Home Made Laundry Detergent (Brick)!

Co-Conspirator Jess and I finally got to have our first Homesteading Date this weekend. We successfully completed two DIY greeny projects, and we're excited to share them with you.

We'll start with Home Made Laundry Detergent!

So convinced were we of this fool-proof recipe that we made a triple batch.  Here's the recipe, via everyone's favorite vegan super-crunchy blogger, Bonzai Aphrodite.

Single Batch (we tripled these amounts)
1 1/4 cups vinegar
1 cup baking soda
1 cup washing soda
1 cup borax
1/4 cup liquid castile soap

Vinegar + sodas and borax

You have to start with the vinegar, then add the baking soda, washing soda, and borax. The mixture will fizz and foam (yay!). We found it valuable to have one person continually stirring (Jess), while one person measured and poured (me).

Once you have that mixture fizzing and spitting away, add the castile soap. We used Dr. Bronner's Magic Soap, peppermint scent. Not because we like our clothes to smell like Certs, but because we both had a bottle in this scent. Probably because that's the one they have most often at Trader Joe's. We added about 20 drops of lavender essential oil to the mixture to cut the very sharp scent of the castile soap. The mint scent wasn't unpleasant, just strong. The lavender had a nice mellowing effect.

This stuff really is magical.

AugDog came by to supervise the science experiment. He got bored quickly when he realized we didn't have anything that he could eat.

Once you've stirred in all your ingredients, you have completed about 1/3 of the necessary elbow grease. This recipe requires A LOT of stirring. Stop stirring, Bonsai warned, and you'll end up with a rock-hard brick of soap. So we stirred. And then stirred some more.
As you stir, the mixture will start to take on a sort of cakey appearance and texture. KEEP STIRRING!  We kept stirring until the soap easily formed a nice little cohesive clump of detergent in my hand when I scooped it out.

It looked like this when we stopped.

We split up our glorious home-made all-natural laundry soap and I took my portion home in a plastic storage container. I was sooooo excited to try it out.

And then I tried to scoop some out to do a load of laundry last night. And discovered that I had not a jaunty container of DIY laundry soap goodness, but a laundry soap brick.

Chisel or scoop?

I think it is still usable, I'll just have to break it up before use. Not ideal. I emailed Jess about the brick situation, and she said that her soap was still soft and cakey!  So maybe my soap just ended up baking in our hothothot apartment? Who knows. I'll try it out with some actual laundry and let you know how what happens.
Jess, any words of wisdom to share with the blogosphere?

Stay tuned for our escapades in home-made natural deodorant!

A Case Study in Will Power Failure

It's the 25th of July, and I have to say, I have done pretty well with this month's MISSION IMPOSSIBLE. I've talked myself out of numerous JCrew *Extra 30% Off!* sale purchases, and deleted my Anthropologie Summer Sale email without even opening it. I haven't even gone to Target this month.

But then this morning I got off the Metra at the train station and was dazzled by the UP TO 40% OFF! STORE CLOSING! posters slathered over every centimeter of the station Borders.

My heart pounded. I started talking myself down from the urge to loot the whole store. But I knew how this Blowout Sale would go down. By this afternoon, that store will look like a swarm of ravenous locusts had descended upon it. You'd just find a few Happy Horses 2011 calendars and some slow cooker cook books lying disheveled on the floor. Tumble weeds would blow through the aisles. People would be disassembling the book cases and carrying away the wood.

But still, I tried to resist. Until I saw a 40% OFF sign hanging from the magazine section.

Oh. Joy.

I felt a serious daze come over me, and I walked straight to the rack and yanked out 5 - YES FIVE - of the magazines I have not let myself ever buy. The magazines that I only graze my fingers over adoringly in book stores because I do not know anyone who subscribes, and I refuse to pay $6 for them.

