*Soda Streams and Dried Cabbage

It’s a busy week! I’m getting the shop ready for a special day. We’re having a jumble sale this Saturday, filled with new Kisma Kreative stock, post-spring clean stuff, and new summer stock from other crafters. It seems the winter is mostly over and we are celebrating the return of the beautiful South African sunshine. Says me, as I sit in the darkness of a rather dreary rainy day. Oh well. The shop will be quiet and I can get on with the job at hand.

If you're in Grahamstown do join for complimentary coffee and cake while you browse.

The jumble sale is full of household stuff from our home as we start to empty out so we can fit in our new, small, simple house. It’s amazing how much randomness we can collect, just because there is space to put it. The money we make will go into a special savings tin to be spent only on what we need in the new house.

My Mom- made granadilla
syrup comes in  old beer bottles
that neither of us can throw
away.
The other bottle is an old Soda
Stream Bottle.  They used to be
made of glass. Do you
remember them? The bottle top
was white but I lost it. FYI, an
old Soy Sauce  bottle top fits
just fine.
I guess I'll need some
new fashioned ones now.

One of those things is a Soda Stream machine. Something I haven’t used since I was a kid but what fond memories.  It was a novelty then but now it will be much more practical. My Mom makes this awesome granadilla syrup. Totally amazeballs! Yes, that’s what I said - it’s that good. We add it to a glass of soda water, a few ice cubes and it is the most refreshing, delicious drink in the word - forget Sparletta Granadilla. It is also chemical and preservative free. Yes, it has sugar (a natural preservative) in it - probably a whole lot of sugar. But it is sugar that I understand - those little white granules - not some derivative, or sugar-like substance - TTPD42 something or other. Personally I feel sugar has got a raw deal. Use a little moderation, people. The other ingredients are fresh, natural granadilla and lemon juice.  Both grown in Mom’s back garden. It doesn’t get better than that.

The problem is I hate all the plastic 2l bottles our soda habit is producing. I mean, yes, you can reuse a 2l plastic bottle, but only so many! The answer - the humble Soda Stream machine. Who thought an eighties invention would actually be practical? It turns out they are quite a bit more expensive than I thought so some of the money from our jumble sale will have to go towards it. Unless of course someone out there has a Soda Stream machine they want to swop for something off the jumble sale? No really - wanna trade? Then all we need to do is find a recipe to make tonic water and that’s Tom’s  summer G ‘n’ Ts sorted too. This would make me happy.

One more thing I want to share with you this week - dried cabbage. It’s a thing. We get a veg box from Nitarah Farm every week. The box is full of  freshly picked, organically grown, in-season veg. You get whatever is growing and ready for picking that week. We often end up with an overflowing supply of a certain vegetable and I will not let this go to waste. There will be more vegetable preserving recipes on this blog. If you have any recipes of your own please do feel free to share them in the comments below. It would be much appreciated. I’m always looking for new ways to preserve excess vegetables.

This is my shriveled cabbage. Cool hey?

We have had a large number of baby cabbages recently. Beautiful, sweet baby cabbage. We’ve eaten loads of coleslaw, I’ve made a ton of pickled cabbage and we’ve had stir fry for days. There is, however, only so much you can do with a cabbage. Quite by chance I came across a post by someone on the Internet with the same problem. When she sent out a request for new ways to preserve cabbage the common reply was: dehydrate it. Really? Dehydrated cabbage? The thought never crossed my mind.

What I have discovered is that a lot of the time folks do tend to make things more complicated than they need to be. Now I’m sure you could dry your cabbage out in an electric oven on super low. I have a gas oven and the temperatures range from really quite hot all the way up to super-hot. We live in a fairly dry climate and we did have a lot of beautiful sunshine this week.  I sliced the cabbage really thin like they said and laid it out on a clean tea towel on a large baking tray. Then I stuck it in the useless spare room with an ordinary fan angled on  the tray. I thought, let’s see what happens.

