March Goals and Doings

March.  In like a lion, out like a lamb.  When it comes to weather, here's hoping for everyone' sakes.

But, hey, enjoy the shots of the "Bob Ross-esque" sunset we had one night.  I guess we'll be getting sunsets that are quite spectacular for at least a few years due to all of the stuff that got thrown into the atmosphere due to the Hunga Tonga volcanic eruptions the last few years.  

Side note:  If you want to see a movie of heartbreak, survival and human endurance, I can't recommend the movie Krakatoa The Last Days enough (warning though...it can, and probably will, make you cry).  It is based on real accounts from Krakatoa and it really teaches you a lot about volcanoes while you watch as well.   It is definitely worth a watch and is really well done.

Anyway, yeah, volcanoes.  Crazy stuff, but it leads to lots of stuff getting thrown into the atmosphere that leads to pretty sunsets and things.  

February was really busy with meetings for Alvah for all of his necessary evaluations for his three year check up and lots of running around having to find him a new winter coat (outgrew his overnight), new shoes (ditto) and things like that.  I also caught a stomach bug that has worked its way across the country and it took me in particular down hard here...the rest of the family was down for a day, while I was down for a week.  Not how I'd recommend losing five pounds quickly.  Thank goodness I'm feeling better.  Still popping tons of vitamins and eating super healthy for the sake of recovering my health after that whole mess.  So far, I'm doing okay, knock on wood.

Bright side, we only have one meeting left (the recap of all of the other meetings, meeting) and then we will hopefully be done with meetings for a little bit.  Medicaid is getting nasty about wanting to approve the medications that we need for Alvah to keep his mental health stable, so when our insurance goes up for renewal this year, I am going to call and talk to them about getting him on our family insurance as a second insurance.  With his type of Medicaid it isn't necessary, but they seem to not want to pay for what little I have required of them now, so it is time to seek alternatives to help alleviate the situation.

So, anyway, onto other things!

Well, believe it or not, despite swimming obligations for Armina (she's now a certified lifeguard, yay!!!) , meetings, sickness and other stuff, I actually had a bunch of stuff going on at the house as well.  So, let's get to some of it!

1.  One of my main personal goals when it came to this year was going through my kitchen stuff (and really stuff period) and if it doesn’t serve a current useful purpose, I decided it is time to start using them or, if I can’t find anything to do with some things, to just get rid of them.  When you have limited space, it seems like making it work efficiently becomes a huge priority, so that is what I’m always striving to do, so I looked at problems areas at the beginning of the year and tried to figure out how to make things be more efficient.

One of the things I decided I needed to make regular use of was my cast iron.  I also needed to figure out how to rehome said cast iron as I was keeping my cast iron skillets and pans in the bottom drawer of my oven (technically I guess it is a warmer drawer) and it did double-fold not great.  For one, it was warping the drawer, which is not heavy duty at all, with the weight of the pans, so the drawer was getting harder and harder to open and close as the bottom slowly deformed, but by stacking my pans on top of one another constantly in a warm environment, it was causing the oil that I cured the pans with to go rancid really fast and I was having to pull all the pans out of the drawer weekly to wash and then re-cure the pans.  And I’m not getting any younger, so lifting a heavy stack of cast iron up when I needed a pan or to put one away, or to lift them all up and down again to wash and cure them all, was becoming more and more of a pain (literally).

 I was watching one of the YouTube channels I watch occasionally one day  and saw that she had a cast iron pan rack in her small kitchen and thought, “You know, if she can fit it in her kitchen, I bet I can fit one in mine!”  I went looking on Amazon and realized that the cast iron pan racks were actually pretty reasonably priced, so I ordered one (after carefully measuring all of my pans and things) that would fit most of my cast iron pans.  It fits PERFECTLY in the space I measured it for (which is great when the measurements online are actually accurate) and it is so much nicer to pull pans in and out of it compared to the drawer in the oven (my husband thought of wall mounting the pans, but we just plain do not have the wall space in the kitchen to do it).  The drawer in the oven now houses my sheet pans, since they lay a lot more evenly in the drawer and disperse their weight better in the space and I put my cutting boards in the cabinet that used to home my sheet pans.  The system is working well, I am proud to say, if I can get my mind wrapped around where I stored everything and go to the right spot right away (like the sheet pans were in the same cabinet for 10 years, so yeah….it has been a transition to look for them in the oven drawer instead of the cabinet *laugh*).

I also had a cast iron griddle that I got for free that was out by a dumpster at a used store years ago that had some surface rust on it, but was in really good shape otherwise, so I had asked if I could have it and when they said yes, I brought it home and scrubbed the rust off and put an entire new seasoning onto the pan.  I was proud of it, but the downside to it was that at my old house the griddle would NOT work with the oven that I had and when we moved to our current house the stove still had really separated burners so the griddle didn’t work well there either as it would not heat evenly.  I didn’t want to get rid of the griddle, so I just ended up moving it from place to place over the years which kept it dry and all, but it still wasn’t functional.  I ran into it when cleaning/decluttering the last couple of months and was considering getting rid of it, when I looked at it for a second and thought, “Wait, this looks about the same size as the griddle that is built into my oven now”.  Sure enough I compared sizes and after quickly removing said current griddle and putting the middle burner onto my stove the cast iron griddle fit PERFECTLY!  Since then I’ve been actively trying to use it more and have grilled things like chicken on it and on the smooth side I cooked a big batch of sourdough English muffins on it just a little bit ago (most of the English muffins went into the freezer to use later on :).  Side note:  The English muffins are SO good!!!  They are so chewy and yummy, I highly recommend that recipe!  