Ok, technically I have bought Martha Stewart Weddings before, but only when I was engaged. And I can justify that one as a "work expense" for my wedding flower side gig. I have not justification for the other stuff.
So with just 7 days to go until the end of the No Buy July, I failed. I got a really super deal on something that never EVER goes on sale and brings me a great deal of enjoyment. But I still failed. I'm going to console myself with the decision to not crack them open until my vacation next month, since I would have inevitably bought magazines for the flight.

Sigh. I guess one $16 failure this month is still better than I do most months on impulse purchasing. Maybe I'll go over these mags in urgent, delighted detail on the plane and then realize that they were not worth the $16 or the mission failure. Or, maybe I'll remember that magazines are one of my chief joys in life and clutch them to my chest with glee. It could really go either way.

In the interest of full disclosure, I did also buy a very BIG purchase last week, but it was planned, budgeted for, and sales-stalked for quite a while. I'm on the fence about keeping it, but if I do, I'll definitely give it a Big Reveal on the blog.

The Basil Tree

I thought I should include some snaps of our newly adopted Basil Tree before its inevitable demise:

We got this towering beauty from the Evanston Farmer's Market last weekend. Her billowy stalks of perky, delicious leaves wooed us, and her $8 price tag sold us. Spend $3 per 15-leaf pack at the grocery store a few times, and you'll easily be charmed by what looks like a perpetual Pizza, Pesto, and Fresh Sauce tree.

We've had her almost a week, and the heat is causing me to wring my hands in worry. I told the farmer that I had killed my little organic basil plant from Whole Foods. "What happened to it?" he asked. "It looked droopy and thirsty all the time, so I watered it, but it's leaves turned yellow and eventually fell off." He informed me that I had over watered it. Boo. He assured me that the Basil Tree should be pretty hearty, and that it needed sunlight and adequate, but not too much water. My herb-growing friend Liz suspects this particular Basil Tree may be root bound, and recommends that I think about getting a bigger pot. But then it wouldn't fit on the window sill, so would it get enough sunlight? Hmm. We'll have to rig something up. Maybe we re-pot the beautiful behemoth into two separate pots, and put them on a side table. I'll keep you posted.

In the meantime, Liz and I whipped up an almost-vegan dinner of random stuff inspired by the Basil Tree herself:

Polenta with marinara and fresh basil, three-bean salad (from Trader Joe's), and lemon butter green beans. A little butter and fresh lemon juice turn green beans into my Favorite Vegetable. And other than that pat of butter, this plate is animal-product free. And Crazy Delish.

Hippie Chickens

Les and I keep discussing leaning into vegan diets, and I have to admit that I'm convinced that it would be the best diet for the planet and my arteries. But I just can't give up cheese. I LOVE cheese. With all my cholesterol-choked heart.

I see cheese as my primary vegan roadblock, but I I have also grown to appreciate the practical and tasty elegance of eggs, especially considering how processed and packaged most meat substitutes are (even tofu).  So while I keep practicing my vegan recipes and stretch my experience with non-meat protein, I've also gotten into egg dishes over the past couple of years. But I can't stomach the knowledge of the truly horrific conditions under which most of those eggs are produced. Which is why I'm very happy that Les and I shook on a deal to go ahead and spend the $6 a dozen it costs to buy only real cage-free eggs from now on.

We've been buying our eggs from the Farmers Market in Rogers Park since this winter, but I'd never actually talked with any of the farmers to check and make SURE that the chickens that laid our cute little eggs were really as happy-go-lucky as I wanted to image them. Since, you know, the terms "cage-free" and "free range" are not regulated by any governing body. I could slap a "cage free" label on apple sauce if I wanted to, and no one would stop me. Anyway, this weekend I talked to the kindly farmer who sold me my dozen eggs from Midnight Sun Farms.

