It's Easy Being Green

Are you egg-nogged out yet?  I can’t seem to get my fill of the drink that is delightfully bad for us!  Sometimes the usual old flavor gets boring though.  So how about this alternative recipe for Homemade Banana Eggnog:

I cup plain or vanilla yogurt

1 banana, cut up

2 Tbsp. honey

2 tsp. vanilla extract

1 egg

Place all the ingredients into a blender and process for 20 seconds or until smooth.  Yum!  The recipe makes 2 servings.  If you’d like to turn it into a winter warmer, your favorite brandy or even a banana brandy would taste pretty good in this one.  Do you have any eggnog recipes that you’d like to share?

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Are you looking for a steaming hot cup of chocolate to warm you up and satsify your sweet tooth?  You might want to try some real, homemade hot cocoa then.  The stuff you buy in packets at the store can be good but the homemade stuff can be even better.  Try this recipe out:

2 Tbsp unsweetened cocoa

2 Tbsp honey

2 cups warm milk

1/4 tsp. vanilla

2 Tbsp powdered milk (optional)

Blend cocoa and honey in a cup.  Add a small amount of the warm milk to make a syrup.  Pour that syrup into the rest of the warm milk and add the vanilla.  If you’d like richer cocoa, pour the milk mixture into the blender and add the powdered milk, blending until combined.  Pour the contents back into a pan and heat until warm but not boiling.  Of course you can always top off of your homemade cocoa with another sweet treat like marshmallows or a candy cane!

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Now that it’s getting colder outside, we’ve had an influx of fruit flies inside our house.  We’ve always got fresh product around so the little buggers who hitched a ride home constantly find the nourishment they need to reproduce.  We’ve prevented some of the madness by putting produce away in dark cupboards that the flies don’t have access to instead of keeping things in a fruit basket on the counter.  But there are still a pesky few that can breed into dozens of fruit flies and just drive you nuts.

A quick and eco-friendly way to get rid of the fruit flies is to pour red wine into a small container like a bowl or a cup.  Cover the top of the container with saran wrap and then poke a few small holes into the top.  The idea is that the flies will be attracted to the fruity scent of the wine, crawl through the holes in the middle of the saran wrap and not be able to get back out.  My fiance discovered this trick and put it into play and sure enough it works like a charm.  We keep our fruit fly trap by the kitchen sink. So everytime I go to the sink and see some inside, I give the bowl a good swish.  That knocks the fruit flies into the wine where they eventually drown and don’t reproduce.  Also, pour boiling hot water down your drains.  Apparently fruit flies like to lay their eggs and reproduce in the sludge that can buildup in your sink drains.

Do you have a natural and chemical-free way to get rid of pests in your home or garden?

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So I haven’t really announced to my readers yet that I’m getting ready to make a cross-country trek to a new home. I’m leaving Flagstaff, AZ after so many wonderful years and heading to Evansville, Indiana. I got a new a job there, the cost of living is much lower and I will have a long growing season to spur a quite productive garden. At least that’s my hope anyway! The drive is more than 1500 miles and we obviously can’t take perishable food on the road with us. So we’ve been dwindling down our supplies both in the cupboard and in the freezer. That’s led to some very uninteresting meals but also extremely low grocery bills. I knew we hoarded food for a reason!

Within our stash of food, we had several bags of frozen fruit. Two of those bags were a triple berry mix with raspberries, blueberries and blackberries. The third was a bag of strawberries. I’ve dipped into them on occasion to make one recipe or another but they were mostly unused. Not wanting to waste all those berries or give them away, we decided to whip up some quick batches of no-pectin jam. Pectin is that stuff you buy in the little box at the grocery store that gels up your fruit mix. I didn’t have any to begin with and really didn’t want to waste the gas driving into town for some so I found pectin-free jam recipes online (my canning book was packed away by my very efficient box packer).

My first batch of triple berry jam worked out great. I found a recipe that basically is nothing but 4 cups of fruit and 4 cups of sugar. Boil it until it gets to 220 degrees and then can it in sterilized jars. Pretty simple! But my next batch of strawberry jam wasn’t working out so good. After an hour of rapid boiling I could not get the temperature to climb above 203 degrees. Getting worried I headed to the world wide web to do some SOS searching on what to do. Luckily, I stumbled across Laura and Barb’s blog called My Sisters Kitchen. Their blog post on making jam without any added pectin informed me of a temperature correction formula if you’re above sea level. At 7500 feet, I definitely needed to correct down on a boiling point for my jam!

I quickly rushed back to my kitchen and began putting my strawberry jam into sterilized jars. Those two saved my day! I could have been waiting for strawberries to boil until they absolutely could boil no more and turned into some strange gooey concoction that would have made for a dish washing disaster! Check out their blog. They seem to have a lot of wonderful recipes and life experiences to share. I’m going to add them to my frequent list!

What have you done to avoid wasting food?  Have you found yourself making changes due to rising food prices?  Share your hints and tips with our other readers.  For some time we’ve been using a whole chicken right down to the bones for several meals.  For more on that, read The Art of Resourcefulness.