Simple Living Tool of the Week

Amazon.com: The Best Skillet Recipes: What's the Best Way to Make Lasagna With Rich, Meaty Flavor, Chunks of Tomato, and Gooey Cheese, Without Ever Turning on the Oven or Boiling a P

I love to cook. I love leafing through cookbooks, making up the menus and grocery lists, and most of all I love adding those one or two ingredients the recipe didn't call for or using that new technique I learned on the cooking channel. Cooking has been a hobby of mine through most my teenage years and into my adult life.

It was when I was first married that I realized my habits in the kitchen were a little out of hand. I made good food, but in the process I used and dirtied every dish in the house in a whirling, frenzied, sauteeing, deep-frying tornado. A lot of enjoyment was sapped from perfectly delicious meals because the my mind was filled the images of the mountain of dishes in the sink, the burnt food spilled on the stove-tops, and the over-flowing trash-can: easily an hour's worth of clean-up for both me and my husband.

Over the last couple years, I made small changes here and there, but it was when we started talking about moving into the yurt that I got serious about living simply in the kitchen, since our yurt kitchen would be a camping stove and a small section of wall along the outside of the one, large, round room.

Of course, this was quickly turned into an excuse to buy a book, and, serendipitously, I was soon presented with just the right. It was during the local NPR station's fund drive that Chris Kimball was a guest on the mid-morning call-in show, answering questions and promoting the give-away gift: America's Test Kitchen and Cook Illustrated's skillet cookbook. Perfect, thought I, just what I am looking for. But instead of pledging $150 to the NPR station, I bought it for $35 at Barnes and Noble. It's their own fault; the news that day was full of people telling me how poor and destitute I am.

The book has been a success. I have been learning to make whole meals which need only a skillet, spatula, cutting board, and knife to prepare, and only those things need washing up afterward. Every recipe has a detailed account of the process the test kitchen went through to arrive at the final product, for instance why they use soft tofu instead of firm to make crispy fried tofu. Reading it is just like watching ATK on the public television station.

The first recipes I tried involve making a sauce in the skillet and adding dry pasta right to the sauce. Not only does this eliminate the need for a pasta-pot of boiling water, but the pasta itself is more flavorful because it is absorbing more than just salted water. Thinking environmentally, it takes a lot of BTUs to boil a pot of water, so one can save half the energy of a traditional pasta meal while making the same amount of food.

I wish I could review more of the individual recipes, but I must admit that my cooking style usually prohibits me from actually following recipes. Don't tell the folks at ATK, though, because after testing and tweaking any given recipe one-hundred plus times, they do not take kindly to the idea that us part-time hobbyists know better than they, and perhaps defensibly so. All I can say is that last night I made chicken fajitas that were delicious to the taste and highly desirable, spending $20 to feed eight people, dirtying a minumum of dishes, and though you will not see that particular combination of ingredients in Best Skillet Recipes, that meal was as much a product of that cookbook as it was my own creation.

It could have more photographs. I like large color photos with every recipe, and they only provide seven or eight in a small glossy insert, so I give it four out of five stars.

My rating scale:

1 star: Evil
2 stars: Incompetent
3 stars: Competent
4 stars: Excellent
5 stars: Flawless

The Small House in the Small Town

Even though we loved living in our yurt, there are many things about owning a home, and this home in particular, that will more than make up for the wait for the second yurt. (I am speaking as if we own this house, but it is not official yet.)

1) We own it! Or will shortly. That means in place of monthly rent, we will be paying a yearly tax roughly equal to one month's worth of our last apartment. The neighbors there had kicking steroes and shot holes in their walls/girlfriends for fun with real guns, so we were getting great dollar value.

2) The yard is vast. There is already a narrow sidewalk dividing it into His and Hers halves. My half contains the apple tree. His will soon boast a shop in which he will have a place for every loud, greasy tool of his dreams, and every load, greasy tool in its place. This shop will also one day serve as the Moonshine Shack: the locked building not attached to a place of residence in which we can make our own ethanol. Not for drinking, so don't even offer us one-hundred dollars a gallon because we will laugh in your face because we don't need the money.