Me:  Can you tell me more about your eggs?
Farmer:  Sure. Our chickens live in a pasture during the day, and roost in a coop at night. They do not live in a cage. They eat bugs, and an organic meal ration, and also get some left over hops from a local brewery, which they seem to really like. These eggs were laid sometime this week and were transported from only about an hour away. So you can't really get any fresher eggs unless you have your own chickens.
Me: Cool! I'll take a dozen.
Farmer:  Did you have any other questions?
Me: Nope. Just wanted to know how these eggs are different from the other eggs sold here.
Farmer: They're not. Except ours are about $1 cheaper.
Me: Even Better. Keep up the good work.

If anything about this exchange strikes you as ridiculous, check out my favorite Portlandia clip:

The farmer was so resigned to his "city-living socialist left-wing hippie freaks who want to know if the chicken who laid their eggs had friends, and what her favorite flower is, and whether the other chickens in the pasture are nice to her" speech that I felt like I should try to cheer him up. Maybe I'll send him a thank-you card to give to his chickens.

Midnight Sun Farms in Grayslake

The makings of a tasty egg sandwich

Look at that beautiful yolk!

I read in The Omnivore's Dilemma that you can tell if a chicken was really cage-free by whether the egg white stays really close to the yolk when you crack it. Something about how exercise effects the protein structure. This one checks out!

Delish finished product. YUM.

Frugal Food

We've had some successful food experiments over at the G3 apartment this week. Which I think only happened because I also didn't have any after-work plans. Seriously - working moms, or any moms, HOW DO YOU DO IT?

I wasn't sure we could really scrape together a week's work of dinners and lunches without going back to the store, but we did it. Regretably, our kitchen is too revolting for me to have taken any photos of our successes. No, really. I was assembling our dinner plates on straightened-out stacks of dirty dishes last night. You know - you put the dirty plate on top of the dirty cooking pot to make it level and hide the dirty utensils inside the pot and then put your clean dinner plate on top of the teetering pile and scoop on your delicious creation. TMI? That's how we roll in the Shoebox With Scant Countertops.

Last night was my favorite Kitchen Win: Bootleg Bean Chilaquiles. I've never actually eaten chilaquiles, but they always smell delish when other people order them, and decided that I had everything we needed to do a version. Everything except fresh cilantro, which I am avoiding until I can find organic.

I cut up some corn tortillas with kitchen shears and toasted them in some butter in the skillet, making quite delectable little frito-like semi-crunchy corn shreds. Removed them from the pan and set aside. Then I used the hot pan and a tiny bit more butter to cook up the chopped remains of an onion that has been in our fridge for almost too long. Added the leftover black beans, heated them up, then took our two remaining cage-free farmers market eggs and scrambled them in with the beans and onions. Then you just put some of the fried tortilla shreds on a plate, top with the egg/bean/onion mixture, and then top that tasty pile with salsa and avocado. And cheese of course.

Cleaned out the fridge and enjoyed a delish mish-mash of stuff for about, um, $1 per person. SCORE. 

Trial and Error

So guess what? It's July 5 and Les and I have already spent over half of our newly-winnowed grocery budget, and have gone $11 over our monthly "food not cooked at home" budget! Whoo-hoo! It's gonna be a fun month.

It's so weird. When I was in grad school, I honestly and truly ate saltines and peanut butter some weeks because I ran out of money. Friends were sending me Trader Joe's gift cards in the mail because they suspected I was broker than broke. Les lived on a grad school budget for EIGHT YEARS. So how did we go from penny pinching rock stars to overspending freakos in just a few short years?

I guess you could also ask how I went from marathon runner to never-runner in just 2 years.

The answer, I think, is the same for both. Slacking off on the discipline that makes certain things in one's life run smoothly and naturally. When I committed to the marathon, I committed to early morning runs. I committed to not wearing high heels for 6 months, to eating and not eating foods that fit my training. I knew I would not be able to go out with my friends every time I wanted to, or stay out late before a long run. But it was OK, because everyone knew I had my Eye on the Prize. And that eventually your life would go back to normal.

