It's getting cold in here, so put on all your clothes

From earlier in the season:

After a lovely warm fall, winter is finally here with it's chilly, damp weather. Although our flat is newly insulated, we are scrooges with our electricity and haven't turned on our heat pump, which can make for some pretty chilly mornings typing away at the computer. I should mention at this point that although I am Canadian, I am definitely the biggest wimp in the flat when it comes to the cold. Show me a still, -30°C morning, and I'll tell you I want to go cross country skiing across a frozen lake, but sit me down on the couch inside, and I turn into a shivering wimp. I can only guess that it came from growing up in houses that are centrally heated, automatically ventillated, and very well insulated, so the entire house is kept at a comfortable 19°C. Even in student housing we were warm – the arrangement in Canada is that your landlord pays for your heating so that low income households don't go without heat in the winter. It's taken me a while to get used to the housing and heating here (where you won't die if your heating gets turned off), and after five years of living in (and loving) NZ, I still haven't quite gotten the hang of not feeling the cold like my Kiwi flatmates. So for everyone else who feels the cold, I dedicate this blog to you.

As you might imagine, not turning on the heat pump when things are frozen outside is a little chilly, so here is my “how to deal with the cold” checklist, inspired by Bugs Bunny cartoons and the ways Canadians deal with the cold. If I get through this checklist and still feel chilly, then I'll stage a revolution and reach for the heat pump remote.

1. Layer up right away. Don't wait until you're already cold to put on more clothes, put them on first thing in the morning. Warming your body back up takes far more energy than keeping it warm.

2. Break out those long undies. Do you remember watching Bugs Bunny cartoons as a kid? Remember when the characters lost their clothes how they would have long underwear underneath? You should too! You never know when a cross-dressing rabbit is going to trick you out of your clothing... If it's really cold I wear two pairs of long johns, a wool singlet and a long-sleeved wool top.

3. Liner socks, wooly socks AND slippers. Ning measured the air temperature of his bedroom at floor and desk level. Floor level was a full two degrees colder than desk height. Blood flows from your feet back through the rest of your body. If your tootsies are chilly, the rest of you will be too.

4. Fleecy goodness. I have a few pairs of fleece pants scored from an op-shop. Layered on top of long johns, they are so cosy and warm! Fleece sweaters are great too. Pick a large one with a hood) so you can fit a light woolen sweater underneat (two layers of fleece together will bunch), then put up that hood. Don't worry about looking like a hooligan in your own home.

5. Accessorise. You might be surprised at how much warmer you'll feel with fingerless gloves, a neck warmer and a touque (a beanie to the Kiwis). Fingerless gloves don't hamper your typing or your grip, so they're handy to wear around the house. If you can crochet, make a circle to fit loosely around your lower arm, and continue until you have a tube going up to your thumb. Drop sections of stitches so your tube gets narrower and you leave holes for your thumb and fingers to poke out. I'm sorry I can't explain better – I can bring my gloves to the prize-giving to show anyone who is interested. A neck warmer is a tube usually made of wool or fleece that you wear like a scarf. It's handy because it doesn't come undone and there are no floppy ends to dip in your tea. If you're like me and get a stiff neck and shoulders from the cold a neck warmer can really help relieve the tension. Even though you're wearing the hood from your sweater, adding a touque underneath can make a world of difference. Most of the heat lost from your body comes out from the top of your head, so put a lid on it.

6. A housecoat. My thanks to Elmer Fudd for the inspiration for this one. When he comes home from a busy day of wabbit hunting he doffs his jacket and puts on a housecoat. It occurred to me that I can do this too! So I went and bought a lovely, long, soft, snuggly housecoat. It's so big it fits over all my other layers and hangs down to my knees, so it covers my entire torsoe and makes me feel oh so snuggly.

