Homemade Bread

Bread is a delicious thing to make yourself that also saves on packaging that will potentially go in the trash. I make bread about once a week. My batch is pretty large and makes 5 loaves. It tastes delicious and we love it for eating fresh, toast, french toast and more but for the most part our family doesn't prefer it for sandwiches. So I went searching and found a different recipe to try out for sandwich bread. I used this one and we liked it pretty well. Many of us were good with it for sandwiches but not everybody yet (with two of the holdouts being people that take the most sandwiches to work). So I guess I am still looking. Does anybody have any great suggestions?

Here is my bread recipe:

Whole Wheat Bread

3 Tablespoons active dry yeast

5 1/4 cups warm water or I often substitute quite a lot of warm pureed squash instead.

1/2 cup honey

1/3 cup oil or butter or I often use melted beef tallow

1 Tablespoon salt

Around 15-17 cups of whole wheat flour (it is fine to use some or all white flour instead)

Combine 4 cups flour, the yeast, honey and warm (blood warm) water. Stir well. Sometimes I let this sit and react for around 15 minutes but sometimes I am in a hurry and I don't. Then stir in the salt and oil and as much flour as you can. Then need in enough flour to have a nice smooth and not to sticky but not to hard lump of dough. Cover and let rise until double.

 When the dough has risen punch it down and then divide your dough into 5ths (or if you would like bigger loafs you can do 4) or you could deep fry some of it in oil to make fry bread. Shape your lumps into nice loaves and place them in greased bread pans. Cover and let rise again until they are looking like they are filling up the pans.

Preheat over to 375 degrees and then bake them around 40 minutes or until nicely browned and sounding hollow.

 We love to eat it warm but it does squish up and get misshaped when you slice it while warm. That is okay - it still tastes wonderful! We do also store some for later.

As far as packaging goes.....

When we do buy bread from the store (for sandwiches) we do save the bags and wash them over and over again and then use those bags for our homemade bread. I wouldn't mind finding a nice bread shaped (or even the size for two loaves) container to keep them in but that hasn't happened yet. So we are using what is eventually disposable wrapping but we re-use for a long time so at least it is a fair amount less that is going to the land fill. Not a perfect "zero waste" but a less waste way to do things.

Homemade Laundry Soap

I have blogged about laundry soap before but since I am writing about zero waste this month and also I needed to make a batch of laundry soap again I thought I should bring it up on here again as well.

  This is something I have made for many, many years. I am sure over that time it has helped us save a pretty large chunk of money. We have also dealt with no plastic laundry bottles in that time. We simply have some cardboard boxes from time to time (and sometimes some small amounts of plastic wrapper from the soap- we didn't this month). 

• It is not hard to make and my kids enjoy helping me. 
• I make over 3 gallons of liquid laundry soap at a time so it lasts quite a while.
• It is cheap.
• It is pretty much scent free which is very important to me (that was helpful for me having less headaches).
• It still gets our clothes clean.
• It is pretty natural.
• I can make it with zero waste!!!

  I use:
1 bar of soap (pretty much any type)
4 cups of water in a pot.
1 cup washing soda
1/2 cup borax
3 gallons warm water in a big bucket

Shave the bar of soap into the pot of water and heat until melted on the stove. Then mix that in with the water in the bucket. Then add the washing soda and borax in and mix thoroughly. It is now ready to use. After sitting for a few hours it will probably get gelled. That is not a problem. Just use it like that.

We also avoid scents and waste by not using fabric softener or dryer sheets. We just don't use anything and it works fine. I try not to over dry my clothes as that creates a lot of static cling. I also do a lot of line drying which prevents static cling. I do still want to make wool dryer balls sometime however.

 Do you make your own laundry soap?

Blowing Your Nose with Zero Waste

One area which I have wholeheartedly embraced the Zero Waste concept for many years now is in the nose blowing department. :-) I switched the handkerchiefs quite some time ago and haven't looked back. For the most part the rest of the family uses them as well but we do have a couple of members that prefer tissues especially when they have colds. It isn't a big deal as tissues can be composted or used to start a fire. But still I do prefer handkerchiefs because I find them softer, cheaper and less wasteful.

I recently made a few new ones (they do wear out from time to time and if everybody gets a cold at once then it would be nice to have more). I simply used a portion of a worn out flannel sheet, cut it into squares and hemmed them up. So nice and easy!