At first there was a rather pungent cabbage smell and I thought, hmm, this might not be worth it. But the smell hung around for about an hour and then dissipated ( thank goodness). The slivers of cabbage started to shrivel up quite quickly. I went in from time to time to move the bits around so they didn’t stick and to let the air get into all the nooks and crannies. The next day - fully shrivelled cabbage strips. Like little worms. They were still a little leathery so I popped them in the hot oven after I’d done a casserole. I turned the oven off but the residual heat was just enough to crisp them right up.

So now I have a stash of dried cabbage I can through into soups and stews. They say you can use it in stir fries but I don’t see how - sort of crispy. But maybe if you soak them first? I dunno - I’ll get back to you on that one. I hope we get more cabbage in our box this week!!

Ok boys and girls, I have to get back to jumble sale tagging and shop renovations. Go dry a cabbage and tell me how you get on.

 PS: Make sure you never miss an exciting instalment of Living Lightly. Subscribe to the blog via email - over there on the right hand side of the page at the top. Then you’ll get every new instalment right there in your email inbox. And it will make me feel loved. It’s a little lonely out here in cyber space.

*PS - I’m Just Like You

I feel the need to tell you a little bit more about myself. I need you to understand that I am by no means the most perfect greenie or eco-friendly person out there.

I want to be. I think about it a lot. I mean to be. But I still buy chips in plastic foil bags made with Amazon-destroying Palm oil when I can’t fight the urge. I might buy veggies in sea-creature-strangling plastic when I’m in a hurry. I will buy loose potatoes and then pop them in a million-year-to-biodegrade plastic bag because I still haven’t made the reusable net ones I have in my mind. I mean to eat beans and tofu instead of chops and chicken legs. But I don’t. I want to recycle but sho - it’s so difficult to get to the recycling drop offs on time - maybe next week. We did start a compost heap - but that’s just what it is, a heap at the top of the garden. It’s very natural. Just doesn’t have fancy worms or a tap were you can run off … whatever it is you run off of a proper compost system. I know solar is good, and expensive, but I’ll read up on it when I have time. I try to remember to turn the geyser off – but I always forget to turn it back on.

I don’t plan on giving up TV, Wi-Fi or good food. But I am hoping to find a practical way to live better, more consciously and with less stress within this mad, mad world we call home. I’m going with a ‘less is more’ philosophy. The less you have, the less you have to be worried about - right? Home-grown, home-made, less preservatives, fewer ingredients I don’t understand, less stuff from far, far away and origins unknown, back to basics, within reason. Does that make any sense? I’m like you, I want to be less selfish and demanding of the planet but I don’t want to live in the dark ages either. Surely we can find a practical, happy medium? That’s my goal right there I think. A practical and happy medium to Living Lightly in the real world.

As I am moving my studio back home and my work hours become more flexitime I will be able to test out all the recipes, building plans, suggested alternatives and green options out there. I hope to figure out what is practical, affordable and what will make an actual difference, no matter how small, as opposed to the crackpot plans that are out there on the net. Electricity from a coke can or Internet out of old CDs? I dunno, maybe we’ll be pleasantly surprised.

I have come to the conclusion that I am limited in the amount of income I can bring in doing what I do so another part of the experiment is to discover how much I can save by living lightly - and in this way contribute to the household income. We all know the economy is wobbly in the world and especially in South Africa just now. Nothing is for sure at the moment. This is my backup plan. A lifestyle that is efficient, less stressful, more healthy, economical, and planet friendly. I mean, isn’t that what we all want?

I hope you’ll follow my journey and help out where you can. I’m sure there is a wealth of knowledge between us - things you didn’t even know you knew, things you didn’t think had any value. Things you forgot you knew. I’ll be needing your advice and help along the way - it’s going to be easy to get lost in this story.

*And So It Begins

The first big steps to streamline how we live have begun. We have just sold our 3 bedroom house and bought an open-planned house instead. By ‘open plan’ I mean one big room. WOW! Dedication, right?  Well, I’d love to say that but really the house situation kind of came first and kick-started the whole realisation that we were using up so much unnecessarily.