7. If you're still chilly it's time to add some heat. Grab a hot water bottle or (better yet), a hard plastic drink bottle. This is a great use for that old Nalgene that leaks BPAs into the water because the cylinder shape makes it release the heat more slowly (and therefore longer) than a hot water bottle, they fit inside an old holey rugby sock, and you're not going to drink the BPAs. If you don't have a Nalgene, you can get a similar effect from a hot water bottle with a cosy. Fill the bottle with boiling water and sit on it. Dave worked out that it costs about 4 cents to boil a kettle, and the heat from the bottle will last for a couple hours, compared to about 60 cents to run a heat pump for two hours. The heat from the bottle is trasferred direclty to your skin and blood stream, making it a far more efficient use of energy.

   Another great heat source is hot drinks. The chilly air can be hard on your immune system so Natalie and I make drinks high in vitamin C with dried mandarin peel, lemon peel, lemon juice, apple cider vinegar and dried rose hips (now is the perfect time of year to cut, seed and dry them). Sage and oil of oregano are also good additions for fighting colds or nipping them in the bud. Add a little honey for sweetness and extra cold-fighting power.

8. Cuddle under a blanket. And if you're STILL cold, grab a blanket and a cat/flatmate/boyfriend/dog for a good warm cuddle.

9. Now you can turn on the heating.

My list might seem a bit excessive, and people with a less Scottish background might wonder why I haven't just turned on the heat pump, but I abhore waste in all its forms, including wasted energy and money. It is currently 7° outside and has been cloudy and rainy all day, so there was no sun to warm the house. It's probably about 10° in here. I am sitting on the couch typing away with everything on my list up to item 8 except the extra long john, gloves and neck warmer (because I got too warm). I am not the least bit tempted to turn on the heat pump.

If you are what you eat, then I don't want to live in a package

If you are what you eat, then I don't want to live in a package

I try to cook enough to have leftovers for lunch so we're eating healthy lunches and avoiding canned soups, beans and cheese toasties. Canned foods aren't terrible, they have their uses, but they are processed salty foods, not as healthy as fresh foods, and though their packaging is recyclable, our veges usually have no packaging at all. There is also some evidence to suggest that toxins from the plastic lining in cans leaches into the food (ick!). Cheese toasties also are not terrible, especially if you make them like us with home made wholemeal bread and fresh onion, garlic, basil, parsley and/or mushrooms (yum!), but they use a lot of cheese, and dairying is quite polluting, even in NZ where the cows are pasture fed and (by international standards) generally well cared-for.

We've also been on a mission to eat less chocolate and biscuits. Lets face it, they're tasty, but unhealthy and their origin and packaging usually isn't very eco. This has probably been our simplest change of all. We put a bowl of pre-washed and dried fruit on the coffee table in the lounge. Now, when we start to get peckish between meals, the closest, easiest thing to eat is a piece of fruit, and not the chocolate or biscuits that are all the way in the kitchen. I usually find that a piece of fruit will satisfy or delay most chocolate or biscuit cravings, and if I do still want some I usually eat less. Our chocolate and biscuit consumption has plummeted, and we're eating 3-6 pieces of healthy, fresh fruit per day. Incidentally, it's still winter, but our winter sniffles have gone...

Not everyone has the time or space for a large garden. If you're limited in either I recommend growing rocket, silverbeet, mint and italian parsley. These three will grow all winter with no fuss (mine didn't mind being snowed under), and can be made into salad, soup, frittata or pesto (see below). In the early autumn I sprinkled rocket, radish, lettuce mix and spring onion seeds on a patch of dirt, watered them, and left them alone. Don't weed your veggies unless the weeds are out-competing your food; the weeds act as a living mulch, keep the soil moist, and add organic matter when they die. I've only weeded my garden once this year, and it's been supplying us with fresh greens all winter. The plants are big enough now that they're shading out the weeds, though only the rocket and radishes survived the cold. I'll let them go to seed and replant themselves for next year since I see no need to interfere in the process. My garden may not look pretty, but I spend all of 20 minutes per week tending to it, and it keeps on feeding us. We are currently growing rocket, silverbeet, mint, italian parsley, garlic, aloe, feverfew, sage, beetroot, lettuce, lavender, thai basil, radishes, leeks, beans, micro-greens, and a few other seeds I planted but I can't remember and will figure them out when they sprout :). A few weeks ago we planted a garden for my mother-in-law with the easy-to-grow four above and lettuce. She says they're growing like mad and she hasn't had to water or weed them yet.