Same with budgeting and living well with less. When you're in grad school, you have this goal of finishing up your degree and then getting on with your life. There's a light at the end of the tunnel. A goal. And everyone knows about it. You can put up with ramen and sly gifts of pantry staples from friends because you know that in a couple of years you'll be able to buy our own darn pasta, thank you very much....

So how do you define what you hope will be a New Normal? Hopefully this blog will help some with the accountability. But we're really going to have to re-learn how we eat, shop, and spend quality time with our friends. Because we ate out 4 times this long weekend (ONE WEEKEND!) and there went our whole pot of money for the month. There are other ways to hang out with people you love, so I've just got to bit the bullet and suggest a walk, or an ice cream cone rather than dinner and drinks. The point is the "together", not the spending, right?

Yeah, well, that's the update so far on this month of trial-and-error as we try to put our money where our "live well and spend less" mouths are. 

July Gray Hair Update and... Mission Impossible

Well blogfriends, it's July. Hard to believe, considering I have felt "summer hot" exactly one day so far since May. Oh, and Chicago got golf ball-sized hail barfed all over its north side it last night (thanks to our official sponsor of summer - Freaky Weather). But even if I have to squint at my calendar and rub my eyes in disbelief, my roots know that another month has passed....

Lots of you who know about the G3 Experiment come up to me and say things like "But I don't really see that much gray!", which is true, weirdly - you don't notice it so much from straight on...

Me in my office cube!

You would, however, see a growing epicenter of kinky, chemically unscathed white if you were tall enough to view my head from above...

My gray hair + florescent overhead lighting. Unnaturally extra white, but realistic for where I spend most of my day.

So, progress. There were only a few days in June where I wanted to sneak incognito to Target and buy a bottle of dye. Those days are fewer and fewer every month.

That was the hair update. Now, on to MISSION IMPOSSIBLE
Les and I decided (actually, I decided for us, since I am the CFO of our household) that July 1 was going to mark the start of our new Fiscal Year. We need a fresh start. A realistic picture of our sitch-ee-a-shun, now that we are officially a one-income family again.

We'd both sort of lived it up last year for the first time in our adult lives. Having 2 incomes felt like a big gasp of breathing room after years and years of tight grad school/crap job/student loan hell budgets. Starbucks? Don't mind if I do! Buy my lunch every day this week? Why not!  Don't you think Auggie could use $42 worth of treats this month? Why yes, yes I do! Whoo-hoo!! We're grown ups now! We can buy things! Word to the wise: Good Grown Ups are responsible, and they have impulse control.

Fast Forward to the end of June, and I'm getting twitchy that my latte days are far far behind me now.

With bank statements in hand, I turned to the nifty free budget planning tool over at Google Docs and plugged in my income and all our fixed expenses. Feeling pretty good about those numbers, I started playing with the other stuff. The groceries. The Eating Out. The Random *EXTRA 30% OFF* JCrew purchases. You know. The stuff you have to really wrangle to the ground if you're going to stick to a budget.

My first set of "dream budget" figures ended up with us being $141 in the hole every month. Boooo. After some jockeying and trimming, I came up with a budget that would leave us with about $30 extra every month. Which I promise you we will need, since are BOTH Spendy McSpendertons at our house. The learning curve could be tearful.

The New Budget for FY 2011-2012 does include some discretionary money for both of us, so I can get my latte fix every once in a while, and not have to pass up the perfect clearance-rack skirt if it is really awesome. But the reality is that I have way WAY too much stuff as it is.

Which brings us to the MISSION.
To not buy anything that I do not actually need for my daily life for the entire month of July.

You heard me.

NOTHING.

No magazines, shoes, organic paraben-free mascara, funky earrings, or $2200 oil paintings of cows. (Yes, I am pining for a cow painting I saw at a cafe on Wednesday. I even asked Les if I could buy it when I sell my car).

Think I can do it? If so, cheer me on. July is looking like a looooong month from my chair. I'm hoping July can really kick-start a commitment to living simply. Or at least help me be grateful for all the great stuff I already have.