallon of milk in hand we proceeded to attempt to make our first intentional batch of cheese. (We won't talk about the nasty curdled, unintentional messes we've made a few times in the past. Yuck!)

The ingredients are simple: citric acid, rennet, cheese salt, and milk. The directions are few. It just requires a thermometer and some attention to detail. Fortunately, the Wise and Bearded One was there to take care of the detailed piece since I'm more a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants kind of girl in the kitchen.

Here's a picture "cutting the cheese" and then seeing the curds separate from the whey. Having never made cheese before I didn't realize what a nasty, greenish liquid whey is. The kit had recommendations for what you could do with the whey, but since it skeeved us out we threw the whey away. (Say that line three times fast!)

After the curds and whey separated, we squished out as much of the whey as possible and then kneaded the curd for a while until--voila!--it turned into cheese. Two balls (or since all I do these days is breastfeed--they look a little more like silicone breast implants to me...sick, I know).

It was good cheese. It tasted just like the fresh mozzarella you can buy at the gourmet grocery store. Next time I think we'll put in a little more salt and some herbs from the garden....dill? rosemary?...just to make it extra special.

We sliced up the cheese and served it with fresh basil from our garden and some tomatoes for a caprese salad when our friends came over for a cook-out. Yum!

If you are intrigued by this, you don't have to live in Portland to buy a cheese making kit. Urban Cheesecraft also sells on Etsy. There's the kit for mozzarella/ricotta that we used, plus kits for paneer/queso blanco and goat cheese/chevre. Yummy! These would also be great gifts for your foodie friends....that brother-in-law that watches Alton Brown religiously, the girlfriend who makes her own bread, perfect gift!

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This post is part of the Go Local Challenge hosted by my blogger-friend, Heather Jane. You can find out more about the challenge here.

Go Local: Meal #2

We've been cooking with local food every week. Really! I just can't seem to keep up the blogging of the local meals for the Go Local Challenge. So here's a meal from the other week. Maybe I'll blog two Go Local Meals this week in an attempt to catch up with Heather's challenge.

One of the ways we've attempted to eat healthier and more locally the past two years is subscribe to Organics to You. Organics to You is a little like a CSA crossed with the old-time milkman delivery. Every other Tuesday a "small bin" of produce is delivered to our front door. Organics to You contracts with thirteen local farmers to buy their produce. During the off-season they purchase organically-grown foods from a local distributor. Usually these off-season foods come from California or Mexico. But even in the winter time we get some local food---onions, apples, chard, mushrooms, squash.

We like Organics to You because it forces us to eat our vegetables---they're here, we already paid for them so we'd better eat 'em before they go bad. We've also learned to eat and appreciate vegetables that weren't on our usual grocery store shopping list---kale, swiss chard, winter squash, among others. Sometimes I have to call up my vegetarian friend, Amy, and ask for help identifying or figuring out how to cook an u.f.v. (unidentified flying veggie). We've learned that pretty much any vegetable can be sauteed in butter with a little garlic and everyone is happy. I've also been using the Simply in Season cookbook because it is organized seasonally and has cooking suggestions for all kinds of vegetables. I just discovered that their website also has the handy-dandy fruit and vegetable guide. Check it out!

The other week we made the Spring Celebration Soup in an attempt to use up a LOT of vegetables in one fell swoop. It's on page 36 for those of you who care. It is veggies in chicken stock with a shot of lemon juice to zing it up. It's the kind of food you couldn't have forced me to eat before the age of 21 but now I find fresh and appealing. I thought the lemon was a cheerful, Greek-inspired addition. The Wise and Bearded One wasn't such a fan. However, he cooked up some lovely steaks--also locally-grown, grassfed--so the meal worked for him too.

Cooking meat is really his job since I'm not fond of handling raw chunks of flesh. He did the work last summer of tracking down local beef and pork farmers by walking around the farmer's market and talked to various vendors until he found farmers who were willing to work with him to purchase a 1/4 beef and 1/2 a pig. So now we have a freezer half-full of meat to be eaten whenever we remember to thaw some of it.

What do you do to get your family to "eat your vegetables"? Have you found other ways to "shake the hand that feeds you" as Michael Pollan recommends? We're always looking for new ideas so please comment below. Or take on the challenge yourself and tell us about YOUR local meal.

Go Local: Meal #1

Whoosh! The last four weeks of the school year went by in a flash! I had to go back to work to keep our health insurance for the summer so the Wise and Bearded One stayed home with the Sprout for the four weeks and I worked my tail off back in the Very Litigious School District. (For those of you who are newer blog readers, I work for the director of special education coordinating programs in two high schools in a district-that-will-not-be-named.)

But now it is summer, summer, summer! And I can't wait to enjoy the sunshine, fabulous food, and time to be creative that summer brings. I'm taking up Heather's challenge (see post below) to make at least one meal every week with local ingredients. I feel a little sheepish doing this since I must confess that the Wise and Bearded One does most of the cooking around here. Maybe having to blog about it will get me to cook a little more.

Anyhow, here's our first Go Local meal. We decided to Go Local Extreme Style and make our first meal grown entirely on our property.















Eggs from our Urban Hens
+
One Square Foot Mesclun Mix
+
Radishes
=
Yummy Extremely Local Salad









Yummy Extremely Local Salad
+
Bacon Bits
+
Salad Dressing
=
Local Salad with Benefits

Go Local 2009 Challenge

My blogger-friend, Heather, has challenged us to Go Local.