As you might have guessed, we have a glut of fresh produce, so now we're back to the point of this blog – waste not. We often buy cans of soup and beans for quick lunches, but last week they were $2 per can. I'd spent the past week trying to fit as many veges into our dinners as possible so we could eat them all before they went off, then it clicked that I could make large quantities of soups and freeze them for lunches. I'm not sure why I didn't do it before! I'll put the recipes in the next post for any who would like to follow-suit.

As promised, here the recipes we made in order to eat less canned food and more fresh produce (with ingredient origins in brackets). This project was inspired by an excellent book about eating local produce called Animal Vegetable Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver (www.animalvegetablemiracle.com/). I highly recommend it.

Soup broth

It's worth making a broth first to add richness to your soups. It seems such a waste to me to make broth with veges that could be used for another purpose, so I make mine with bits and pieces that have a nice flavour but are tough or stringy and normally discarded. While you're making dinner put the items below into a container. Store it in the freezer until you have enough to make a broth.

In a crock pot combine any of the following:

• dark, outer celery leaves

• dark tops of leeks

• inner onion peel (the layer that's partly juicy, partly brown – the brown bits add colour)

• broccoli, cauliflower and cabbage stalks

• parsley stems

• herbs from your garden or foraging missions

• carrot tops

• apple and pear cores (got this from a book about the middle ages-they add a nice sweetness)

• lemon rinds (wakes up the broth)

• pumpkin peel and seeds

• parsnip peel

• inner garlic peel with the oils on it

• capsicum seeds

• meat bones, cut open to expose the marrow if possible (butchers will do it, or (carefully!) cut well cooked chicken bones with a large, sharp knife)

• salt, pepper

Add just enough water to cover the veges, cook on low overnight, cool, strain through a colander, and save for future use. Congratulations, you've just made something useful (and tasty!) for free.

Pumpkin soup

Main ingredients

2 onions (foraged)

3 cloves garlic (co-op)

1 pumpkin (foraged)

2 stalks celery (foraged)

1 cup beans (soaked overnight) or lentils (Binn Inn)

minced ginger (foraged)

parsley (garden)

rosemary (community garden)

salt

pepper

nutmeg

enough broth to cover veges

Thai option

1 tbsp green curry paste (supermarket)

1 can coconut cream (supermarket)

Western option

1-2 cups something creamy (i.e. cream, sour cream, yoghurt, milk of any variety) (supermarket)

½ cup white wine (supermarket)

1. Fry onion until clear, add garlic for a minute, then dump in crock-pot.

2. Pour some broth into the frying pan and scrub with your spoon to de-glaze the pan. Dump broth into crock pot.

3. Add the rest of the main ingredients, pour in rest of broth, and cook until pumpkin is soft.

4. Cool, then blend until smooth

5. Add either the Thai or Western option ingredients, reheat and serve or freeze in portions

Carrot Ginger Soup

This is pretty much the same as my pumpkin soup, but with carrots instead of pumpkin. Add more ginger and use the “western” option.

Beef Stew

The protein in this comes mostly from the beans. The beef is just there for flavour – omit for a vege option.