I’m so happy to finally be able to use the grill pan for things.  I put it on a shelf where I can get to it easily and put my cast iron loaf pans and my smaller cast iron Dutch oven on the same shelf so I can get to things I use regularly without having to move things around the entire kitchen to get them. 

Note:  I am planning on giving a kitchen tour sometime soon…I’m just behind at this point, so you will see the cast iron rack I got here, hopefully soon :).

2.  As previously mentioned with the English muffins, I’ve gotten into small batch sourdough making the last few months.  I’ve found that small batch sourdough works for me perfectly as it takes a week to get the starter built up where I need it to be and then I use pretty much the entire starter on a batch of bread and pancakes or something else and then I start the process over again.  This way I don’t waste much starter (I’ve even used some of the discard starter to make tasty crackers the last bit, and by the way the crackers are delicious!  They have a cheesy taste even though they contain no cheese!) and I don’t end up baking a ton of stuff to use up said starter like other people I’ve seen online and things.  I bake, sure, but there are only three of us that actively eat what I bake with the sourdough, so I sure don’t want to end up baking a bunch of stuff that will ultimately go to waste.

Shot of  the sourdough discard crackers up above there.

Once summer hits and it gets too hot, I know that I won't be baking with sourdough much, so I'm having fun experimenting with it while I have the colder weather *laugh*.

I found a recipe that calls for mixing 50 grams of flour with 50 grams of water to feed the starter every day and then you discard half of what you put in every day, which has worked out well for me.  I also found that mixing in a bit of home ground flour (like half of the 50 grams per day that the method calls for) worked out well to make sure the starter had enough flour to feed on and wouldn’t run out of food too quickly (my kitchen can get pretty warm when I have baking and stuff to do and the starter will start to blow through the flour it has to feed on FAST without the home ground flour to help feed it), so it also gives me something to use home ground flour for, which is always nice :).

Oh and March, yeah, what are my goals there?  

3.  I’ve been watching a bunch of homestead/gardening channels/personal vlog channels on YouTube and it seems like a ton of channels share Costco or Azure Standard hauls on their channels and hoenstly I find that stuff neat to watch as it is kind of "how the other half live" for me.  I don’t have a Costco membership (nearest Costco is Anchorage and once I include fuel costs and things we keep deciding it isn’t worth it to get one) and Azure Standard doesn’t really work up here as the shipping costs get prohibitive to get the goods up here, at least for us.  So, unlike some others I’m down to Three Bears (who is a local outfit that buys things from Costco and marks them up, BUT tends to carry local items and also doesn’t require you to have a membership to shop there) and others places like Amazon to get different types of groceries.  So, I thought it would be kind of fun to start sharing my "grocery hauls" with you here, if for no other reason than to potentially help out those who live in the bush areas of Alaska who might be interested in what would ship, or not ship, up here and things.  I've gotten a few calls for help asking me to start up a coupon blog again (which it has been a long time since I did that) and while I can't really do that (coupons ain't what they used to be, for one thing), I figured I can at least point out some good deals (or not, who knows) of things I've gotten in the way of groceries and household items.  I've been supplementing my groceries with things I've found online for a while and it has really helped to help me get ahold of things that are super expensively locally or not available at all, or in some cases I would just find a really good deal on something and order it because it was cheap and I knew I wouldn't even BEGIN to get something that cheap nearby.  So, yeah, I thought I'd share some of those finds when I find them.

So, stay tuned for that aspect coming back to the blog a bit.  My way of shopping has definitely changed the last three years, so it might be fun for people who have read the blog for a while to see how my shopping habits have changed as well and how I'm stopping things from going to waste (I'll get more into that on another post).

4.  One big goal for March (meandering though the post is, yes, I do have some goals for this month) is to fix the two Lazy Susan cabinets in my kitchen.  My bottom cabinet is pretty much gone.  It needs the Lazy Susan part in it completely replaced as the old plastic shelves are nearly cracked in half on both shelves and attempts to repair said shelves have failed...we are pretty sure the plastic is just breaking down from age, but it has made the cabinet nearly useless as time went on as I've had to remove one thing after another from it to alleviate the weight on it so it doesn't completely break in half.  I was able to redeem all of my credit card rewards from the medical bills I had to put onto my credit card (if there is one bright side to anything is that my credit card gives me double rewards for medical stuff) and used them to purchase a brand new Lazy Susan insert for the cabinet (not cheap normal price).  We got the insert in a few weeks ago and my husband is taking measurements and things to make it work with our current cabinet set up (I still think we might end up having to hinge the cabinet doors to move them out of the way to use the cabinet insert, but I guess we shall see...it was the only insert I could find that would ship to Alaska, so we'll make it work one way or the other.  Heck I'd use it without cabinet doors at this point if it will make the cabinet workable again.

The spice cabinet Lazy Susan insert is having problems with bowing and things on the bottom shelf and is scraping on 1/2 of the shelf as it spins, so I'm working on a fix for that to make the shelf work again.  I really don't want to have to shell out for another insert for that cabinet, so we'll see what I can come up with :).

I've definitely got other goals I'm working on hammering out, but those are two of the biggies for this month.  

And yeah, I'm going to call it good for now on this post.  I know, it's kind of short compared to the amount of time that has passed, but I've really just been in the "get through day to day while recovering health and energy" mode for the last month, so you sure haven't missed much.  I SHOULD be up to more stuff this month as I'm feeling better, so here's hoping :).  I hope your February went well and now onto March!!!