The Rules:

Who: Anyone who wants to challenge themselves to buy local, eat local, or grow local food/handmade items
What: A challenge to eat one meal per week consisting of locally(within 250 miles from where you are) produced ingredients. You get salt, pepper, spices and oil for free. (I also take liberties with basic baking necessities like soda, sugar, flour, etc.)
When: Every Monday from June through August Mr. Linky will appear on Heather's blog. You can post a link back to your blog once, or every week throughout the summer any day of the week.
Where: You post about the foods you are eating locally, the conversation you had with a local grower/farmer, the pictures you took of your very own garden, the dinner you made from scratch using foods grown by someone who loves growing food, the local food potluck party you threw on Market Saturday...Bring it all right back to Heather's blog and we'll come see what you've been up to.
Why: To inspire and be inspired to eat healthy, local foods. It's good for you. It's good for the environment. It's good for the economy.

Happy Thanksgiving!

I'm thankful for my husband, my family and friends, you out there in the blog-o-sphere. And I'm so very thankful to live in the misty, moisty Pacific Northwest.

Here's a holiday table decoration I started on today. I was inspired by some gnarly looking centerpieces I saw in Portland Spaces made entirely of bark and greenery gathered on nature walks. The base is a beautiful piece of silver fir that our neighbor, the florist, gave us. Then I added some mossy twigs, lichen, and pine cones from our mini-hike today. I added fruit that we had around the house. Nothing is wired together so my plan is that we'll gradually eat the fruit and replace it with other nuts, berries, ivy and acorns that we gather as we walk around the neighborhood.

Thank you for sharing this little piece of my life with me.

Natural Laundry Soap

In part due to the pregnancy, I've been reexamining the sustainability and toxicity of our household cleaning products and personal care products. I am most particular about substances that are ingested or contact the skin. Thinking about this brought me back to my desire to make my own laundry soap again.

I did this for awhile about 5 years ago and it worked well but then we moved and I lost my sources for soap flakes. Plus, in Portland it is easy to find environmentally-friendly laundry soap such as Seventh Generation, Ecover, etc. However, I like having total control of the ingredients (what? me wanting to control something?!) and I like using large glass containers that can be used over and over again instead of discarding the plastic tub every few weeks.

So I did the obvious thing. I searched the internets for websites with laundry soap recipes:
http://www.soap-flakes.com/recipes.html
http://www.instructables.com/id/Homemade-Laundry-Detergent/
http://www.thesimpledollar.com/2008/04/09/making-your-own-laundry-detergent-a-detailed-visual-guide/
http://www.naturalhomemagazine.com/Inspiration/2000-05-01/laundryrecipe.aspx

I considered making a wet soap since there are some concerns that when you wash with cold water (as I do) the soap flakes in dry formulas may not dissolve fully. However, most of the wet soap recipes use washing soda which is the more caustic twin of baking soda and requires that you wear gloves when handling it. And you know how often I wear gloves! (never, not even when pruning roses until my hands start to bleed and I remember that I have a perfectly good pair of leather gloves in the garage, but that's another story) Plus washing soda wasn't available at my local grocery stores so I decided to go with the Natural Home recipe:

16 cups baking soda
12 cups borax
8 cups grated castile or glycerin soap flakes*
3 tablespoons lavender, lemon, or grapefruit essential oil (I don't use that much because I don't like strong scents)

Combine baking soda, borax, and soap flakes, add essential oil, and mix with a wire whisk. Use 1/8 cup of powder per load. This recipe makes enough powder to last a family of four one year.

All the ingredients were available between my local Safeway and New Seasons. Since I was too impatient to order soap flakes from an importer (they're no longer made in the States), I determined to buy the soap with the label that I could understand.

I tried several different grating options to try to find the finest grate (please don't kill me, Pamper Chef Lady, for misuse of a mandolin). I settled on the microplane that we usually use to grate lemon rinds and the like. Thirty minutes of an HGTV show and one skinned knuckle later I had well over the 8 cups of soap needed for the recipe (3 bars would probably be enough).

Then I started mixing my ingredients. I took my two biggest mixing bowls and mixed half a recipe in each. I'm terrible at English measurements (oh, when can we switch to metric? They promised in 4th grade that it was coming soon!) so I had to learn that largest box of baking soda is really on 8 cups worth. Fortunately I had two other big boxes of baking soda around the house so I threw them in too. Plus 1/2 of an old box of Borax lying around. And a tablespoon or so of some lemon essential oil left over from when I made laundry soap long long ago.

The results: 3 mongo-size IKEA containers of natural lemon-scented laundry soap. Plus 2 recycled spaghetti jars worth. But they weren't pretty so they didn't make it into the picture. So far I've done several loads of laundry and can't tell the difference from using commercial laundry detergent (as long as I'm diligent about pre-treating stains, which I always suck at).

Anybody else up to trying to make their own laundry soap? I think my sister tried a different recipe and wasn't as satisfied. Care to comment, sis?

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ADDENDUM: I made a second batch in June 2009 and took the time to calculate costs to make a batch.

--3 bars Kirk's Castile Bar Soap at $1.39 = $4.17
--16 cups Baking Soda (I used less than half of 12 pound bag from Costco that I bought for $5.88) = $2.94
--1 1/2 boxes 20 Mule Team Borax (76 oz. box for $4.39 at New Seasons) = $6.59
--Essential oils I had from earlier projects so I did not purchase any = free

TOTAL COST $13.70
YIELD: 36 cups using 1/8 cup per load = 288 loads
TOTAL COST PER LOAD = less than 5 cents