3 onions (foraged)

5 cloves garlic (co-op)

½ cabbage (foraged)

2 carrots (co-op)

1 parsnip (co-op)

rosemary (community garden)

parsley (garden)

sage (garden)

silverbeet (neighbour's garden)

1 head broccoli (co-op)

¼ pumpkin (co-op)

tomato (foraged)

2 potatoes (co-op)

2 cups beans (soaked overnight) (Binn Inn)

200 g beef mince (supermarket)

1 cup barley (normally from Binn Inn, but this was from the supermarket)

nutmeg, cloves, peppercorns, turmeric, oregano, salt, pepper (Binn Inn)

broth

1. Fry onion until clear, add garlic for a minute, then dump in crock-pot.

2. Pour some broth into the frying pan and scrub with your spoon to de-glaze the pan. Dump broth into crock pot.

3. Add the rest of the main ingredients, cover with broth, and cook until beans are tender.

4. Cool and freeze in portions.

frittata

1 onion (foraged)

3 cloves garlic (co-op)

parsley (garden)

rosemary (community garden)

silverbeet (neighbour's garden)

rocket (garden)

5 free range eggs (supermarket)

a bit of milk (supermarket)

a few slices feta cheese (optional; supermarket)

salt and pepper (Binn Inn)

1. chop onion, mince garlic, mince parsley, roughly chop silverbeet and rocket

2. In a cast iron frying pan fry onion until clear, add garlic for a minute.

3. Beat eggs and milk, add salt and pepper

4. Add parsley, rosemary, silverbeet and rocket to frying pan, pour in eggs.

5. Cook until edges set, then sprinkle with feta, remove handle (if necessary), and put pan in oven on grill until top turns golden.

6. We served it with a foraged and garden salad, and foraged oven chips.

Pesto

We loved Jan's pesto recipe, so we modified it to suit what we have available. The result is a yummy, super healthy raw pasta sauce rich in iron and vitamin C that we can whip up in less time than it takes to cook the pasta. This is now our favourite meal when we come home late.

1 handful silverbeet leaves (neighbour's garden)

1 handful rocket (garden)

1 handful parsley leaves (garden)

3 cloves garlic (co-op)

¼ cup olive oil (supermarket)

¼ cup mixes seeds and nuts (whatever we have on hand) (foraged or Binn Inn)

juice half a lemon (co-op or foraged)

1. Throw it in a food processor

2. turn it on...

3. serve over wholemeal pasta with a bit of cheese

Enjoy!

Laura

Things I wish I'd known at the start of winter

1. Closing the lounge door makes the lounge warm up a LOT. We have nice big North-facing windows in our lounge which warm the room up nicely (just not the entire house).

2. We're on night rates power. From 9 pm to 7 am we pay 19 cents per kw/h, but in the daytime we pay 29 cents per kw/h (!). The price difference is because during peak hours (day time) power generation companies often have to bring their coal plants online, which is expensive. So it's both cheaper (if you're on night rates) and better for the environment (regardless) to use power at night. We've started turning our hot water cylinder off during the day, and only turning it on every other night, which saves us a good chunk off our power bill. Contact energy has a nifty little graph thing on their website so you can see your hourly power usage. Our usage drops down to nearly nil during the daytime now, when it was pretty constant before. We're also using less power in total by turning the cylinder off. We have a moderately insulated cylinder with a sleeping bag wrapped around it, so it stays warm enough for 2-3 showers over the full two days We try to do our washing in the evening now too, even though all our loads are now done in cold water the washing machine will still use a reasonable amount of power. If we need to have the oven on for something other than dinner we try to do it either while the oven is already hot anyway, or after 9 pm.

3. We can use the heat pump and it won't cost a fortune. The heat pump is set to turn on for 15 minutes at 6:45 am to warm the lounge to 16 degrees while we're still on night rates. It normally takes .8 kw hours to do this, so it costs us about 15 cents per day, and it means that the lounge isn't freezing when we get up. It also dries the condensation on the windows and gives the sun a good kick start so that by noon the lounge is normally about 17-18 degrees.

4. Sew the curtain linings onto the lounge window first. I did the bedroom (also a large window) at the atart of winter, but we heat the lounge...