 We use mostly cotton flannel which we like. This is our drawer which is in a central location where we keep the handkerchiefs.

 This system works pretty well for us. Do you use hankies? Have you ever tried it?

Making Butter

I don't find butter highly packaged. The butter wrappers I use to first grease pans and then for fire starter. The box can either be recycled or work for fire started as well. So buying butter even during this "zero waste" month is fine for me. Except....... it has been really expensive lately! And I had extra cream on hand.

So we skimmed the cream off of the milk and made some butter.

It is really pretty easy to do. I reviewed the process by reading this post on Wellness Mama.  We beat it with the mixer until it got past the whipped cream stage and started separating into butter.

You keep going until it is all either liquid (the buttermilk) or in little chunks. You then drain off the buttermilk to use for other purposes (baking and such). Then you rinse the butter a few times and work in some salt if desired.

We got a nice amount of butter to use. And it is cool to be able to make yet another thing that we can get with no packaging!

A New Homemade Doll

I was working on a silk wedding flower order last week and while I was doing that I had to unwrap a flower "stem" that was covered in this really soft string/thread. I immediately thought - "What pretty hair that would make for a doll. I mentioned it to Megan and she thought it would be lovely too and pretty soon she was working to make a new doll.

 Megan is my doll collector. She enjoys dolls and thinks it is fun to have all different kinds (though her favorites are China dolls). She had really wanted a wax doll so I made her one for a Christmas gift a couple of years ago. She also has made her own dolls and clothes for dolls. She has been making dolls for a long time, this post tells about us making one together in 2010.

  The hair that Megan used for making this doll would have gone to the trash had we not figured out a lovely use for it. If we take the time to think often we can use "trash" rather than sending it to the landfill. What ways have you reused trash?

A Variety of Harvest Pictures

One way that we are able to create much less waste is by growing, harvesting, using and putting away much of our own food. I love doing this. Not only does it mean we deal with much less packaging but also we have food that is much better for us and we know exactly where it came from.

  I had taken a bunch of harvest photos this year that I had never gotten put on this blog so here they are in this post. :-) In order of when they were taken - some of the harvest that we have rejoiced over this year....

 One of the earlier meals from our garden. New potatoes, green beans and cucumbers along with meatballs which had veggies in it and the sauce as well. So yummy!

 One of Mom and Dad's lovely watermelons - displayed by Aaron. Isn't it so cool??? Those watermelons looked funny (though most of them were normal shaped just yellow too) but tasted great!

 Aaron using the apple picker to get apples at Mom and Dad's.

 The grapes at my parents were really lovely this year.

Mara and Mom picking grapes. I picked grape leaves once as well to try making dolma but that never happened. I did however can a lot of grape juice and jelly.

 Green beans, husk cherries and cucumbers all did quite well in our garden.

 Boxes and baskets like this can feel overwhelming - both with how am I going to get these all processed and also just overwhelming thankfulness. God blesses us abundantly!

 Many jars of applesauce were canned.

 Nana gave Aaron her old juicer. It was so much fun to enjoy fresh yummy juices. We enjoyed a grape, apple, cucumber and husk cherry juice. It was really good!

 I love these big jars for canning juice in. I tried making husk cherry jam this year and I really like it.

 Snapping green beans over at my parents. It is a very fun job to do while visiting but not quite as much fun to do it by yourself.

 Final garden clean-up (though I do still have carrots and beets to dig) after the frost. We had covered the peppers for a couple of nights but we just picked everything (green tomatoes too) now. We only got our first frost last week which was extremely late for us.

 Apple sauce process.... I put yucky stuff in a bucket to go to the chickens (wormy parts, bad spots, etc), "good" cores and such go into a kettle which I cover with water and make apple cider from. Good pieces go into a put which I put a little water and cinnamon with and cook until soft. Then I add some honey and puree it and can it.

My pantry shelves are nearly full. Woohoo! Much of veggies actually go in our freezers too.

  When I can I use reusable jars, bands and tattler canning lids (for the most part - I do also use some metal ones which I will generally use several times as well). That means no waste is created either now or later. For frozen foods I will re-use containers over and over again.

  Do you put up food for the winter? I would love to hear about it.