3) It's in A***** County. Where Our People live and shop at the A***** Farm Market, and go to community food workshops by John the Bee Guy (among others) with Potluck afterward, and know what a yurt is, and wash with my Mom's soap.

4) It's three minute's drive to a Kroger. Our last Small Town had only a tiny Mart with more varieties of frozen pizza than of fresh produce and no plain yogurt at all.

5) No carpets. Yes, I'm sure you can guess what this means: Naked Potty-Training. Just two hours ago Lilli did not pee on the floor, but in her potty the first time ever she sat on it, so don't tell me it doesn't work.

6) Sam's Gym. "Do you know what I want?" My husband said to me, "I want to start a gym where it's just barebones matts on the floor, no instructor--everyone would learn from each other. It'd be dirt cheap. Dirt cheap. You might not even need fees, you could just have a jar by the door. That's what I want." That gym exists. And it's right down the road.

In short, if there is a house that is just as just right for us as our yurt, it is this house. We are pleased, and we will stay five years, God willin' an' the creek don't rise.

Evaluation

Objective: Eliminate the need for a refrigerator
Strategy: Green cooler and a small chest freezer
Dollar value of food spoiled in the cooler: $20 approx.
Space of Mother-in-law's refrigerator being used by Jamie: 1/5 approx.
Overall score: 4/10
Rank: Poseur--Jamie looks like she's playing at grid-independence. She has a long way to go before she attains the rank of Hippie Modern, let alone Honorary Amish.

The thing is that all the little tricks you learn to save money and energy with a refrigerator--one-stop shopping, stocking up, ect.--will lead straight to soggy spinach floating in grime if you're using a cooler. You can't keep a week's worth of fresh leafy greens safe in a cooler, and it would be folly to even attempt it with meat or any eggs except my mother's farm eggs. I'm having to retrain myself. My inner consumer is certain that my failure is due to my cooler being a secondhand Coleman and not a Yeti Tundra Series Ice Box.

This is the Yurt that Kevin Built

The picture that forms the background of this blog's header is of the yurt that we will be trading for a small house in a small town with a third of an acre attached.

I hate packing, but this time it's different. Moving out of the Rowling* estate was a nightmare because the Rowling family is weird and set my teeth on edge. Moving out of the second McArthur apartment cost sixty dollars at the laundromat to wash the black mold out of all the linens. Moving out of the Cooper residence was like being hit on the head with one of those huge, bouncy mallets in that arcade game where you bonk the groundhogs because the Cooper family, their freinds, and their realtors are all wierd and set my teeth on edge, AND it cost sixty bucks to wash the fleas out of the linens., AND I left my one family hierloom--Granma R's rolling pin--in a kitchen drawer.

But this time I'm moving out of the first home my husband built. It's like I lost one-hundred pounds and was still wearing my old clothes, all that time I spent in all those square rooms.

There are several factors that make yurt-living ideal for me. The first is, it's so naturally beautiful. The symmetry of the red-painted frame against canvas is elegance itself. I admire well-appointed homes and the people who appoint them, but I do not have their talent, and I hate spending the money. Our apartments always looked as if they had been just moved into yesterday.

Along the same line, I seemed only able to keep one room clean at a time. If the kitchen sparkled, it was because the bedroom was a disaster area. A yurt only has one room. One floor to sweep, with the bed right there--no shutting the door on it and forgetting that it is unmade.

Most of all, a yurt is simple. I like a revolver because I can see with my own eyes how it works. Semi-automatics are ugly as all the sins you can commit with them, but I don't like them because, for all I know, they work by magic. With a revolver, though, there's no hiding the fall of the hammer, the spinning of the cylinder: it requires no faith. I feel the same about the yurt. Houses are full of mysterious pipings and wirings hidden in the walls and under the floors. You think you know what's going on, but do you really? How much do you know about the state of your roof, right now, no peeking? If you don't know about your roof, you don't know about your foundation, and if you don't know about your foundation, what do you know?

So, no, I don't want to move out of my yurt, but I won't be missing it for long. Because a third of an acre? Plenty of room for another yurt.

*Names have been changed