Waste Not

Something happened to our culture somewhere between my grandparents' generation and mine. I can remember cooking dinner with my grandmother watching her scrape the last bit of butter into the pan, parroting that timeless classic, “waste not, want not”. My grandfather too, used to save all sorts of bits and pieces so that when the plumbing broke he would have the piece he needed to fix it. This was normal to me growing up, and yet now anyone of my generation who dares to save things for future use is a hoarder. If you gather fruits and nuts from park trees you're cheap. And if you dry, pickle, can or extract every last bit of useful food, then you're “wasting your time”, because apparently, “time is money”. Well I hate to break it to you, but time is time, and money is money, and frankly, I think time is far more useful. I don't know about you, but I don't get $24 free every day. I do get 24 hours though, and I try not to waste them, just like I try not to waste my food.

There is something you should know about me before we start – I'm Scottish. That means I enjoy porridge, don't mind sleet and snow, love a good misty night, have a fiery temper, and the clasp on my wallet is rusted shut. Living cheaply isn't about having piles of cash in the bank to roll around in once a year, it's about only using what you need, having something to fall back on in hard times, and leaving the rest for others. In hard economic times (and good), when you might lose your job at any time, it's comforting to know that you can live on 10 grand for a year, and that it's really not that bad.

There are 1001 ways to save money, but the topic I'll focus on today is food. You might be wondering why I'm writing about saving money on food for a blog about sustainability, but I've learned something this winter: cheap food = healthy food = eco food.

I sometimes hear people say they can't afford to be green, or they can't afford healthy food, and this puzzles me. The cheapest, healthiest food is that which is least processed: fruits and veges (local and in season are cheapest), wholegrains (barley, rice), and dried pulses. Even if you buy all these at a supermarket, you can still make a stew for under $1 per serving. Granted, organics are expensive, but non-organic produce is still far better than anything processed and packaged. We buy our staple items (grains, flours, beans, spices) at Binn Inn because they're cheaper and unpackaged. Our favourite source of fruits and veges is Christchurch itself. We get about half of our fresh food from our garden, the neighbour's garden, and foraging sites around city (google otautahi urban foraging). The other half comes from a local church's vege co-op. If you don't have access to a co-op, the local markets and fruit and vege shops usually have good prices too. Anything else we need comes from the supermarket, but as their products are usually processed, packaged and expensive we're trying to cut back on what we buy there.

When foraging we often get a large load of one type of food (e.g., apples). We either preserve the produce by bottling, pickling, drying, or freezing, or give it to our neighbour, who in turn gives us all the silverbeet we want and meat from her work (she brings home leftover cuts from work that would otherwise be thrown away). So far this fall and winter we've pickled ginger and cabbage, frozen roasted sliced capsicum, and frozen fruits as we find them for making jam at a later date.

In the developed world we waste enough food to feed every single person on the planet. This is not an exaggeration, if anything it's an understatement. With that in mind, I've been on a mission to use every last useful bit of the food we get. I've dried mint, sage, mandarin peel and lemon peel for teas, and parsley, basil, rosemary, garlic shoots (chive substitute), and celery leaves for use in cooking. Drying plants and peels is easy, I just string them up in a warm, dark, dry place with good air circulation. Our laundry room works well.

I've also started planning meals more carefully so we use up produce before it goes off. If our co-op bag of veggies has leafy greens in it, we use those first to avoid that floppy, limp bit of silverbeet sitting in the fridge on Sunday. Our favourite new uses for silverbeet (in order of preference) include saag (palak) curries, pesto, frittatas, Jan's silverbeet and filo pie, and spanakopitas (tasty, but a lot of work and dairy, so they're a “sometimes food” ;). Fresh inner celery leaves are lovely in salads, and cauliflower and broccoli leaves are great in stir fries within a few days of bringing them home. We don't throw away the dark tops of leeks either, they are full of flavour and can be used in soups if they're going to cook for a while. To keep track of what produce needs using up we've started using one crisper drawer for old produce, and one for new. We also rotate our bowl of roasting veggies so the new stuff goes at the bottom. This way we know exactly what needs using up and can cook appropriately.

Enjoy your dinner tonight!

Laura