Slow Living Diary June 2012

Once again, I am joining in with Christine from Slow Living Essentials for a monthly reflection of slow living…

NOURISH: I’ve been experimenting a lot with vegetarian meals from cookbooks. We’ve tried Cauliflower Soup, Chickpea & Cauliflower curry and a Ketchup Chilli. My favourite has been experimenting with quick and easy veggie burgers – Little B’s favourite is kidney bean and sweet potato. I’ve also been making a Caramel flavour icecream – Little B is on soft foods due to a tooth problem so this bulked up some smoothies to fill his tummy. It’s at times like these I wish he could eat yoghurt.

PREPARE: I’ve been preparing and freezing things we use a lot for Little B – freezing chicken lentil pasta sauce in ice cube trays, making up batches of fruit bread for breakfast, so I just need to pop it into the toaster during the week.

After quite a few blackouts in the bad weather, we’ve been rethinking our emergency preps as well. We’ve borrowed (for now) some great lanterns and sleeping bags (gets mighty cold with no heating at night) – and we will update with our own as finances permit.

REDUCE: This is a photo of our weekly garbage bin. I’m so proud that we have reduced our rubbish to about 1/3^rd of the bin. Our main thing in there is actually cat litter. I’ve tried a worm farm and a compost bin for it before but it never seems to work. I’ve wondered about those in the ground dog loos and whether we could scoop out the poo into there and compost the cat litter (which is shredded pelleted old phone books)??

GREEN: This month I’ve focused mainly on our cleaning. I’m trying out a new routine I found online to keep on top of the cleaning & clutter and it’s working well so far. I’ve knitted a few more cleaning cloths, and am keeping the shower pristine by keeping a container of castile soap, a cloth and a squedgee in the bottom of the shower. This way I can give it a quick once over when I’m in there :-)

GROW: Our bare rooted plants arrived on Friday from Yalca Fruit Trees, so I planted out our Bon Chretien pear tree and our Williamette & Chilliwack raspberries. The raspberries are in a temporary home in a vegie bed until we get our half wine barrels for them (they came a bit earlier than I expected).

CREATE: I’ve started crocheting some hot water bottle covers. I’m having second thoughts about the black though as its really hard to see the stitches sometimes.

I also made a bunch of flannel handkerchiefs for me. I kept stealing Little B’s then thought I should make some for me…how cute are the little bicycles?? $4.50 worth of material made me 20 hankies...frugal as well as useful!!

DISCOVER:  I’ve been reading a few vegetarian cookbooks and experimenting with their recipes. I’m a bit naughty in that I don’t like to follow recipes to the letter. Instead I like to read a recipe, re-interpret it and then cook.

Little B and I have also been reading Mr Popper’s Penguins. For fun I’ve read Ape House by Sara Gruen (absolutely great read!!) and The Girl Who Chased the Moon by Sarah Addison Allen.

I’m also really gotten into watching different documentaries (helped by ABC2 screening lots of different things every Sunday). Last week was about eco-terrorism….you know I never understood the violence in the protests at G20 summits but after watching this, now I do.

ENHANCE: This month we joined in the lantern parade our community has for Winter Solstice.

ENJOY: Grandparents Day at kindy was pretty fun but so was the lantern parade. I love meeting up with likeminded people and watching Little B’s excitement at the fire twirlers. Plus I get my jollies watching my old bellydance troupe perform.