Feeling restless, we casually started looking around at what kind of houses were available in our price range. The more we looked the more we felt that nothing really worked for us. Three rooms, a guest room, study - do we need a work room in the house for me? Maybe a garden flat? Oh, and a big lounge with a fireplace maybe. But none of the houses felt like us. Even though they had all the things we thought we wanted.

It was around this point that we started to pare down what we really needed and wanted in our home, and discovered that we really didn’t need most of what we thought we needed. It’s funny how you just get used to the way things are. We looked at our current home and realised that we live in the kitchen mostly. It’s fairly large and sunny and it leads onto our beautiful back garden, so when we have guests we all gravitate to the heart of the house, our kitchen and garden. So this is an important room for us. Tom is a writer and amateur photographer. He needs his study - and I need him to have his study! So that’s the second important room. What happens in our lounge? We watch TV. That’s it. A whole room just to watch TV. There is our bedroom were the bed is, obviously. And then another room that was a guest room but so seldom gets used we tend to fill it with stuff that doesn’t go anywhere else.  I wonder if we would keep that stuff if we didn’t have the room to keep it?  And a bathroom. I do need a bathroom. With a door.  I’m not that much of a hippy.

Having just decided we wanted one room and would find a way to build it we met the perfect estate agent who swept us up and showed us this house that had not even been listed yet. It felt like it was meant to be. It is basically one big room with a bathroom off the side and a scullery type space on the other side.  It looks small, but I really am pretty sure it is more or less the same floor space as we  actually use in our current home. It is on the edge of a beautiful large property - so much outside space! A panhandle property, it’s tucked away behind the front line of houses. We plan to build a wooden wendyhouse on the other end of the property for Tom, a proper man cave. There are already two smaller wendyhouses on the property, one for garden storage and one for all my stuff!

The next big step is that I have decided to close my shop and studio in town now that I will have space at home to work. I do prefer the scatterbrained way of working on my designs while stirring the stew for supper. My business will be run from my online website and I will do select markets and festivals as opportunities present themselves. This evolution of Kisma Kreative will allow me more flexible time and I can run a more efficient household and business in my own unique way. I am pretty damn sure I can save us loads of money on the grocery bill by having the time to think about how we use what we purchase.

I really am quite excited about our new adventure. Now while we wait until the house is ours we will have to do some cleaning out, passing on and jumble sales to make sure we only take what we need with us into the new house.

*Live Lightly

Hi there. My name is Tracy and I’m a closet tree-hugging, barefoot, hippy creative. Last month I turned 40. ‘The Big Four Oh’. ‘Life begins ... ,’ and all that.

Now, I’m not one to worry about getting old and I’m not prone to major epiphanies and the like, but something about this birthday has set me thinking about life, the world and my place in it. Do I really want what I think I want, or do I want it because I’m supposed to? I must want these things because that’s the way it is and you have to work many, many hours, make some money and live in a 3-bedroom house with two children, two dogs, a cat and a bond - regardless of what it will cost you, your children, your neighbors or the Earth.

Well, I don’t want that. As it turns out I want to live simply. I need to live lightly.

My husband Tom and I already try to be careful about bringing home plastic shopping bags, we turn off lights when we leave a room and we compost our perishables. We talk about taking our own containers to the butcher, or getting another bin so we can separate recyclables easily, but never really get there. I want to see if we can do more, so I am starting an experiment to find out:
Is is viable, affordable, healthy and sustainable to live lightly in the real world?

What do I mean by live lightly? The main idea is to have as little negative impact on the world as possible. We will try to reduce, reuse and recycle as much as possible. We will make do and mend. We will try to support local business if we have to buy new.  We will try to buy only fresh local farm produce instead of  shipped-in, plastic-covered, factory-made perishables. We will try to find alternate energy-saving sources of power (we don’t have much of a choice with this one anyway, what with load shedding every other month). We will try to live in a way that works for us, the planet, and our community even if it goes against the accepted norm of things. That’s kind of the fun part.

We are planning a few big changes to start with. I have no doubt it will be hard and we will cheat a bit along the way, maybe even come close to giving up. I hope not. I look forward to the challenge and hope you’ll come along with us on this adventure.